Lee's Blog

about this. They’ve raised my hopes and then dashed them so many times.

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 pointed out that that lackwit Ray Comfort would look less stupid if he mocked an idea that some scientists somewhere actually advanced.

Well, here’s one: scientists claim that global warming could cause an ice age! Ha ha, that’s counterintuitive and thus mockable.

It actually does make sense: sudden warming causes melting of a substantial part of Greenland’s ice cap, flooding the North Atlantic with cold fresh water, covering the warm current that keeps Europe warm, thus allowing the snow cover to grow … and there you go, an ice age.

But it *sounds* pretty unlikely, so you could mock it without sounding completely stupid. So you could mock it without sounding like Ray Comfort, in other words.

I really feel sorry for Harry, the programmer who tried for three years to decipher the CRU climate model … and failed. One problem he had struck a particular chord with me: there was a sum-of-squares routine that could return negative numbers.

I cannot resist suggesting that this is what happens when you use imaginary numbers (I don’t know why no one else has made that joke).

Ahem. At any rate, when I first took over my current project, I found exactly that: a sum-of-squares that was sometimes negative. The funny thing is that the code *looked* perfect. The issue was a problem deducing the types for a template, and it was so weird that no one believed my explanation of what was happening. I literally had to run it in the debugger and point out the intermediate values in order to convince my coworkers.

If that’s the kind of thing Harry had to deal with, it’s no wonder he gave up.

I used to work in a doctors’ office. We saw lots of poor people. Sometimes we were paid by Medicare, sometimes by Medicaid. Both programs still exist. Why do people keep condemning the U.S. as leaving poor people to die in the streets?

I cannot express how frustrated and upset I am about this. What were they thinking? We do a better job of keeping old data, documenting reasons for code changes, explaining why old models were wrong and needed to be changed, and nobody is even relying on us to
make economy-altering decisions. Argh! Now all the work has to be redone, people who were already suspicious will be more so, and — they lost some of the data!

What were they thinking? I want to believe they were honest and did good science, but they sure don’t make it easy.

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.

This is a really cool video showing air traffic around the world over a 24-hour period. It is really interesting to see how the traffic thins out in the dark and then picks up again with the daylight, all across the world.

Meerkats have a certain ferretty look to them. I’m glad these guys enjoyed their Halloween.