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Showing posts with label Rationalism v Superstition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rationalism v Superstition. Show all posts

Saturday, January 06, 2024

Why do Intelligent Design Creationists lie about junk DNA?

A recent post on Evolution News (sic) promotes a a new podcast: Casey Luskin on Junk DNA’s “Kuhnian Paradigm Shift”. You can listen to the podcast here but most Sandwalk readers won't bother because they've heard it all before. [see Paradigm shifting.]

Luskin repeats the now familiar refrain of claiming that scientists used to think that all non-coding DNA was junk. Then he goes on to list recent discoveries showing that some of this non-coding DNA is functional. The truth is that no knowledgeable scientist ever claimed that all non-coding DNA was junk. The original idea of junk DNA was based on evidence that only 10% of the genome is functional and these scientists knew that coding regions occupied only a few percent. Thus, right from the beginning, the experts on genome evolution knew about all sorts of functional non-coding DNA such as regulatory sequences, non-coding genes, and other things.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Stephen Meyer lies about scientists working on evolutionary theory

I know Stephen Meyer and I have discussed his views on creationism many times. Some of the issues he raises are quite interesting and they aren't easy to refute. In this video from 2020, he presents two standard creationist objections to evolution: the Cambrian explosion, and the probability of evolving a gene.1

Sunday, September 17, 2023

Discovery Institute's latest video: The Codes of Life

This is a very slick video from the Discovery Institute. It shows you what we are up against. Anyone who thinks they can easily refute the claims in this video hasn't tried.

Intelligent Design Creationists know exactly what they are doing and they are very good at it. There are so many thing wrong with this video that it would take a book to correct them all and, furthermore, you would have to convince people that their entire worldview has to change in order to really understand biology. I bet there are many scientists who couldn't deal with a video like this and that's a problem.

Real biology is messy and sloppy. Things do not look as neatly designed as Richard Dawkins and the creationists would have you believe. I've tried to present the case for a sloppy worldview in my latest book.


Saturday, February 25, 2023

How Intelligent Design Creationists try to deal with the similarity between human and chimp genomes

The initial measurement of the difference between the human and chimp genomes was based on aligning 2.4 billion base pairs in the two genomes. This gave a difference of 1.23% by counting base pair substitutions and small deletions and insertions (indels). However, if you look at larger indels, including genes, you can come up with bigger values because you can count the total number of base pairs in each indel; for example, a deletion of 1,000 bp will be equivalent to 1,000 SNPs.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

On reasoning with creationists

I've been trying to reason with creationists for more than 30 years, beginning with debates on talk.origins back in the early 1990s. Sometimes we make a little progress but most of the time it's very frustrating.

Over the years, we've encountered a few outstanding examples of creationists whose "reasoning" abilities defy explanation. One of he most famous is Otangelo Grasso - his ability to misunderstand and misconstrue science is legendary. He is one of only a small number of people who are banned from Sandwalk.

Here's an example of his unique unreasoning abiltiies.

Trying to educate a creationist (Otangelo Grasso)

I bring this up because he recently posted an artilce on the Uncommon Descent blog and you just have to read it if you want a good laugh. It shows you that 30 years of attempting to teach science to creationists isn't nearly long enough.

Otangelo Grasso on the difficulties of reasoning with atheists


Thursday, October 28, 2021

Science reviews a creationist book

You can't get much more anti-science than a book about Adam and Eve. Nevertheless, Stephen Schaffner—a computational biologist at the Broad Institute of MIT in Boston—decided that such a book was worthy of a mostly favorable review in one of the most prestigious science journals in the world [Adam. Eve, and the evolution of humankind].

Schaffner is reviewing a book by William Lane Craig whom he describes as "a widely published philosopher, theologian, and Christian apologist." There are others who would dispute that laudatory description including Richard Dawkins in a ten-year-old essay published in The Guardian [Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig].

I won't bother to mention all of the issues with the review since Jerry Coyne has covered them on his website but I would like to quote part of the second-last paragraph of the review.

Craig’s goal in writing this book, of course, is not a scientific one, and it cannot be judged on scientific grounds. I suspect that for many scientists, including religious ones, the exercise will be seen as misguided or simply incomprehensible.

Having followed Craig's anti-science crusade for several years, I have no difficulty in understanding why he would write such a book. What I find truly misguided and incomprehensible is why Science would publish such a review. Perhaps it's because AAAS, the publisher of Science, has a history of accommodating religion?


Monday, August 05, 2019

Religion vs science (junk DNA): a blast from the past

I was checking out the science books in our local bookstore the other day and I came across Evolution 2.0 by Perry Marshall. It was published in 2015 but I don't recall seeing it before.

The author is an engineer (The Salem Conjecture) who's a big fan of Intelligent Design. The book is an attempt to prove that evolution is a fraud.

I checked to see if junk DNA was mentioned and came across the following passages on pages 273-275. It's interesting to read them in light of what's happened in the past four years. I think that the view represented in this book is still the standard view in the ID community in spite of the fact that it is factually incorrect and scientifically indefensible.

Sunday, November 25, 2018

Michael Behe's third book

I'm looking forward to Michael Behe's third book, which is due to be published in February. As most of you probably know, Michael Behe is a biochemist and a former professor at Lehigh University in Scranton, Pennsylvania, USA. He's also a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science & Culture—the most prominent organization pushing Intelligent Design Creationism.

This will be Behe's third book. The first one was Darwin's Black Box (1996) where he argued against evolution by suggesting that some cellular complexes (e.g. bacterial flagella) are irreducibly complex and could not possibly have evolved by natural means. His second book was The Edge of Evolution (2007) where the theme was that there are limits to evolution preventing it from accomplishing significant beneficial changes.

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Test your irony meter

The irony meter was a running joke on the newsgroup talk.origins back in the last century. Our irony meters were supposed to protect us from the craziness of creationists but as soon as we built a really good irony meter a new bit of creationist crazy came along and fried it. Apparently Jesus and Mo have the same problem.


Saturday, October 28, 2017

Creationists questioning pseudogenes: the GULO pseudogene

This is the second post discussing creationist1 papers on pseudogenes. The first post addressed a paper by Jeffrey Tomkins on the β-globin pseudogene [Creationists questioning pseudogenes: the beta-globin pseudogene]. This post covers another paper by Tomkins claiming that the GULO pseudogenes in various primate species are not derived from a common ancestor but instead have been deactivated independently in each lineage.

The Tomkins' article was published in 2014 in Answers Research Journal, a publication that describes itself like this:
ARJ is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework.

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Creationists questioning pseudogenes: the beta-globin pseudogene

Jonathan Kane recently (Oct. 6, 2017) posted an article on The Panda's Thumb where he claimed that Young Earth Creationists often don't get enough credit for raising serious issues about evolution [Five principles for arguing against creationism].

He mentioned some articles about pseudogenes as prime examples. I asked him for references and he responded with two articles by Jeffrey Tomkins that were published on the Answers in Genesis website. The first was on the β-globin pseudogene and the second was on the GULO pseudogene. Both articles claim that these DNA sequences aren't really pseudogenes because they have functions.

I'll deal with the β-globin pseudogene in this post and the GULO pseudogene in a subsequent post.

Wednesday, March 08, 2017

What's in Your Genome? Chapter 4: Pervasive Transcription

I'm working (slowly) on a book called What's in Your Genome?: 90% of your genome is junk! The first chapter is an introduction to genomes and DNA [What's in Your Genome? Chapter 1: Introducing Genomes ]. Chapter 2 is an overview of the human genome. It's a summary of known functional sequences and known junk DNA [What's in Your Genome? Chapter 2: The Big Picture]. Chapter 3 defines "genes" and describes protein-coding genes and alternative splicing [What's in Your Genome? Chapter 3: What Is a Gene?].

Chapter 4 is all about pervasive transcription and genes for functional noncoding RNAs.
Chapter 4: Pervasive Transcription
  • How much of the genome is transcribed?
  • How do we know about pervasive transcription?
  • Different kinds of noncoding RNAs
  •         Box 4-1: Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs)
  • Understanding transcription
  •         Box 4-2: Revisiting the Central Dogma
  • What the scientific papers don’t tell you
  •         Box 4-3: John Mattick proves his hypothesis?
  • On the origin of new genes
  • The biggest blow to junk?
  •         Box 4-4: How do you tell if it’s functional?
  • Biochemistry is messy
  • Evolution as a tinkerer
  •         Box 4-5: Dealing with junk RNA
  • Change your worldview


Friday, September 23, 2016

A theology student doesn't like Jerry Coyne's book Faith vs. Fact

A theology student named Derrick has written a review of Jerry Coyne's book Faith vs. Fact. He didn't like it very much. (Duh!) You can read his review at: Jerry Coyne, Faith Vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible.

Before reading that review, let's make sure we understand Jerry's position. Here's what he says on page xx of his book.
My main thesis is narrower and, I think, more defensible: understanding reality, in the sense of being able to use what we know to predict what we don't, is best achieved using the tools of science, and is never achieved using the methods of faith. That is attested by the acknowledged success of science in telling us everything from the smallest bits of matter to the origin of the universe itself—compared with the abject failure of religion to tell us anything about gods, including whether they exist.

Monday, May 09, 2016

John Oliver teaches us to be skeptical of scientific publications

We all know that the purpose of education should be to teach students how to think critically. We're not doing a very good job. Take biochemistry, for example. We spend a lot of time transferring information from lecture notes to student notes and then examining students on whether the transfer has worked. We think that teaching students to read the primary literature will make them better scientists when, in fact, teaching them to be skeptical of the primary literature is what's really necessary.

The ENCODE fiasco is just one of many examples where the scientific literature got it wrong. We need to make sure that our students appreciate the important parts of science; namely, the necessity of repeating experiments and the value of scientific consensus. Our students, and many of my colleagues, are prone to hype and promotion just like every one else but that's exactly what critical thinking is supposed to avoid. And it's exactly what proper science—no matter how you define it—is designed to overcome.

If students and scientists are having trouble with these concepts, imagine how difficult it is for the general public. How are they supposed to know that not every "breakthrough" is a real breakthrough and not every new study is correct?

John Oliver did an excellent job of explaining the problem on a recent (May 8, 2016) episode of Last Week Tonight. Watch it. It's worth 20 minutes of your time. The last bit on "Todd Talks" is classic.




Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Darwin's statue

A large statue of Charles Darwin was installed in the main foyer of the London's Natural History Museum in 1885—just a few years after Darwin's death. It was removed in 1927 and replaced by a statue of Richard Owen who was no fan of Darwin.

The museum came to its senses in 2009 and put the statue back in it's original position. (It had been in the cafeteria in the basement.) Read the story at: Moving Darwin.

Owen was the man who founded the museum and he was also known for his support of structuralism—the idea that basic body plans cannot be easily explained by evolution. Structuralism is the new buzzword among Intelligent Design Creationists. They don't understand the concept but they're certain it refutes evolution and supports goddidit.

Michael Denton is upset about the statue [see Conversations with Michael Denton: You Can Move the Statue if You Wish...]. Watch the video ...



Ignorance + "body plans" + misinformation (lies) + god-of-the-gaps = Intelligent Design Creationism

Watch Paul Nelson combine his lack of knowledge of evolution and evolutionary theory with misinformation (i.e. lies) and a little bit of false developmental biology then stir the pot with a large dose of god-of-the-gaps to produce a smooth argument that refutes evolution.

There's lots of other stuff going on in this talk. I was especially amused by the discussion of methodological naturalism at the end. Paul Nelson argues that science is blind to all the evidence of a creator because the "rule" of science is that it can't even consider that evidence.

I'll say one thing about this talk: it's very clever. It would take a book to show that Paul Nelson is wrong about everything and the explanations would be far too complicated for the average creationist. For them, it's easier to believe that Paul Nelson is telling them the truth and evolutionary biologists are too stupid to understand their own discipline.

Otangelo Grasso has posted a transcript of the talk. Thank-you Otangelo.




Sunday, February 14, 2016

Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding

Antonin Gregory Scalia (March 11, 1936 – February 13, 2016), justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, died a few days ago. This creates a crisis in American politics because they have a strange set of Constitutional requirements guaranteed to maximize the probability of crises every time they need a new Supreme Court justice.

Scalia's death reminded me of the dissenting opinion in EDWARDS V. AGUILLARD (June 19, 1987). This was the case that invalidated Louisiana's "Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act." Stephen Jay Gould was puzzled by the dissenting opinion so he wrote a wonderful essay to explain Justice Scalia's Misunderstanding.

It's worth reading the entire essay but here's the conclusion,
Following this theme, Scalia presents his most confused statement in the written dissent:
Creation science, its proponents insist, no more must explain whence life came than evolution must explain whence came the inanimate materials from which it says life evolved. But even if that were not so, to posit a past creator is not to posit the eternal and personal God who is the object of religious veneration.
True indeed; one might be a creationist in some vernacular sense by maintaining a highly abstract and impersonal view of the creator. But Aristotle's unmoved mover is no more part of science than the Lord of Genesis. Science does not deal with questions of ultimate origins. We would object just as strongly if the Aristotelophiles of Delaware forced a law through the state legislature requiring that creation of each species ex nihilo by an unmoved mover be presented every time evolution is discussed in class. The difference is only historical circumstance, not the logic of argument The unmoved mover doesn't pack much political punch; fundamentalism ranks among our most potent irrationalisms.

Consider also, indeed especially, Scalia's false concept of science. He equates creation and evolution because creationists can't explain life's beginning, while evolutionists can't resolve the ultimate origin of the inorganic components that later aggregated to life. But this inability is the very heart of creationist logic and the central reason why their doctrine is not science, while science's inability to specify the ultimate origin of matter is irrelevant because we are not trying to do any such thing. We know that we can't, and we do not even consider such a question as part of science.

We understand Hutton's wisdom. We do not search for unattainable ultimates.

We define evolution, using Darwin's phrase, as "descent with modification" from prior living things. Our documentation of life's evolutionary tree records one of science's greatest triumphs, a profoundly liberating discovery on the oldest maxim that truth can make us free. We have made this discovery by recognizing what can be answered and what must be left alone. If Justice Scalia heeded our definitions and our practices, he would understand why creationism cannot qualify as science. He would also, by the way, sense the excitement of evolution and its evidence; no person of substance could be unmoved by something so interesting. Only Aristotle's creator may be so impassive.


Saturday, February 13, 2016

Michael Denton discovers non-adaptive evolution ... attributes it to gods

Readers of this blog will know that I'm a fan of Evolution by Accident. I don't think that the history of life can be explained in strict Darwinian terms (i.e. natural selection) and I think that modern evolutionary theory includes Neutral Theory and a major role for random genetic drift.

This is the view of many modern evolutionary biologists. Their work and views have been reported frequently on Sandwalk over the past ten years but you can find it in all the evolutionary biology textbooks. I'm just the messenger here. It's evolutionary biologists who have made the case for non-adaptive evolution beginning long before The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.

Friday, February 12, 2016

This is what a strawman looks like

This is another post about the stupidity of Intelligent Design Creationists. Stop reading if you don't need any more convincing.

Today is Darwin Day. It's the anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin (Feb. 12, 1809 - April 19, 1882).

This is not a happy day for the Discovery Institute so they've put up a series of posts on Evolution News & Views (sic) to discredit Darwin and "Darwinism."

One of them is by the newly rejuvenated poster boy, Michael Denton: On Darwin Day, Darwinism Is Well Past Its "Sell By" Date. Here's the part I want you to see,
To understand the core weakness of the Darwinian worldview, it is important to understand what Darwinian natural selection requires. The process will work its magic, building up functional structures in organisms, only when two very strict conditions are met: First, the structure must be adaptive—that is, helpful to the organism in flourishing in its environment—and second, there must be a continuum of structures, functional all along the way, leading from an ancestor species to the descendent.

That is, the thing we are trying to explain must in some way help the creature survive, and between the creature and the creature's ancestor there must be a gradual change, each step of which is stable and enhances fitness, or success in reproduction.
Strictly speaking, that's a reasonable explanation of Darwinism as most evolutionary biologists understand it. But here's the problem. There aren't very many evolutionary biologists who are strict Darwinists these days even though there are many who tilt strongly in that direction.