Mr. Chapman and "40 Days and 40 Nights"

A new book out on the Dover "Pandas" trial is "40 Days and 40 Nights" by Matthew Chapman. In addition to many other attributes, Mr. Chapman is also a great-great- grandson of Charles Darwin. Chapman insisted that this was not all that relevant to his life, and I would be willing to believe him if he hadn't made such a fuss.

I did enjoy reading Chapman's book. It brought a number of chuckles and a few out-right laughs. The strongest feature of the book was his apparent concern and even fondness for nearly all involved. His quick character sketches humanized the participants in ways that I had not perceived from reading, and even meeting some of the principals.

That said, there were some features that I found odd. My biggest surprise was that Chapman made no mention at all of the famous "Of Pandas and People" "cdesign_proponentsists" gaff exposed in Barbara Forrest's testimony. I had been anticipating that his reaction to such a blatant con-job would be particularly amusing. But there was no mention- none. I reread the chapter to see if I had missed it, and then I even checked the page numbers to be sure nothing mechanical had failed. But there was no "cdesign proponentsists" to be found.

Michael Behe's cross examination by Eric Rothschild had similar omissions where I wished Chapman's talent for observation had been given play. For example, Chapman spends some time on Rothschild and Behe going back and forth over the question of the evolution of the adaptive immune system (190-193). A portion of this was a bit of "theater" where Rothschild stacks piles and piles of published research on the evolution of the immune system in front of Behe, who has claimed in testimony that no such research exists. Chapman seemed to have missed that while doing so Rothschild handed Behe several massive textbooks relevant to just this question, and after a time, Behe asked, "Mr. Rothschild, would you like your books back? They're heavy."

Chapman incorrectly called the immune system exchange "Rothschild's last attack on Behe" (190). This lead to the glaring omission of Rothschild's cross examination of the analogy of "intelligent design detection al la the ID creationists, and the real science of archaeology. This followed the lunch break on Day 12 of the trial, and perhaps Chapman never made it back into the courtroom that afternoon. Few would blame him, and fewer notice but me! This is because his omission also stepped all over my 2.5 seconds of Dover fame. Rothschild used as a portion of his challenge my chapter on archaeology and forensics from "Why Intelligent Design Fails" (Young and Edis 2004). The end of Behe's cross examination was Rothschild's observation that, "Science fiction movies are not science, are they, Professor Behe?" Behe's answer was irrelevant and this exchange found its way into the Judge's decision.

The real quality of Chapman's writing, observation, and humanity is in a last scene set at the end of the trial (250-251). On one side of the street the plaintiffs, their lawyers, their families, the support crew (including Nick Matzke), and others meet in celebration and good cheer. On the other side of the street, the defence attorneys sat alone.

I could almost feel sorry for the bastards.

PS:
OPPS, I was corrected this afternoon re: “cdesign proponentists.” For those not close followers of the creationists and their program, the book "Of Pandas and People" was the original "intelligent design" textbook. It was targeted on highschools in the USA. The work on the book began in the early 1980s and it was solidly a "special creationism" text. Following the US Supreme Court decision in Edwards v Aguillard (1987) outlawing "special creationism" or "creation science," the book's authors simply used a word processor to delete "creationists" and replace with "design proponents." In one preserved draft copy, there was the telltale error where an incomplete deletion resulted in “cdesign proponentists.”

This was not actually used in the Dover trial by Barbara Forrest as I had incorrectly recalled because, as explained to me today by expert Nick Matzke, “It was like pouring salt in the wound, when the wound was decapitation.”

Since this was posted at Panda's Thumb, and as a review at Amazon.com, I have left the original of my comments and added the corection.

My appologies to Mr. Chapman.

Creationst Say the Darndest Things about Dinosaurs

Here are just a few of the most obvious errors in the creationist tract "Radiocarbon dating dinosaurs."

The opening paragraph claims to present some published C14 data from 1970 and inferred that these were current problems for radiocarbon dating. So the first falsehood is that a paper in 1970 on the issues regarding calibration and sample preparation has current relevance. Data from 40 years ago pretty much is useless. But let's look at them.

The creationists claim that a date of 28,000 years (28 Ka) was reported for "Sabre-toothed tiger: 28,000 years (evolution: a few million)." First, all radiocarbon dates must be reported as "radiocarbon years before present (RCYBP)" or "calibrated YBP" with reference to the calibration standard. Secondly, the age range for sabertooth "tigers," (Smilodon) extends to the early Holocene, or about 10,000 years ago. So a date of 28 Ka is entirely possible. I strongly doubt that these 40 year old data are valid, but the errors these creationists made in just one line are impressive; 1) the data are incorrectly presented, 2) the age range for Smilodon given by the creationists, "a few million," was incorrect, 3) the reported age of 28 Ka is well within the known dates for Smilodon.

The biggest con job of the opening paragraph is the implication that the improperly cited paper in Radiocarbon even presented these data as valid.

The reported "data" on unspecified "dinosaur bone" are useless as presented. What are we told about them? We are first told of bone fragments from a " Acrocanthosaurus dinosaur." There is no usable information about where or how these materials were collected, or treated nor is there any referenced accession numbers or publications that could lead to such information. Without this information the data are meaningless. We are next told about four more samples, three supposedly from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh PA. The remaining bone is a total mystery. Even though there is a noted vertebrate paleontology museum in Pittsburgh, without giving the deaccession numbers from the museum it is impossible to know what these bones really were. There was no table giving a data summary as promised, "The table below lists these dates and those of four other samples ..." There is no table, there are no data, there is no point to this creationist gem.

Two AMS analyses were supposedly run, one at U of Arizona and one at a mystery "overseas AMS lab." One other beta decay laboratory is left a total mystery and no laboratory accession numbers of any kind are given. The beta decay samples were apparently augmented with a "coprolite" sample. All the errors and omissions related to the bones are repeated for the coprolite.

The authors of this article expose ignorance in every paragraph. One of my favorite is their incorrect use of the word "appetite."

Quote:
The dating procedure used on the bones was a bio-apatite method, which was our only option at the time because of the lack of large amounts of bone protein or more reliable material. Bones were washed with dilute acetic acid, and crushed to less than 1 mm in size. The bone powder is then digested in cold dilute acetic acid with constant agitation for 24 hours to remove normal carbonates. The sample is then hydrolyzed under vacuum with HCL to dissolve bone appetite and evolve its carbon dioxide for analysis.

The word they were groping for was "apatite" which is a common bone mineral, chemicaly it is calcium phosphate. Even though they have copied some of a laboratory proceedure which used the correct term, they obviously failed to understand what it refered to or what it was.

As there are no meaningful data given, there is no point to this tract.

Hinckley again

Once again Mr. Hickley opines

My response

Re: The age of reason

Mr. Jim Hinckley has written that his goals are to merely provide "material for water cooler conversation, to spark discussion on controversial topics and, perhaps, encourage people to question, to think." I guess that means he need not attend to facts or even truth with a small "t." Hinckley has had about a month that he might have used to learn about evolution, or about what is a theory- any scientific theory. Instead he still incorrectly refers to evolution as a "concept" that is "stuck in the realm of theory."


Hinckley asks, what happens to lay persons who question science? The obvious thing is they are published in newspapers without malicious editing. We have a long history telling us what happened to "heretics" and religious minorities, as well as scientists when religion gains political power; they get killed.


Hinkley includes the Nazi Holocaust as light "water cooler" fare and falsely claimed it was inspired by Darwin. This has become a popular creationist lie. And it is a more dangerous lie than anyother because as it is said, "He who is ignorant of history is doomed to repeat it."

Racism and bigotry are far older than Darwin, and older than the sciences. They have been justified by every religious and nationalistic sort of argument. The man most responsible for Germany's "racial hygiene" or "Rassenhygiene," prgrams and author of its founding articles and books was Alfred Ploetz. His 1895 work particularly argued aginst medical care for the "weak" as this would alow them to reproduce more than the "fit."

He and many of his American followers opposed welfare and medical care for the poor as "unfair advantages" for the unfit that harmed the chances of hard working, moral sorts of people. His ideal of "fitness" was of course the wealthy. Ploetz established the Society for Racial Hygiene, {Gesellshaft für Rassenhygiene}, in 1905 which grew to 1,300 members by 1930. Curiously, the Racial Hygiene movement opposed birthcontrol, and in the words of Max von Gruber (1914) "the so-called women's liberation movement."


This latter point was echoed by American eugenicists who objected to birthcontrol as part of an "antibaby strike" by "liberated women." Today's US religious right-wing as represented by Hinckley fits hand and glove with the anti-minority, anti-feminist, and anti-poor philosophy that was the true wellspring of Nazism.


The targeting of Jews by the Nazis is directly exposed in the 1938 Nazi "Office of Racial Policy" publication {Inromationsdienst} where Martin Luther’s advice on the “proper” treatment of Jews was given prominent display:


" ... to put their synagogues and schools to fire, and what will not burn, to cover with earth and rubble so that no-one will ever again see anything there but cinders ... Second, one should tear down and destroy their houses, for they do also in there what they do in their schools and synagogues ... And third, one should confiscate their prayer books and Talmud, in which idolatry and lies, slander and blasphemy is taught” From Proctor 1988:88.

The founder of Protestant Christianity was a far greater inspiration to the Nazis than any scientist.

But Hinckley wants, no he demands, "absolute truth." Without this truth with a capital "T" he sees only destruction. Absolute truth is one that clearly must be uniformly imposed on all people, otherwise how is it absolute? What did one of our nation's founders see coming from absolutism? Thomas Jefferson wrote, "Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women and children since the introduction of Christianity have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned, yet we have not advanced one inch toward uniformity." — : Notes on Virginia, 1782. Absolute rulers demand that we acknolwedge their absolute truth. In September 1821, Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams, "And even should the cloud of barbarism and despotism again obscure the science and libraries of Europe, this country remains to preserve and restore light and liberty to them."

Note well that Jefferson linked science and libraries with "light and liberty." He was not worried that they might lose their churches and cathedrals. I am with the author of the Declaration of Independence. Is two hundred years too long to remember why America exists?


Hinckley ends his latest screed hoping that infliction of his "absolute truth" will introduce "a new age of reason."

Some good advice Mr. Hinckley is that when you fall in a hole- stop digging.

Gary Hurd, Ph. D.
Dana Point, California

(Thanks to John "Catshark" at Thoughts in a Haystack Tap Dancing in California for the "heads up")

Some Creationists Can't Evolve

I have been drawn into an exchange on the "Kingman Daily Miner" which prides itself as "Kingmans only Daily Newpaper."

*Edited to add Mar, 18: It has been 4 days since I submitted a partial response to the bullshit by Silas Stillwater, and there is no post on the paper's website. I doubt that there will be. My initial response was weirdly edited by the newpaper removing all of my original paragraphing. I suspect that the editorial policy at the paper is creationist through and through.

Following my response to Jim Hickley's creationist screed, someone using the name of Silas Stillwater posted a response.

My response follows

A common short definition of evolution is "change over time." The recent, rather long comment by someone perhaps named Silas Stillwater showed a remarkable lack of evolution. I'll try to be more brief. The objections to science he makes are all what we call PRATTs, or Points Refuted Thousands of Times. Most have webpages and even books refuting them, for example the "Index to Creationist Claims" ( http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/index.html ). But the dedicated creationist is oblivious. Stillwater shows that he is disingenuous at best when he excused Hinkley's falshoods because Hinckley "... writes for the casual reader." Who else should we try our best to be honest and clearly spoken with, Mr. Stillwater? Why do you feel it is acceptable to lie to general readers? Is it merely because it is easier than with a scientific audience?

Stillwater followed with an equally false note that he was not an advocate of a particular position even after his years of "research" and even publishing on the topic. Why then are all of his objections directed at science and his "get out of jail" cards wasted on Hinckley's creationism? On a personal basis, I earned a doctorate in anthropology over 30 years ago, and count in my professional experience being a statistical data analyst/computer programer, an analytical chemist, a professor of medicine, and a forensic scientist. But it was nearly 17 years ago when I was Curator and then Director of Education at a natural history museum that I was reluctantly drawn into the creationist attack on science and reason. Since that time I have contributed to several publications, print and electronic, on this topic.

Among the electronic media, I have been published by the TalkOrigins.org which Stillwater despises as an "evolutionist haven." More of that dubious neutrality by Stillwather. I co-founded the Panda's Thumb website in 2004 which currently has recorded over 4.5 million visits, 18 times Stillwater's 0.25 million. Even accepting Stillwater's unsupported claims regarding his website (What was it called?), he is no comparison with Panda's Thumb, or TalkOrigins. T.O. publishes dozens of scientific experts, including leaders in their fields, on how their research and studies directly refute the sorts of creationist falsehoods presented in Hinckley and Stillwater's recent comments. Further, T.O. receives thousands of hits daily; even single articles out of hundreds published have far over twice the hit count claimed by Stillwater as evidence of his experience.

But, Stillwater draws on this minor experience to observe that mathematicians, or "mathy" types genearlly, are dismissive of evolutionary biology compared with actual biologists. Weirdly, Stillwater ignored the obvious conclusion that people who actually know about biology understand evolution, while those who lack the
needful training do not. Instead, he imagines some sort of "probability theory" problem for evolution. I have doubt if Stillwater, or Hinckley for that matter, has any idea what probability theory is, or how it is applied in population genetics, or evolution. Since nothing that Stillwater claims on this is supported by any document or evidence beyond his bald assertions, we can only guess at what this might mean regarding the popular understanding of evolution. One obvious conclusion is that people who know some math, but are ignorant about biology are just as biologically uniformed as people who don't know either math or biology. What we can be certain of is that this is not relevant to the either the significance or validity of evolution. It is pure smoke screen, like Hinckley's meaningless "probabilities" of amino acids randomly aligning into proteins which if Stillwater had even a modicum of the expertise he claims would have known.

For those following along point by point, I want to move to why Stillwater excused Hinckley's gross errors regarding Darwin and biology professor Kenyon. Stillwater wants you to skip these because they are gross errors! Stillwater is not unbiased, he wants us all to forget that Hinckley is incompetently repeating creationist frauds while pretending to be independent, informed and honest.

Stillwater made an accusation out of my pointing out that Hinckley followed in a long Creationist tradition of making false quotations. In fact, there are published volumes of these used by creationists. One example, that just happened to contain the Patterson "quote" Hickley and Stillwater so revere was published in the "Revised Quote Book," published by the Creation Science Foundation in 1990. The first "Quote Book" had to become "Revised" because the first publication was so filled with out-right fabrications and lies that even the creationists had to reissue it. I personally find it strange that the bulk of Stillwater's comment is related to this blatent misrepresentation of Professor Patterson. Since we are happily at the start of spring training, let me say that when a batter is leaning out over the plate, a high inside pitch is not totally out of the question. But, the creationist lies regarding Patterson's remarks and intended meaning are intentionally throwing at the batter! It is not about "footnotes" it is about lying.

The context that neither Hinckley nor Stillwater seem aware of was the heated debate within the sciences some 20 to 30 years ago regarding the place of fossils and molecular genetics in evolutionary theory, and how fossils could be orgainized into nested groups related to living species. Even more exactly, Collin Patterson was one of the leaders in a effort to replace the old classifications with more modern, more mathematical classification. He shared this position with Niels Ethridge, and Steven Jay Gould, all of whom provided much creationist fodder in their polemics against 19th century gradualism. Hinckley and Stillwater, by repeating the lies of creationist "quote mines" are apparently ignorant of this argument, since they have promoted the secondary falsehood that evolution is a monolithic dogma. Since Stillwather claimed to be a highly proficient expert, we must reject either his honesty or is claim to be an expert. Oh. That also means he is not honest.

Here is what Patterson had to say about the misrepresented fragment of his long ago talk, "That brush with Sunderland (I had never heard of him before) was my first experience of creationists. The famous "keynote address" at the American Museum of Natural History in 1981 was nothing of the sort. It was a talk to the "Systematics Discussion Group" in the Museum, an (extremely) informal group. I had been asked to talk to them on "Evolutionism and creationism"; fired up by a paper by Ernst Mayr published in Science just the week before. I gave a fairly rumbustious talk, arguing that the theory of evolution had done more harm than good to biological systematics (classification).

Unknown to me, there was a creationist in the audience with a hidden tape recorder. So much the worse for me. But my talk was addressed to professional systematists, and
concerned systematics, nothing else," Colin Patterson to Lionel Theunissen (1993).

Stillwater concluded that "Patterson had a problem with the theory of evolution."
Stillwater would be so totally wrong as to be reduced to a joke in the sciences, we have little patience for those who fail as badly as he at simple concepts. For readers interested in a full discussion of Patterson and creationists, I recommend the following
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/patterson.html (or go to TalkOrigins and search for "Patterson").

Stillwater acknowledges there are "problems" with Hinckley in spite of making every effort to deny or excuse them. He committed a major hypocrisy arguing that I should be careful with the po' lil' general public, when not minutes before his forgives Hinckley's frauds because they are written for the same po' general public. I am called to the Bible verse, 1 John 4: 1. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

The real difference is that I have not lied.

Gary Hurd, Ph.D.

A "hunger for truth?"

Evolution: Scientific fact or faithful religion? by Jim Hinckley was published by the Kingman (Arizona) Daily Miner.

I submitted the following response;

As a scientist with a fondness for irony, I found much to enjoy in Jim Hinckley's recent ediorial on creationism. For example, there is his implication that he has a "hunger for the discovery of truth." We shall see.

There are many serious errors made by Hinckley in his March 8 commentary. The first is his two fold error regarding the sources of evolutionary biology. The minor part is that Anaximander of Miletus offered a Darwinian theory of evolution- this is not the case. Nor did Empedocles, who thought that isolated organs; hearts, spleens etc. had formed spontaniously and then "found" each other to assemble into whole organisms. But these are simple errors of fact. The deeper error was that it is a criticism of evolutionary biology that Charles Darwin was not the exclusive originator of evolutionary theory. He was not. The fact is that modern evolutionary theory is much stronger because it is the product of thousands of scientists working for well over a century.

Hinckley next confused the idea of "experimentation" with "observation." To study astronomy we don't need to create suns or galaxies, nor do we need to create life to study biology. An example from geology is that if we go and make observations about where oil has been found, we can go to where similar rock formations exist and find more oil. Geology, astronomy and evolutionary biology are histroical sciences which use a mix of direct observations from nature for the "big" theory, and much more limited experimental results for "fine tuning." Since we can now closely control gene sequences, evolutionary science has rapidly left field observations and moved to direct laboratory study. Hinckley seems to be ignorant of the last 15 years of biological science.

Hinckley is either grossly mistaken conserning Dean Kenyon, or he is a flagrant liar. Kenyon was neither fired, nor demoted, nor forbidden from presenting his research. Kenyon was told to teach a biology course for non-science majors from the textbook. He refused and was no longer assigned that class. The rest of Hinckley's screed consists mostly of what is called "quote mining," or the misrepresentation of an author's meaning by selective out of context quotation. All of the quote mined material used by Hinckley are found in lists of quotations compiled by creationist organizations who shamelessly wait for a scientist to die before manipulating their work. All of Hinckley's quotes are found and refuted in "The Quote Mine Project" online at www.talkorigins.com.

We have in Hinckley's essay is a perfect example of the creationist at work; attacking America's Constitutional protection of religious freedom, and undermining our fragile scientific and technological dominance in the world economy. His tools are half truths and out and out fabrications.

Gary Hurd, Ph.D.

It has been a long time

I had great plans to maintain some reasonable posting rate, but I am embarassed to see that I have barely posted at all.

I wrote some posts that I deleted when I stopped being angry, and one I deleted after I sobered up.

But compared to geological time scales, I am doing fine.




Here is an article, Ancient Molecules and Modern Myths I wrote some time ago. I was particularly wroth at the lies and distortions of John R. Baumgardner about the age of the Earth and the persistance of ancient biological molecules.

It begins, "A common YEC misinterpretation of surviving organic material in dinosaur bone is that this "proves" that the Earth is young and that radiometric dating methods should be rejected. Their argument reduces to nothing more than organic molecules can't last a long while."

Enjoy.

The first webpage article I wrote on the creationist attack on reason was a reaction to the absurd pseudo geology of Tas Walker who writes for the Australian creationist organization "Answers in Genesis Ministries." Titled "A Response to a Dubious Diluvium: A Tas Walker Creationist Fantasy." What was so maddening then and now is how readily creationists take absurd positions that fly in the face of reality. My article was hosted by the late John Stear on his Australian website, "No Answers in Genesis." Feel free to comment if you have an interest in discussing this article, or Walker's original writing.

Jo Que

I am nearly ready. I have been trying to learn how to best use this software package, and to wrap up some other writing. This tiny corner of cyberspace will be entirely focused on the on-going creationist attack on reason. I say "reason" because I also want to expand my focus a bit from science to also consider some of the historical and theological failings of creationism.

I realize that I will probably retreat from the web-based bulletin boards that I have frequented for the last ~6 years. This will be something of a relief.

I have a significant backload of writing projects that are cash propositions, so I am going to launch "Stones n' Bones" with a reposting of my earlier website articles on evo/creato. If you never read them before, I hope you like them. If you have read them already, I hope that you will take the time to comment.