I guess at some point I’m going to have to read Neil Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish. People in the blogosphere keep pulling out interesting tidbits.

Life started in the oceans, so there is much within us that harkens back to our youth in the high seas. The Panda’s Thumb points us to an article that you can find in the University of Chicago Magazine or over at RichardDawkins.net. The article is excerpted from Shubin’s book. Here is one choice excerpt:

In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod [VW] Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingers—and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed world—one with no history—we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.

Nowhere is this history more visible than in the detours, twists, and turns of our arteries, nerves, and veins. Follow some nerves and you’ll find that they make strange loops around other organs, apparently going in one direction only to twist and end up in an unexpected place. The detours are fascinating products of our past that, as we’ll see, often create problems—hiccups and hernias, for example. And this is only one way our past comes back to plague us.
…
Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component. The examples that follow reflect how different branches of the tree of life inside us—from ancient humans, to amphibians and fish, and finally to microbes—come back to pester us today. Each of these examples show that we were not designed rationally but are products of a convoluted history.

He then gives several fascinating examples of how problems such as heart disease, obesity, sleep apnea, hernias, and hiccups are the direct result of our prior evolutionary incarnations as fish, amphibians, and early mammals. He also repeatedly shows how none of this exhibits intelligent design.

Yet more overwhelming evidence for evolution. Yet more overwhelming evidence against creationism. You’d have to be extremely ignorant or extremely stupid to be a creationist these days.

As we discussed previously, one of the characteristics of a good and proper theory is that it can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena. One of the vexing things about the ID creationists is that they spend all of their time bashing “Darwinism” without ever stepping up to the plate and telling us what works in their theory. In fact, their rabid avoidance to doing so suggests that their “theory” must be completely bogus.

About a week ago, Denyse O’Leary tried to tackle the question of “What does Intelligent Design creationism predict?” She either completely misunderstood the question (quite likely, since she apparently doesn’t understand science) or she was dodging it (quite likely, since her “theory” is bankrupt). Her answers mostly consisted of “Darwinists will be unable to…”.

The people who promote a theory are the ones who are supposed to support it by coming up with some predictions it makes and then going out and doing some research to see if those predictions are true. It shouldn’t be up to the rest of us to do their work for them. Nevertheless, the Blue Collar Scientist has decided to tackle the issue in his article “Intelligent Design Creationism does too predict outcomes!” Go over and read the whole thing. I’ll just excerpt a piece and add some comments.

Intelligent design creationism claims … that different creatures are specially created and are not related.

If that were so, I believe that we would find that these creatures would be made of the most appropriate chemical compounds given their phenotype and environment. But this turns out to not be so - out of a possible thousands of amino acids, all of life’s protein is built by only twenty of them, and all the species in the world can only produce a couple hundred amino acids. Despite this, some amino acids that are not used or made by living organisms would be quite useful to many living creatures today. For example, synthetic amino acids with efficient chelating properties might be quite useful to organisms living in areas with arsenic-contaminated water. Yet such organisms lack such useful amino acids and must make do with less effective chelators.

That is a very specific prediction that flows logically from ID creationism. Too bad the prediction is wrong. Evolutionary theory, however, predicts that there would only be a few amino acids, because evolution repurposes existing materials. It’s much harder to make a whole new material from scratch than to take one that is almost right and just jam it in there or bend it a bit to make it fit.

Everywhere you look in nature, you see this reuse and repurposing of existing materials, often in inefficient ways. Nobody would design things like this.

Go over to Blue Collar Scientist and read the rest of the article. He has some more good examples.

The Design of Life is an ID creationist lie-fest passing itself off as a textbook. It’s written by two of the biggest proponents of this religious non-science, William A. Dembski and Jonathan Wells, who both work at the Discovery Institute clown college. This book is actually just a retitled third edition of the book Of Pandas and People that got laughed out of the Kitzmiller v. Dover creationism trial.

One of their tactics for promoting the book is by having a blog, where they post sciency articles that creationist stooges like Denyse O’Leary and Access Research Network (see earlier BoF articles here, here, and here) can then trumpet over and over in their own blogs.

So over on the Design of Life blog is a post titled “The Tree of Life and Speciation – the odd case of the beefalo”, written by Jane Harris-Zsovan. All I could find out about Jane Harris-Zsovan is that she’s an anti-science writer living in Canada. Let’s see what she has to say about the Beefalo and how it proves ID creationism or disproves evolution or demonstrates perpetual motion, or whatever crazy claim she has (I still haven’t figured out what her goal is here).

Does the classification system used by biologists accurately reflect the path of natural selection through the generations? And does it trace the differentiation of species? Not necessarily.

Stop the presses! Oh wait. That’s something we already knew. I guess it’s news to the ID creationists, though. Those people don’t know a whole lot of science.

Taxonomy is an attempt to describe and classify all living organisms. Closely related to that is Systematics, which studies how these organisms are related to each other through evolution. It’s a little more complicated and nuanced than that, but hopefully those definitions will work well enough for this article.

OK, so scientists want to know what all the plants, animals, fungi, etc. are, and how they all evolved. They’ve come up with the classification scheme that we know today. Ideally, the taxonomic charts that we’ve put together would accurately reflect exactly how everything is related and how they evolved. There’s going to be a little bit of error here. In the old days, they had to rely on morphology and other techniques to puzzle out relationships. Things have gotten a lot better now that we have genetics, but there are still places that need tweaking.

Anyway, so we have animals classified into different orders, genera, species, etc. It’s not a perfect classification, partly due to historical inertia. It takes time to get everybody to agree that there’s enough evidence to justify calling something a new sub-species or merging two genera or such. Until that consensus emerges, we continue to use the old classification. Remember, there are millions of species, and there aren’t that many people working just on taxonomy and systematics. This stuff takes time to resolve.

So in Harris-Zsovan’s article published on the Design of Life blog, she’s claiming that the current taxonomic charts aren’t perfect. We already knew that. What’s your point, Jane? And how does that help your claim? And just what is your claim? Well, let’s delve deeper into the article.

Consider the Bovoids, genus bison (for example, the North American buffalo) and genus bos (for example, domesticated cattle).

Now might be a good time to look at their relative taxonomies.

Notice how closely related the two are. They’re even in the same sub-family, only splitting at the genus level. Theoretically, two organisms of the same genus but different species cannot mate and produce fertile offspring. In the case of the bison and cattle, we’re even going one level higher than that: same sub-family but different genera. If the guys who put this table together are correct, the two can’t interbreed. (Remember, though, that nature is a broad continuum. It is only humans who want to put things into artificial boxes. The boundaries between boxes are often blurry in real life.)

According to most theories of speciation, a cross between two genera (such as genus bison and genus bos) after a geographical separation of many thousands of years is unlikely.

Actually, time has nothing to do with it. If the animals have been correctly cataloged and truly are of different genera, they wouldn’t be able to interbreed and produce fertile offspring, even if they’re sharing the same pasture.

But tell that to a rancher in Western Canada or the United States where buffalo bison, raised on ranches, are interbred with cattle. (These animals have been known to interbreed since the 18th century.) The resulting offspring are called beefalo or cattalo.

As she points out, this is not news, so I’m still having trouble figuring out what this has to do with ID creationism or evolution or the Roswell crash (or whatever she’s trying to convince us of).

Both domestic cattle and American bison can interbreed with their cousin, the European bison (the wisent), as well as with yaks and other members of the bos genus. A cattle/wisent cross is called a zubron. A yak/cattle hybrid is known as a dzo.
…
Hybridization of European and American bison does not appear to cause fertility problems even in first generation males. Some taxonomists argue that the wisent and the American bison are not separate species at all.

Those taxonomists are probably correct. It looks like the charts need to be updated. This is science in action. When new data come in, you revise your hypothesis accordingly.

Ancestors of American bison and European bison are thought have descended from an ancient relative in Southern Asia over 400,000 years ago in the Pliocene epoch.
…
But, after millennia of separation, European and North American bison are still recognizable as bison.

BFD. Crocodiles are still recognizable as crocodiles after millions of years. All that means is that their environment has been relatively stable and hasn’t produced much evolutionary pressure.

Darwin’s theory of speciation through natural selection would predict that the hybridization of cows and yaks with bison is quite unlikely.

What? Who says? Show me where in evolutionary biology it says that populations separated geographically for thousands of years are required to be separate species. If the environments are similar and there are no other evolutionary pressures, you would expect them to remain the same species! (Genetic drift is one factor that could cause speciation, but that’s random and could just as easily not happen.)

She then points out (as I did in the table above) that bison and cattle are in two different genera.

The existence of the beefalo 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.

Yes, Jane. So what’s your point?

And, in the case of European bison and American bison, there is debate as to whether speciation has fully occurred.

Yes, Jane. So what’s your point?

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

What?! That’s your whole thesis? I read this whole article just to find out you’re retarded?! Just to find out that you have no concept of how evolution works?

I’ll repeat my question from above: Where in “Darwinian” theory, or anywhere else in biology for that matter, does it say that speciation has to occur? And since you brought it up, where in this narrative is the natural selection? There’s no selection pressure! Without selection, speciation by natural selection can’t happen!

“[S]peciation by natural selection is not the whole story”, because it’s not any part of this story, you freaking moron!

And even if this were somehow a flaw in evolutionary theory (it’s not), how does that prove Intelligent Design creationism? It doesn’t! Once again, the ID-iot creatards think that proving the moon isn’t green somehow proves that it’s purple!

Once — just once — I’d like to read an article by these people that showed an understanding of any of the following:

• Evolution
• Science
• Logic
• Reality

Take your pick, Jane. Just one is all I ask.

I’ll be posting an article later tonight about something an ID advocate has written. I’m still trying to figure out how the article proves ID creationism. Maybe I’ll have it figured out by tonight. In the meantime, enjoy these two videos by one of my favorite YouTube users, CDK007.

The first one shows that Intelligent Design IS creationism:

(YouTube page is here.)

You’ve probably heard creationists claim that “randomness cannot create information”, implying that evolution (which creationists claim is random) cannot add information to the genome. This video shows how the random events of DNA replication, mating, and accidents, coupled with the non-random pressure of predation, drive evolution.

(YouTube page is here.)

Update: I’ve been Bad Astronomered! Welcome to everyone coming here from Phil Plait’s site.

You’re probably aware that fundie clowndick Ben Stein has a forthcoming movie about the alleged “Darwinist” conspiracy to suppress science. I’m expecting the film to be something on the order of the infamous Fox TV Moon Hoax “documentary”, which was full of outright lies and deceptive editing. When it comes out, maybe we can compare the two and see which is worse.

Fundiecast Cybercast News Service has published an interview with Ben Stein. Let’s take a look.

Intelligent design theory…

Wow! They don’t waste any time. The very first phrase is a lie! Intelligent design creationism is not a theory. The American Heritage Dictionary has a good definition of “theory”.

A set of statements or principles devised to explain a group of facts or phenomena, especially one that has been repeatedly tested or is widely accepted and can be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

As you can see, ID creationism fails on three counts:
1. It has not been repeatedly tested.
2. It is not widely accepted.
3. It can not be used to make predictions about natural phenomena.

Let’s get back to the Cybercast article:

[A] new movie, “Expelled” starring Ben Stein explores how an “elitist scientific establishment” is apparently muzzling and smearing scientists who publicly discuss ID.

There’s no question that anybody claiming that ID creationism is science is being laughed at — not only by scientists but just about anybody with even a remote understanding of science — but there is no vast conspiracy to muzzle anybody.

The First Amendment is under brutal attack in the scientific community, Ben Stein, a former presidential speechwriter-turned-actor and commentator, says in the film, which opens in theaters on Feb. 12.

Really? Now the First Amendment is “under brutal attack”. Actually, that part is true. The attack isn’t coming from scientists, though. It’s coming from crackpot organizations like the Discovery Institute and Access Research Network that are trying to get their religious dogma (ID creationism) taught in the schools.

In an exclusive interview with Cybercast News Service - with audio clips below - Stein contends that rigid Darwinists are silencing their critics in academia, which the film explores, and discusses how ID ideas are helping in cancer research and similar work.

Really? ID creationism cures cancer! Please, Ben Stein, tell us how!

Hello?

Bueller?

Bueller?

Apparently no one’s home. As is typical of creationist asshats, he makes wild claims and then never bothers to back them up.

Yet the ID research that could potentially produce medical breakthroughs, says Stein, is also being undermined by Darwinian scientists who don’t want ID research viewed as legitimate.

According to Ben Stein, there is cancer research being stifled by Darwinists because of some sort of philosophical agenda. I agree that would be bad. But apparently it’s OK to stifle stem cell research because fundies don’t like it. Yeah, Ben. Real consistent.

Now we get into the actual interview between Cybercast News Service (CNS) and Stein. In the interests of brevity, I will only excerpt parts of the longer answers. (You can go to the article to see that I’m not quote mining):

Stein: Science should always be in the business of attempting to disprove itself. Neo-Darwinian science is exactly in the opposite business of endlessly trying to rationalize itself - and reprove itself, you might say - reprove that it’s right without any kind of test.

Science is in the business of attempting to disprove itself. He is mischaracterizing modern biology, and not providing any support for his allegations. He also suffers from Kevin Wirth syndrome. He’s so fixated on Darwin that he has blinded himself to the advances in evolutionary theory that have happened since. No wonder he thinks evolution is outdated. He’s using a 150-year-old definition.

CNS: What sort of separation do you see or perhaps don’t see between creationism, on the one hand, and intelligent design?

Stein: I believe in God and God created the heavens and the earth and all the life on the earth. But what other people, who are intelligent design people, think, I could not characterize.

At least he’s honest about his own motivations. Apparently old Ben isn’t above mischaracterizing others on his own side, though. Intelligent design is creationism, just a different flavor.

CNS: …[N]eurosurgeon, Michael Egnor, and another scientist, Jon Wells, who indicate that given how the cells are put together, with eye toward intelligent design, and with the idea that animal cells have tiny turbines - or if viewed as tiny turbines - he was able to formulate a theory that said in the event these things malfunction and don’t properly shut down and could break apart, this is the first step on the way to cancer.…

First of all, that isn’t a theory. It’s a hypothesis. Second, intelligent design creationism is irrelevant here. Viewing the organelles inside the cell as turbines may be useful, but ID creationism is not needed. If proponents are lumping this into their pile of breakthroughs resulting from ID creationism, they’re just plain cheating.

CNS: …He doesn’t explicitly say ‘a cure for cancer,’…

Wait. Is this the great big scientific breakthrough in cancer research that these retards alluded to earlier? It’s not even connected to their “theory”!

Stein: [T]here is this big issue about RNA and DNA, and whether RNA and DNA can respond to changes in the world around them. I think we say it can respond to changes in the world around them and that neo-Darwinians say it can only do that by random chance…

Again, Stein shows his colossal non-grasp of science. Evolution isn’t random. The mutations are random, but they are acted upon by the environment.

Stein: …We say the cell may have the possibility of doing itself in an intelligent way that there may be some intelligence in the cell itself…. We believe there’s some possibility the cell could have an intelligence of its own.

Ben Stein thinks that the cells can intelligently respond to the environment and reprogram their DNA accordingly. That’s pretty far-fetched, but we should never rule anything out. If it’s true, and they’ve yet to provide any data that it is, the mechanism would be naturalistic. If it’s naturalistic, then it isn’t intelligent design!

Stein: I was just overwhelmed by the fact, at least as I am told, that Darwinists have never observed natural species being originated…

Lie.

Stein: There’s not even a clear definition of what a species is…

Another lie, although nature doesn’t fit into clean boxes. There are always things at the edges that don’t quite fit our definitions.

Stein: …and the Darwinists have no theory whatsoever about the origin of life, none whatsoever, except the most hazy, the kind of preposterous, New Age hypothesis.…

A completely irrelevant separate issue.

Stein: …And I think our theory that there is a creator strikes even some people, even Dawkins very possibly, as more likely than it all happened by total chance.

Now Stein even knows what Richard Dawkins thinks!

Stein: [Richard Dawkins’] idea that there is a complete rock solid consensus [in favor of evolution] is completely wrong.

And Ben Stein is clearly more qualified to make that assessment than Richard Dawkins.

CNS: Why do you think the very idea or suggestion of intelligent design is so antagonistic to scientists who claim they have evidence?

Stein: That’s a deep question.… One, if they are Darwinists and they owe their jobs to being Darwinists, they are not going to challenge the orthodoxy because that would challenge the whole basis of their jobs and their lives. So they are not going to challenge the ideology that has given them lush positions in real life.

Hey, Ben! Where are all of these Darwinists you’re always talking about? I’ve never met any.

Secondly, the whole point of science is to challenge itself. You made this unfounded claim before that there is some sort of conspiracy to retain a set of beliefs against all outside attacks. The only place I’ve seen that behavior is at the Discovery Institute.

Stein: Second thing, once people are locked into a way of thinking, they are unlikely to change.

OK. There is truth to that statement, but that refers to individuals. There are so many scientists out there looking at new things that there is no stagnation in science.

Stein: Third is, if they acknowledge the possibility of intelligent design and that intelligent design is God, then they may think God has moral expectations of them and they may be falling short of those moral expectations, and they may be worried about some sort of judgment upon them.

Holy crap! What a pile of holy crap! So Ben Stein knows that scientists cling to evolution, because they’re afraid of God’s judgment!

Stein: There is a very powerful Marxist establishment within the intelligentsia that does not allow questioning of its premises.

I give up. That’s so batshit crazy I can’t even respond to it.

Stein: [T]his to us - at least to me…- is a bit like the Civil Rights movement. You want to have freedom, where our goal is freedom. We want freedom. We want all our rights, not some of them, all our rights to free speech. We want them here in America, and we want them now.

Martin Luther King!!

Thurgood Marshall!!

Ben Stein??

We’ve had a few of these leave comments around here in the last few weeks.

I was researching creationism on the web and came across an article titled “Intelligent Design is Dead!” in the Vassar Alumnae Quarterly. It’s written by Vassar Professor of Biology Mark Schlessman. Here’s an extremely abbreviated version of the article:

[Y]ou don’t need extensive background to understand why, scientifically, intelligent design is dead. Significant and lasting scientific theories have two major parts. Biologist and college textbook author Scott Freeman calls them the pattern and process components. Pattern components summarize broad sets of observations about nature, and process components describe natural mechanisms that can account for the observations.
…
Evolution, the pattern component of Darwin’s theory, is a solid scientific fact. Natural selection is Darwin’s original process component.
…
Scientific theories also allow us to make testable predictions. Indeed, as new observations and experimental results that are consistent with their predictions accumulate, scientific ideas that start as hypotheses mature into theories.
…
Lastly, a scientific theory, no matter how well established, is subject to falsification. Good scientists should be able to imagine the kinds of evidence that would falsify a theory, or at the very least force a re-evaluation of its explanatory power.

In fact, that last paragraph is very important. We’ll come back to it in just a moment.

The creationists’ ultimate goal is to convert people to Christianity and to restructure society’s laws to parallel Biblical law. To accomplish this, they have a two-pronged approach. The first prong is to disprove evolution. The second prong is to convince people that ID creationism is a viable alternative of strong scientific validity.

In fact, they would be happy to just disprove evolution. If they can accomplish that, they don’t care much whether anybody believes in ID creationism. All that really matters is the end goal of more converts and a restructured society.

As long as real science has a theory that does not require God’s intervention, then they have a major barrier to accomplishing their ultimate goal. They must remove that barrier.

One of the many claims creationists make against the theory of evolution is that it can’t be falsified. That’s a ludicrous charge. Evolution is the core principle of biology. Everything else flows from it. Therefore, evolution is part of every testable claim in the life sciences. For example, long before the tools of modern genetics were developed, taxonomists had determined which species were closely related to each other. Along comes genetics. Evolutionary theory predicted that closely related species would share a lot of genetic material, while more distantly related species would share less. Scientists ran the tests, and the predictions were validated. That’s just one case where evolution could have been falsified. This is repeated constantly throughout the sciences. The results sometimes cause a fine tuning of existing theory, but nowhere have they invalidated major components of the theory. Evolution is being subjected to falsification tests every single day.

Now let’s return to the article and see why Schlessman says that Intelligent Design creationism is dead:

If intelligent design is truly a scientific theory, we should be able to identify its pattern and process components, use it to make testable predictions, and describe observations that would falsify it.

He then cites a couple of examples of Michael Behe’s so-called “irreducible complexity” and discredits them. He finishes this point with:

Suffice it to say that the broad set of observations that would constitute the pattern component of ID is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to find.

He then looks at process:

What about the process component of ID? There isn’t one. I have yet to read a description of the process through which the designing intelligence works. Testable predictions? Again, nothing. How can one make predictions without a process or mechanism to base the predictions on? Is ID falsifiable? To my mind the answer is no. That may seem a little strange, since I obviously don’t think that ID is a scientific theory. But that’s precisely my point. Scientifically, ID is dead.

He also mentions that it’s dead legally, thanks to Kitzmiller v. Dover.

Finally, Schlessman comes to the point depicted in the illustration above:

This brings me to the aspect of the intelligent design story that concerns me the most. The people behind ID believe that if you acknowledge the fact of evolution, your moral compass and your religious faith will be destroyed. That simply isn’t true. Yes, I have some scientist friends who are atheists, but I also know scientists who contribute to our understanding of evolution every working day and also seek out churches to attend wherever their scientific work takes them.

This is important on two counts. First, it shows that science and religion don’t have to be in conflict. It is only the Biblical literalists—mental throwbacks to the Dark Ages—who have a problem.

And that brings us to the second point. If we allow Intelligent Design creationism into the schools, besides weakening science education, we are violating the separation of church and state. We are making one specific flavor of Biblical literalism the official state church of the United States. That doesn’t just violate the rights of a minority, such as atheists or Hindus who don’t follow that religion. It violates the rights of the majority of Christians, who also don’t believe that particular flavor of Christianity.

That’s what the separation of church and state is all about. It not only protects the rights of a minority, it protects the rights of the majority.

I received an email from BoF reader Terri. I tried to respond, but my email bounced. I’ve been having internet connection problems for the last day and a half, but I don’t know if that’s the cause.

Terri wrote:

Today, my local newspaper published a long article about Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law. I’m not enough of a scientist to judge, but the way the article was written seems to be subtly supporting intelligent design. I would appreciate your opinion, or a reference to another blog or person that could help me; if I am correct, I intend to write the paper about misleading readers.

The article does seem to suggest intelligent design creationism, but that may not be the actual intent. Here’s what I wrote to Terri in my email that bounced:

I read the article. Physical sciences aren’t my expertise, but I don’t think the guy is implying intelligent design. Things are designed by their environment. Look at a fish. They all have similar shapes, because that shape is the most efficient way to travel through water. Through mutation, some fish will have a more efficient design, and some will have less. The more efficient design is selected for. You end up with a design without a designer.

Does anybody out there know more about this Constructal Law and if the guy behind it is promoting ID creationism?