Lee's Blog

This lovely comment on Pharyngula comes from Keith Eaton (February 19, 2008 5:17 PM ):

“The gang of prevaricators behind Ben Stein’s Expelled movie had their own way of celebrating Darwin Day: they wrote a blog post that was a solid wall of lies and nonsense.” PZ Myers

You can always detect a wirehead, egomaniac, whose debate skills consist of ad hominem attack, red herring, strawmen, appeals to popularity, and nearly every other form of sophistry and rhetorical fallacy one can find in a standard text on critical thinking. Thus the opening attack paragraph is devoid of any factual statement and nothing more than an extended ad hominem.

This is a pretty funny criticism, given that Eaton will later repeatedly attack Darwin as a racist, mentally ill, and psychotic, as if that were a valid argument against the theory of evolution, and that he’s defending the Expelled essayist, who also thinks that’s a valid argument against the theory of evolution.

continuing……

“In a way, I’m impressed; I’d have to really struggle to write something that was such a dense array of concentrated stupid, but for them, it seems to be a natural talent, allowing them to blithely and effortlessly rattle off a succession of falsehoods without blushing.”

More meaningless blather that could have been written by an editor in some nondescript yellow journalism rag in Eastern Europe in the late fifties.

What does Eastern Europe have to do with it? The term “yellow journalism” was coined with reference to American newspapers, specifically in New York, and I’ve actually never before heard it used with reference to any non-American newspaper. This seems to be some indirect accusation that PZ is a Marxist, as later he claims that PZ is defending Marxism.

The facts are that the neo-nazi darwin cult in control of Big Science have attempted to elevate the miserly contibutions to science by a manic depressive, bi-polar, recluse to the level of contribution to mankind of Abe Lincoln, the man who saved the United States of America, freed a couple of million human beings from slavery, and restored the moral purpose to the country.

Wow. This is, like, concentrated Creationist craziness.

“Neo-nazi darwin cult”? Um, isn’t another talking point that the Nazis got their ideas from Darwin? Wouldn’t that imply that the proper term is “Neo-Darwin Nazi cult”? (Just following the craziness to its logical conclusion.) I suppose it’s unnecessary to note that the neo-Darwinian synthesis was already coming together before Naziism rose to power.

“[A] manic depressive, bi-polar, recluse….” Just for starters, “manic depressive” is the older term for “bi-polar”. To use both is redundant. Further, Darwin was no recluse; he maintained a wide and varied correspondence with many friends. He didn’t travel a lot when he was older, but considering the inconvenience of travel in the mid-nineteenth century, and his general ill-health, why should he have traveled? And why bother to argue about his mental health anyway? It doesn’t matter if he ended as a raging lunatic who had to locked up for the protection of the community (he didn’t). The issue is the science.

And then, “attempted to elevate the miserly contibutions to science … to the level of contribution to mankind of Abe Lincoln”? Why compare Darwin to Lincoln anyway? They share a birthday, which is interesting but just coincidental. Their contributions were in totally different areas, and comparing them isn’t like comparing apples and oranges; it’s more like comparing oak trees and elephants. They are a little alike in one way though: both took first steps, and later generations built hugely on their achievements.

Thus, Lincoln would have been astonished to learn that there have been black men on the Supreme Court; that there has been a black man in command of the Armed Forces; that there is a black man running for President who may well win; indeed, that there is a woman running for President who could conceivably win; yet all these are results of his actions.

Similarly, Darwin would have been astonished to learn that the visible evidence of common descent that he observed has been reinforced in incredible detail by molecular biology and paleontology, and that evolution has been observed in action (insects and disease organisms).

But was Darwin’s contribution to science “miserly”? He developed a theory which was exceedingly productive, and has been revised and extended and has grown into something greater. (That’s why it’s so frustrating to hear Creationists blather on about Darwin — the contributions that he made are only part of the tremendous science of biology, and it is silly to debate about his character or those things he didn’t know or got wrong.)

If Darwin had been eaten by a pack of wild dogs on his unfortunate voyage nothing of any lasting consequence benefitting the human condition would have been lost.

Well, that’s somewhat true. Alfred Russel Wallace independently came up with the same theory. If Darwin had died, we’d be talking about Wallace’s theory. And if Wallace had died before presenting it, someone else would have come up with it. As Huxley said when he heard the theory, “How stupid not to have thought of that.” It took real brilliance to put the pieces together, but the pieces were there and more were being gathered every day; sooner or later — likely sooner — someone would have thought of it.

We of course would have possibly fewer bone polishers with H.S. educations out digging up extinct animals, fewer people wasting money and manpower trying to create life from non-life without a single possible useful outcome in 100 years of failed efforts, and real science would have proceeded without the wasteful, meaningless side-trips and deadends that darwinism has occasioned by encourageing the stupidity of atheism to invade legitimate science.

I like “bone polishers with H.S. education ” — nothing like a bit of elitism by someone who can’t spell “encouraging.” Eaton is an anti-intellectual who doesn’t want them pointy-headed perfessors wasting our money on their flights of fancy. Got that.

But Eaton really doesn’t understand the process of science. Science gets into side-trips and dead-ends because it is impossible to avoid them unless you have a map and know where you are going. But reality, you see, doesn’t come with a map. Science is the explorer that draws and fills in the map. Once the map is drawn, you can see that at this point you should have turned left instead of wandering off into the swamps to the right, but you don’t know that until you’ve checked what is to the left and to the right.

Thus, science investigates phlogiston, the aether, whether micro-organisms spontaneously generate in broth, whether nuclear fusion can be produced by chemical methods, whether there really is a hot, deep biosphere that continually manufactures petrochemicals. The beauty of science is that in investigating these and other issues, we do draw a map, and sometimes we even find something unexpected along the way. Eaton would have us march rigidly along a line sketched out thousands of years ago, never looking left or right or considering if we may be headed for a cliff.

Biology was and is a legitimate science, its efforts and results are extraordinary, but the plague of darwinism in its virilent, virus-like invasion of the field has rendered biology sterile, seemingly unable to get back to the job of following evidence, understanding how life works at the most detailed level, independent of abiogenesis, common ancestors, macro evolutionary events, decent with modification other than the most direct lineages
in clearly defined and narrow biological lines.

Putting aside the incredible claim that biology is sterile, I wonder how Eaton proposes to understand how life (human life — the only life he’s interested in) works at the most detailed level, without considering common ancestors or descent with modification. You can’t do knock-out experiments on human beings. You can’t even do selective breeding of human beings. Most dietary experiments would be unethical if performed on human beings. So would nearly all drug trials. You can’t manipulate a human embryo to see at what stage various tissues form. There’s actually very little you can do to figure out how life really works, if you don’t assume common ancestry and therefore that traits that are consistent across many animals, particularly those that are closely related to us, are likely to be consistent in us too.

The small vocal minority, the larger public special interest groups, secular humanist based political groups, and far left think tanks that band together to proclaim the critical importance of a world view of naturalism and humanist philosophy need to be smacked down by any and all legitimate means and the Expelled movie is a good start.

So now we get down to the nub of the matter — the issue is “a world view of naturalism and humanist philosophy”. Having grown up with that world view, I confess to being utterly bewildered by the hostility that is directed toward it. It’s worked out rather well for the world. There’s nothing like reading about the lives of common folk prior to the twentieth century to develop a deep and abiding appreciation of the world view of naturalism. But at least Eaton is honest — he really cares nothing for science and what it does or does not discover, or what by-ways it might wander into. He just wants his religious beliefs to stand unchallenged.

PZ and his fellow travelers are hardly at a loss for words concerning the subject of darwinism other than hiding his racist views and severe mental psychosis from the public for a century. His slides not withstanding , PZ is full of crap and the evidence is prima facia.

“[P]rima facia” — this is actually spelled “prima facie”, and I do not think it means what Eaton thinks it means. PZ and his “fellow travelers” mostly talk about the theory of evolution, not darwinism, because “darwinism”, if it means anything, is far outdated. And PZ has been hiding something from the public “for a century”? (Cthulhu has blessed him with long life! Must be that Deep One blood.)

But again, so what about Darwin’s “racist views and severe mental psychosis”? (Just by-the-by, bi-polar affective disorder is not a psychosis, severe or otherwise; these terms are not general terms of abuse, but are real diagnostic categories — bi-polar affective disorder can cause psychosis, but is not a psychosis in itself, and Eaton has presented not even the shadow of a claim of psychosis.) Why should PZ or any other scientist spend valuable time arguing about the personality of a researcher, even a very important one, who died a long time ago? That’s left for historians.

Nowhere in the Expelled essay does the writer imply that biologists as a community are racists, white-supremeists and thus PZ is a liar and a bold faced liar at that.

If the Expelled essayist doesn’t intend to imply that biologists are racists, why say — repeatedly — that Darwin was a racist, that the title of his book would fit into a KKK catalog, that his ideas give intellectual fulfillment to racists, and that “Big Science” is covering all this up? What other implication could possibly be intended?

What is clear in the literature is that darwin was a racist, mentally ill, became a rabid atheist, understood nada about biology at the molecular level, and made not a single lasting practical contribution to biological science that would not have happened more quickly and efficiently than if he had never lived.

What literature? Would that be the literature that PZ and his fellow travelers have been covering up for a century?

So we’re back to “Darwin was a racist”. Yawn. Everybody was racist then. If you don’t recognize common descent (and relatively recent common descent, at that) of all human beings, then it is easy to believe that those human beings over there, who don’t look like your neighbors, and don’t talk or dress like you, and don’t have the technology that you have, are really a kind of animal that looks like a human being.

On the topic of racism, a book that I read as a child had a profound influence on my thinking, which I have never forgotten. It was A Pebble in the Sky by Isaac Asimov, and the part that I vividly remember was a discussion in which a telepath points out to one of the main characters that in fact he is prejudiced against the others, including his girlfriend. He responds that he grew up in an atmosphere of bigotry in his formative years “so I can’t help what flaws and follies lie at the roots of my subconscious.”

What I took away from that was “I am not responsible for the prejudices I learned at my mother’s knee.” People are not responsible for discomfort that they might feel with certain people or certain situations; they are responsible for actions that they take in accordance with their prejudices — and then only when they have had the opportunity to learn better. It’s really the heart of the multi-culti attitude, though multi-cultis reserve that understanding exclusively for those who are non-white or non-Christian, preferably both. However, not only is Darwin not responsible for the prejudices he learned at his mother’s knee, but, since he not only grew up but was still living in an atmosphere of bigotry, the degree of tolerance that he did exhibit is admirable.

But again, slandering Darwin is irrelevant. The theory is the thing, and a theory is either supported by evidence or not. It doesn’t matter who came up with the theory, whether he was virtuous or vicious, or even whether he was mentally ill (I once attended a trial in which a psychiatrist testified that the decedent was psychotic; counsel read off a description of what the decedent had done on the day in question and asked whether he was psychotic on that day; and the psychiatrist, being an honest man, replied, “No, on that day he was not psychotic at all.” — psychosis, you see, can wax and wane.)

The continual slander of Darwin by Creationists, I think, can only be attributed to their belief that scientists really are religious and that they really do think of Darwin as a prophet, and that therefore either they will be infuriated to the point of incoherence by slander of him (like Muslims about slander of Mohammed); or else the scales will fall from their eyes, they will realize that they have been led astray, and that they will at last return to the fold like wandering sheep. Creationists don’t seem to recognize that the usual reaction is either a desire to correct their errors (because scientists and even wannabes like me don’t like to see falsehoods go unchallenged), or frustration at the continual introduction of irrelevancies into the discussion, or both.

I am never surprised by this band of elitists including PZ in their defense of Marxism, I am aware of the politics of Dawkins, Gould, etc. while living off the U.S. taxpayer dole and teat his entire paltry, meaningless, and non-productive career.

PZ’s commenters had lots of fun with this since (1) Dawkins is in the UK; (2) Gould is dead, and during life worked for Harvard University which, as they point out, is not a public institution. Eaton then digs the hole deeper by saying
,

I take it that the weevils claim is that only public institutions apply for and receive public grants for scientific research purposes, the writing of books, papers, holding of conferences,etc. and that the purchase of Mr. Dawkin’s books by public libraries whether associated with higher education or municipal convenience, that his many publically sponsored speaking engagements are somehow sheltered from the expenditure of public funding.

I like that. Dawkins’ books are published for anyone to buy; public libraries buy them; therefore Dawkins is “on the public dole.” Dawkins offers his services as a speaker; public institutions perhaps hire him to speak; therefore Dawkins is “on the public dole.” This is another case where the words do not mean what Eaton thinks they mean. “On the dole” means receiving public monies for nothing — this would be called charity if it were not provided by the State. Does Eaton think the librarians who run those public libraries are “on the dole”? Their salaries come from the expenditure of public funds. Does he think the workers who fill in pot holes or repair the highways in the blazing heat are “on the dole”? I think they’d beg to differ with him.

It is quite amusing to see how Stein and the Expelled team have used the cynicism, egomania, anger, foment, and inability to keep their cool in effect to jujitsu the major cult spokespersons and their frailties into a profitable and extrremely clever expose of the Big Science enterprise and its stalking horse, darwinian evolution.

Yes, Creationists’ endless lies frustrate real scientists, who aren’t smooth public relations types and actors, and then Creationists use the less than polished responses of these non-public relations types to make them look bad. Of course, they have to carefully crop and quote-mine their words to do it. One thing that I wonder about in this paragraph is, what is the “Big Science enterprise” really, if Darwinian evolution is merely the stalking horse? I’m guessing that the evil wicked minions of Big Science seek to destroy Christianity and institute the reign of Satan in the guise of secular humanism, but he doesn’t really make that clear.

Did I mention PZ, that you are a liar, a nobody, and of no particular import in any respect.

And that’s why Eaton cluttered up PZ’s blog with three copies of this idiotic screed instead of putting it in his own blog?

Creationists like to accuse Darwin personally of being a racist, but they also like to claim that “Darwinism” leads directly to racism and the Holocaust (and of course anything else that they think the audience will consider bad). But I think that quite the contrary is true.

Let us say that I show you the picture of a footrace. The front runner is about to cross the line at 100 yards; the next runner is ten yards back; the next is twenty yards back; and no one else is within fifty yards. If I tell you this is a hundred yard dash and that everyone is healthy and started at the same time, and then ask you which is the best runner, what answer could you possibly give? The front runner is far better than any of the others, and he and the immediate runners-up are far better runners than the rest. Obviously.

Now suppose I showed you the same picture, but told you that this is an ultra-marathon, a hundred mile race, and that the runners have already run twenty miles over hill and dale. If I ask you now which is the best runner, or which will win the race, I think your only possible answer is that it is impossible to tell. If, after twenty miles, there is not a hundred yards separation among the runners, then they are truly very equally matched. A small stumble over a rock, a slight slipping in mud, may account for all of the current separation, but such can and will happen to any of them as the race continues. There is simply no telling which is best if any.

Now let’s be good multi-cultis and think about the culture of Europeans in the mid 18th century, long before Darwin was even born. They didn’t know much about the history of the world but, like everybody else, they had an origin myth. This myth said, among other things, that every human being was descended from four men (Noah and three sons) and their respective wives, who had lived less than 4,200 years earlier, in 2398 BC. In those 4,200 years, Europeans had developed a higher technology than anyone else, enabling them to spread across the world and seize or dominate most of it, while pretty much everyone else had remained at the Noachian level. A very reasonable conclusion from this is that Europeans were just better than everyone else.

I believe it was William McNeill in Plagues and Peoples, one of many books I’ve left at home, who pointed out that both the Native Americans and the Europeans believed that there were gods who sent disease on them, and when the Europeans arrived, the Native Americans started dying horribly and in droves from diseases that hardly affected the Europeans, so what conclusion could the Native Americans reach but that the European god was far stronger than their own, and intended for the Europeans to take their land? Indeed, what other conclusion could the Europeans themselves reach?

Another point that was evident to the Europeans and everyone else is that the human race was divided into races that were pretty much visibly distinct. But why should that be so, if they’d all been members of the same family just a few millennia ago? One very reasonable explanation was that God had marked them that way, and if he had done so, presumably he wanted them to stay marked and distinct. Since miscegenation led to a loss of the racial distinctions, miscegenation must be disapproved of by God.

But what did Darwin say? That the Earth was far older than 6,000 years (of course, that wasn’t original with him); that the human race was far older than 6,000 years; that the human race derived from animal ancestors; that there was a long, long period in which the distinctive features of the human race were formed; that every human being derived from African ancestors; and that racial distinctions had evolved by sexual selection in different areas. Darwin did not know, of course, how old the modern human race was or how long it had taken for the distinctive features to form, but clearly it was a very long time. And what does that imply?

That implies that every human population had been at the same technological level for a very long time. Europeans had quite recently jumped out ahead technologically, but that didn’t prove anything about innate superiority; if they were innately superior, why hadn’t they jumped out ahead thousands — tens of thousands — of years earlier?

That also implies that the effects of disease on Native Americans had nothing to do with their moral right to exist or occupy their lands; they just hadn’t evolved resistance to the Old World diseases because they hadn’t been in contact with the Old World. The Europeans had developed such resistance through epidemic after plague after epidemic, because they had long been part of the Old World disease pool.

That also implies that the different constellations of racial characteristics, while interesting, have no more moral significance than different language families or clothing styles. Thus, miscegenation is in no way morally objectionable.

In short, Darwin’s theory leads to the conclusion that racism is stupid.

Was Darwin’s theory always interpreted that way? Is it now? No, of course not. There are plenty of people who are happy to quote-mine Darwin and all of science to support their prejudices — but the point is that the prejudices came first. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species came out just two years before the American Civil War, so it can hardly be considered responsible for the attitudes of Southern slaveholders toward their slaves! Shakespeare said that “the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” yes, and bigots can cite science, but that doesn’t mean that science, as a whole, supports bigots.

As for the Holocaust, that is even less reasonable to blame on Darwin. Europeans had been engaging in pogroms against Jews long before Darwin was born. Jews were regularly expelled from European nations because they were considered to be harmful aliens (and allowed back in on sufferance when their contributions were belatedly, and tacitly, recognized). They were regularly blamed for epidemics and anything else that inexplicably went wrong. It is no surprise at all that they would be blamed for Germany’s loss of World War I or the economic crisis that preceded Hitler’s rise to power.

Was Darwin’s theory of evolution cited as one justification for the Final Solution? No doubt. Did the Final Solution depend on Darwin’s theory? No. The Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose, that’s all.

Creationists like to claim that they don’t object at all to science — Heaven forfend! — they just object to scientists sneaking their philosophical materialism in under the guise of methodological materialism. So I have a solution for that. Every scientific paper starts with the following disclaimer:

It is possible that the observations and experimental results detailed in this paper were generated by unknown and unknowable entities using unknown and unknowable forces for unknown and unknowable purposes at unknown and unknowable times; if that is the case then explanation is meaningless and replication improbable, but if we assume that the observations and experimental results are the result of natural forces capable of being investigated by scientific methods, this paper follows.

End of problem.

Creationists love to dump on Darwin as bigoted, as Dr. Simmons did (37:26). My first thought in such cases is that Darwin is long dead, and that his personal bigotry, if any, is irrelevant to the usefulness of his theory, so why bring it up in a debate about science. My second thought is that creationists really, really don’t have a clue how scientists think; they really, really believe that scientists accept the theory of evolution just because they consider Darwin to be some kind of prophet, and that therefore dumping on Darwin as a person is an effective way to “convert” a scientist. My third thought is that a good multi-culti would observe that Darwin was a product of his times, in which what we would consider the most virulent racism and sexism were perfectly normal, but though he could not escape those vices entirely, he was far more decent (in our terms) than the great bulk of his contemporaries. But even if he had been an utterly horrible person, his theory would still be useful or not. And it’s useful. Period.

Dr. Simmons also dumped on Darwin as not knowing much (11:18 and again starting at 37:07)

…but Darwin, uh, didn’t know much about monkeys. He didn’t know why children looked like their parents, even though Mendel was contemporary with him. He knew nothing about genetics; he knew nothing about immunity; he knew nothing about human cells, or viruses; and how could he? It wasn’t available then. It’s gotten so complex in biology that, uh, I don’t think he’d be published now.

As one commenter pointed out, in fact he is published now. I, like many others, have recently printed copies of several of his books (and I’ve read Origin of Species from cover to cover, which Dr. Simmons evidently hasn’t).

But I know what he was trying to imply: Darwin knew very little compared to what we know today, and thus his theory, while pretty good for its time, should be viewed with the same condescending “understanding” that we give to theories of mice spontaneously generating from warm straw. But that just isn’t true. You don’t have to know all the details in order to see the overall picture.

Newton figured out that the planets were falling around the Sun in response to a force of a strength inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the masses, even though he didn’t know the exact distances of most of the planets from the Sun, and didn’t even know of the existence of Neptune and Pluto. Nevertheless, his description of the gravitational force was correct and with appropriate, very accurate, measurements of the value of G (which Newton did not have), we can use it to investigate the structure of our galaxy and indeed the whole universe.

So yes, Darwin didn’t know a lot of what science has found in the past 150 years, but he knew enough to see the overall picture. And I rather think that, if he were alive today, as a real scientist, he would have studied and learned and made a contribution — not the same contribution, obviously, since the theory of evolution would exist even if Darwin had not lived when he did, since Wallace independently discovered it — but he would have made a contribution.

And anyway, I don’t see how not knowing much about current scientific knowledge would be an impediment to being published now. Flood geologists and young earth creationists have no trouble being published.

FoxNews had a remarkably insulting headline on an article on February 1: “Blue-eyed people are inbred mutants.” They changed it later to “All blue-eyed people are related,” probably due to a lot of flaming blue-eyed emails.

Given that my mother had blue eyes, my sister has blue eyes, and everyone else in the family, including me, has hazel eyes, I kind of take exception to the insult. But it’s not just deliberately insulting, it’s wrong.

A mutant results from a mutation, which is “a sudden structural change within the DNA of a gene or chromosome of an organism resulting in the creation of a new character or trait not found in the wildtype” (per Wikipedia). When the gene has been part of the population for thousands of years, as with the blue-eye gene, it’s probably not accurate to continue to call it a mutation anymore. It was originally, but now it’s become part of the wildtype.

Further, when you’re talking about tens if not hundreds of millions of people who carry the gene, what sense does it make to say they’re inbred? Since my mother and father both carried the gene, and it arose only once (which is the gist of the article), then clearly they must share the ancestor in which it arose. But it is theoretically possible, though incredibly unlikely, that they had no other ancestor in common.

It’s been estimated that, given the mixing that has gone on over the generations, every person of any European descent today is the descendant of every European of 1,000 years ago who left any descendants at all. Since some of those Europeans of 1,000 years ago had blue eyes, every person of even partial European descent today is descended from the original blue eyed mutant, even if they themselves don’t carry the marker. That’s upwards of half a billion people. I do not really consider that inbred.

Hmph.

Orac has a post on 9/11 “truthers”, and the comment section has some really remarkable stuff in it. I don’t keep up very much with crazies except through blogs so this stuff is something of a revelation.

Sometimes I am amazed by my fellow citizens. I suppose I should be inured to it by now: I remember being astonished to discover that there was an actual TV show called “Beavis and —-Head” (a word which I will not repeat).   Prior to learning this, I had thought that references to some show by that name were simply insults — that the show was “Beavis and X”, but X was so stupid as to be commonly referred to by an insulting nickname. I had not imagined that our culture had declined so far as to make that name acceptable on national television. Oh, well, live and learn.

Part of Orac’s comment section was argument about whether HIV does, or does not, cause AIDS. Years ago I read Rethinking AIDS which seemed to me to raise some good arguments. The author is a genuine scientist, however, and as best I can tell from the Web, he has concluded that HIV is at least a substantial part of AIDS. I assume that that means that his arguments have been met. It would be interesting to read a good book on how those arguments were met, because I expect that would show real scientists doing what they do best, but the whole area has gotten so politicized that I don’t want to waste time and money on any book about it unless it were recommended by someone I trust. Like Orac, maybe. Or Professor Root-Bernstein.

One thing that annoys me is the assumption that we have a complete list of all causes of acquired immune deficiency, including HIV, and therefore any case of acquired immune deficiency that isn’t caused by something on that list proves that HIV doesn’t cause AIDS. The human body is incredibly intricate, microorganisms and viruses have been evolving for millions of years to attack it in various ways, and are still evolving … is it really not credible that more than one virus might have come up with the trick of attacking the immune system? HIV is the most widespread such virus, so far as we know, but there is no reason at all to think that another such virus might not emerge or might not have already emerged. We just have to be watchful for other possible “AIDS” causing diseases while we fight the one we know about.

But there’s even more craziness in the comments:

How did the tops of the towers, above the impact zones, disintergrate/dissapear [sic]? I see no photographical [sic] evidence of this Pile driver that supposedly crushed the entire building in 10-15 seconds where did it go? After all it is this Pile driver that crushed 80 floors of cold steel superstructure in seconds. (from cooler)

Andrew, your [sic] claiming the tops of the towers disintergrated [sic] when they collided with the bottom half of the building, but then what crushed the rest of the building if the Pile driver was gone once it collided with the bottom half of the building? (from cooler)

“cooler” seems to labor under the impression that “broken cookies have no calories”: once the top part of the building breaks up, it no longer has any mass or momentum, and will do no harm to the rest of the building.

What happened to the tops of the towers? Just give me 2-3 specific sequential causal steps on how they vanished. (from cooler again)

Is this guy seriously contending that the tops of the towers actually “vanished”? Is he under the impression that the United States Government has a disintegrator ray that made them vanish utterly? Did they go into the twilight zone? Is this argument completely insane? But even I can answer his question about sequential causative steps:

1. The structural supports holding up the tops of the towers weakened from the heat of fires ignited by jet fuel, fed by lots of flammable materials, and fanned by high winds.
2. The weight of the tops of the towers then caused them to collapse on top of the lower parts, and they broke up in the process since they were never designed to hold together when their supports were removed.
3. The broken-up pieces of the tops merged with the broken-up pieces of the floors below them, the whole mass of rubble collapsed in a heap, and since the top floors were not labeled in any distinctive way, their rubble cannot be distinguished from the rubble of the bottom floors.

And this nonsense from “cooler” is seriously treated as a challenge to the US Government? Sure, the US Government has not always been beyond reproach, but it hasn’t found a way to defy the laws of physics.

Here’s another stupid “truther” argument I’ve seen, though “cooler” only alludes to it: “The Towers collapsed into their own footprint! That can only happen with a controlled demolition!” (I think the exclamation points are a required part of the argument.)

First of all, the Towers didn’t collapse into their own footprint. Debris from the Towers smashed into the buildings all around them. Indeed some, like the Deutsche Bank tower are so severely damaged as to be beyond repair.

Second, what else would you expect the Towers to do, except fall straight down? In order to fall outside of the footprint, any piece would have to have force applied to it at an angle to gravity. Where would that force come from? The planes themselves applied some force but really, compared with the mass of the Towers, a plane probably applied about as much sideways force as a paper airplane hitting me. Sure, some debris was flung out some distance by that impact (my cousin rushed home to his family, and found a jet engine in the street in front of his apartment, blocks from the Towers), but very little compared to the whole building. Some could also be blasted out sideways by air pressure as the building collapsed but, again, not much compared to the mass of the building.

The fires weakened the buildings and caused them to collapse, but fire could not impart any sideways force. The only possible way that parts of the buildings could fall outwards would be a twist applied as one part of the structure held momentarily longer than another. No doubt that did happen in the initial stages, causing pieces to fall on the buildings all around the Towers, but there is no way that any part of the structure could hold long enough to give a twist to the whole building. So the great bulk fell straight down. Obviously.

I think the “truthers”, like bin Laden, think the Towers should have fallen as complete units, or perhaps broken into a few large pieces while falling. They may be thinking of some famous cases of buildings which collapsed more or less intact because of liquefaction caused by earthquakes, but those were far smaller buildings, and their internal structures were able to withstand the sideways forces and hold together through a much shorter fall than the tops of the Towers endured.

Of course, the most obvious argument against the “truthers” is that, if they were right, they’d have been silenced by now.

I just got through listening to the great Myers/Simmons debate between Professor PZ Myers and Dr. Geoffrey Simmons (medical doctor). Professor Myers’ commenters have had lots of fun mocking Dr. Simmons’ side of the debate, but they don’t seem to mention the best part.

At about 31:30, Dr. Simmons starts to talk about the human brain. One of the commenters observes that at this point, Professor Myers must have said off-mike, “Cthulhu hath delivered him into my hands,” since this is his own field of expertise. So Dr. Simmons makes the argument from personal incredulity about how complex this is (”It’s beyond my comprehension how this could have come about by trial and error” – at about 31:57), and says “this isn’t discussed in books that discuss the Theory of Evolution.”

Of course Professor Myers disagrees that it isn’t discussed, because this claim is nonsense, points out (32:20) that “We know quite a bit about how the brain forms and how it works”, and gives an explanation about how an overabundance of connections originally form and then (32:44) “inappropriate connections are pruned by trial and error”. He calls this a perfect analogue of natural selection, and Dr. Simmons responds (32:56), “Or perhaps they’re pruned by design.” Professor Myers understandably gives a kind of disbelieving gasp or sigh in response. But this isn’t the best part.

The best part starts at 33:08, when Dr. Simmons says,

There’s a time in the life of a fetus when a quarter of a million brain cells migrate practically every minute for a short chunk of time and they all go to the right place and make all or almost all the right connections, and indeed they do do some pruning. But one would have to speculate that this would take billions and billions of years if one were to have an intermediate step for each one of these, and yet this all happened within, oh, a few hundred thousand years maybe, or less.

He is referring to the evolution of the human brain when he says “this would take billions of years,” although the immediate actual prior referent for “this” seems to be the pruning, because “this all happened within, oh, a few hundred thousand years maybe, or less,” which can only refer to the evolution of the human brain. Also, when he says “if one were to have an intermediate step for each one of these”, “each one of these” seems to mean either the pruning of each individual extra connection or the movement of each individual cell.

Well, yeah, if natural selection had specifically acted to determine the pruning of each connection or the movement of each individual cell, one might well have to speculate that the whole package would take billions and billions of years to evolve. But Professor Myers just got through explaining that the pruning takes place through trial and error, and tried to talk about relevant experiments but Dr. Simmons talked over him to make the statement about “There’s a time…”

So what about the movement of the individual cells? Is that determined cell-by-cell under the control of natural selection? Is he kidding? Is he in there debating whether biology is a matter of faith, and he’s never heard of homeotic mutations? A homeotic mutation can cause an entire body part to form in the wrong place. Has he never heard of two-faced cats, which may have two separate muzzles with perfectly formed noses and mouths? The tops of the heads are kind of merged, so the cats don’t have four perfect eyes and ears, but the two muzzles are quite distinct.

How could an entire body part, like a leg, occur in the wrong place, like where an antenna belongs? Why isn’t it just a disorganized blob of cells or not there at all? The reason an entire leg can form in the wrong place is that there are some chemical signals that say, “make a leg”. If they happen to get turned on in the wrong place (whether by developmental accident or by mutation of the regulator genes), well, you get a perfectly good leg in the wrong place.

How can a two-faced cat occur? Why doesn’t it have just one muzzle and a blob of disorganized tissue beside it? Because there is a gradient of chemicals that determines the formation of the face, and if those chemicals don’t get released at the right time, there may be so many cells already present that they don’t communicate among themselves properly, and two faces are formed instead of one.

Likewise, there is some chemical signal that tells nerve cells, “migrate over here and form connections among yourselves.” So they do. And if, by virtue of some mutation, a fetus has somewhat more nerve cells than usual in the area to pick up that chemical signal, then more nerve cells than usual will migrate and form connections. And if having those extra nerve cells is beneficial, that now-grown fetus may survive better and have more offspring that have somewhat more nerve cells than usual. After a while, perhaps, the new, larger number of nerve cells will be normal for the species. It doesn’t take billions of years to build instructions for the additional nerve cells.

The fate of each individual cell isn’t determined by cell-by-cell instructions in the genome. It can’t be (the genome isn’t big enough) and it manifestly isn’t. I know this, and I’m just a computer programmer. Does Dr. Simmons not know this? Does he really believe that biologists don’t know this?

Within the past few days, I ran across someone who commented that creationists don’t really feel a need to disprove evolutionary science; they know that what the scientists say is false, and the only reason they even go through the motions of proof is because the courts unaccountably insist on it. (I’ve lost that link.)

I happened to be reading about geology, and the topic of perpetual motion machines was mentioned. This caused some neurons to bump up against each other, and it occurred to me that the creationists’ response to evolutionary science is like a patent examiner’s response to a perpetual motion machine: “Yeah, right, bring me a working model and I’ll look at it, but I’m not going to waste my time wading through your turgid prose trying to figure out where the inevitable error is.” Likewise, the creationist says, “Yeah, right, show me a moth turning into a hawk and I’ll consider your argument, but otherwise I can’t be bothered.”

The difference, of course, is that the patent examiner relies on extensive and reproducible research by all sorts of people for centuries, all of which indicates that true perpetual motion machines are impossible, and the creationist relies on a pre-scientific book that didn’t even pretend to be a science textbook. But still, this helps me, at least, understand what they’re thinking.

(Note: all evidence indicates that true perpetual motion machines are impossible, but that’s not to say that there couldn’t be some device that really seemed to be a perpetual motion machine. Before radioactivity was discovered, for instance, if someone had brought in a box that warmed water for years without any input, that would certainly have seemed like a perpetual motion machine.)

This one showed up in Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted): Flying Lessons: Additional Insight into the Evolution of Flight in Birds:

Beautiful picture of that creature. So amazing! I’m reminded of all the important organs that are on that head. Think of all the important organs, including the brain, that are in and around the Homo sapiens head. Stop and consider the implications of this. The head of the Alectoris chukar and the Homo sapiens “sticks out” beyond the more substantial part of the body and the vulnerableness of it is shocking.

He (?) is so right. I mean, this design is so obviously bad even to a merely human intelligence that certainly no Intelligent Designer could have come up with it.

Oh, wait, I missed the rest of it:

Natural Selection operating over a supposed long period of time would certainly have placed such organs in a more protected area. This disproves evolution and proves that natural selection does not work to make for the survival of the fittest. Perhaps there is no such thing as natural selection.

He (?) thereby displays ignorance of how natural selection works. See, natural selection works on variation that appears in the population, but not all variation is possible. Angels, for instance, are always drawn with six limbs: two arms, two legs, two wings. But unfortunately tetrapods like us and bats and pterosaurs and birds got locked into four limbs hundreds of millions of years ago. So bats and pterosaurs and birds all had to turn arms into wings in order to fly. Sure, it would have been much more useful to keep the arms and add wings, but that kind of variation just doesn’t arise. No angels.

Looking at the head — well, the commenter seems to have overlooked the fact that the brain is encased in a fairly sturdy bony box. Indeed, it is the only part of the body that is encased in a bony box (for humans and birds, anyway). There used to be a lot of heavily armored fish, back in the Devonian. They’re gone now, and have been for a very long time. That armor takes a lot of resources to make, slows down the organism, and makes it less agile. So even though heavy armor looks (to some of us) like the sort of thing natural selection would favor, it seems that quick though rather vulnerable organisms (like birds, which are very lightly built) tend to outcompete well-armored but slow and clumsy organisms, but natural selection has indeed added protection to the brain.

Take a close look at your abdomen. There’s stuff in there that’s really important to you. Not as immediately important as your head, it’s true, but if you suffer serious damage to the contents of your abdominal cavity, you’ll die just as surely as if you suffer serious damage to the contents of your skull (barring modern medicine, of course). But your abdominal cavity is not protected by a bony box. The commenter thinks the brain should move down into the unprotected abdomen so it doesn’t “stick out”?

Besides overlooking the skull, the commenter seems to have overlooked the fact that the mouth is in the head along with the “distance” sense organs and the brain. This has been true of vertebrates since there have been vertebrates

If we imagine some small wormlike thing slithering in the muck looking for food, it makes sense to move with the mouth in front, so anything edible that was encountered could be immediately snapped up. And it makes sense for natural selection to favor development of sense organs near the mouth, so that anything nearby that was edible could be detected and then snapped up. And it makes sense for natural selection to favor development of ganglia (proto-brains) close to the sense organs and mouth so that sensory input can be quickly interpreted, edible things can be accurately detected, and the mouth quickly directed towards the edible things so it can snap them up. Given that nervous impulses travel fairly slowly, the closer the ganglia are to the sense organs and mouth, the quicker that turn-and-snap-it-up action can take place. So you end up with a head that contains the mouth and sensory organs — and also contains the brain.

We vertebrates inherited that organization, which works “well enough”. To move the head, or even just the brain, to some more central area of the body would require really drastic changes. You can’t get there from here, and that’s no more “proof” that evolution doesn’t exist than pointing out that I can’t walk from New York to Australia is proof that walking is impossible.

This is the second time in a week that I’ve seen the same strange creationist argument. This example comes from Amazon “So-called Macro-evolution”

The existence of the beefalo [buffalo/cow cross] and its cousins, the dzo and zubron, show us that – after millennia of separation – the gene pool of individuals in the genus bison and genus bos has not changed enough to make interbreeding impossible. And, in the case of European bison and American bison, there is debate as to whether speciation has fully occurred.

Clearly, the Darwinian theory of speciation by natural selection is not the whole story. Maybe it’s not the true story at all.

This problem (debate as to whether speciation has fully occurred in a particular case) in no way invalidates Darwin’s theory (or the Modern Theory of Evolution). Moreover, it is not a problem merely for real science; it’s a problem for creationism too.

First, what Darwin said is that varieties diverge indefinitely from their ancestors. He did not say that there is a bright line drawn across the lineage that says “Here the new species arose”. Nor does the Modern Theory of Evolution say that. Instead, it is expected that, over time, separated populations accumulate changes and, in time, such changes may become sufficient to prevent interbreeding.

But this is a statistical probability; it is not guaranteed after some number of generations or some number of years. I read in Speciation about a viable cross (if somewhat funny-looking) between two birds from species that had been separated for millions of years. Unfortunately I left the book at home, but I remember the author describing this as being equivalent to getting a viable cross between a human and a lemur.

There is nothing in the Theory of Evolution that requires that diverging populations become incapable of viable crosses even if their phenotypes are quite different. When the populations are separated, interfertility may decline by chance but it may not, or not by much; if they are then brought back together, one may outcompete the other and drive it to extinction, or natural selection may favor the pure breeds and thus favor the development of mating barriers (because individuals that breed with the other population don’t leave many offspring), or they may interbreed to the point that the incipient species merge back into one, or a hybrid zone may develop.

In any case, far from the beefalo possibly disproving the Theory of Evolution, this is exactly the sort of thing one would expect under that theory. Species are not created once and for all by divine fiat, with barriers that can never be breached; instead, they form slowly and a bit messily, and human observers may have difficulty telling exactly where the lines are supposed to be drawn (or even if there are lines in a given case). And when you get to the genus level — well, the genus really doesn’t exist in the real world. Species are assigned to separate genera based on the magnitude of perceived differences, but such perceptions can be wrong. Maybe the genus bison and the genus bos should be reconsidered in light of the interbreeding detailed by the creationist above. That’s what science is about.

On the other hand, creationists have a problem with the beefalo too, and it appears to me that their problem is worse. After all, their claim is that species (oops, I mean, kinds) were brought into existence recently by divine fiat, and that they bring forth young “each after their own kind.” Okay, so are cattle and bison one kind or two? What about lions and tigers, which are quite capable of producing fertile offspring together? What about the bird species mentioned above?

A creationist should be able to answer a question like this: if cattle and bison are one kind, how do we know what else is of that kind? And how do you know for sure, save by trying to cross these animals with those animals and seeing if you get offspring (i.e., see if they reproduce after their own kind)? For that matter, are horses and donkeys of one kind? They do produce offspring together, after all. Oh, but they’re not fertile, so maybe that doesn’t count. Or maybe it does. But a creationist must be able to answer whether it does or not.
And then again, some creationists think that God the Intelligent Designer created a cat kind, a dog kind, a horse kind, etc., and all the species we have today descended from those original kinds via superfast evolution. But creationists who explain our existing variety of species that way have exactly the same problem real scientists do: how do you tell whether two populations have diverged enough to be separate species?

Since God the Intelligent Designer neglected to write the name of the kind/species on each animal, humans have to figure that out. Even creationists do.