Carl Baugh's many frauds

There are many websites that have detailed the many frauds of Carl Baugh.

There are his fake "doctorates."

There are his many frauds housed in his "museum."

The most notorious are his fake human foot prints supposedly associated with dinosaurs.

The one "human footprint" fraud of Carl Baugh's I have detailed was the "Alvis Delk Cretaceous Footprint"

An extensive analysis of Baugh's other fake "evidences" is found at Glen J. Kuban's excellent website.

Pastor Jim Mumme is an idiot

In a guest editorial, Pastor Jim Mumme made some of the more gross misunderstandings of physical science I recall reading. What is sad is that I suspect Pastor Jim thinks he is advancing a reconciliation between science and religion.

"Pastor" Jim claims to love "science, and ... Christianity’s doctrine of creation." Yet he showed very little understanding of either. His scientific errors begin almost immediately when he wrote, "Energy is defined as the capacity to do work." That would be a crude definition of "entropy." He goes on to say, "Energy is actually invisible, and only its use or result can be seen." Just what does Pastor Jim think his eyes see with? The rest of us use photons which are a form of energy. In fact they are the "pure light" he confused with a weird unorthodox doctrine conflating light and the Divine. When Pastor Jim wrote, "Man can change matter to energy, and an example would be burning gasoline to run an automobile or coal to warm a building," his 'scientific' credibility left the room entirely. Burning gas, or coal does not convert mass into energy; burning releases chemical energy stored in the fuel.

Mr. Mumme weirdly links the notion that mankind cannot generate matter from light, that Genesis opens with a command "let there be light," and concluded that God "actually made the material world out of His personal energy."

We can create matter from energy. One way used massive particles and one could quibble that this was not "pure light" energy. But a new paper published just today (Pike, Mackenroth, Hill & Rose) shows how we can actualize the experimental results predicted in 1934 by Breit and Wheeler. This is the direct generation of electrons from photons; matter from pure light. This also reduces "Pastor" Jim's theology to rubble.

Breit, G. & Wheeler, J. A.
1934 "Collision of two light quanta" Phys. Rev. 46, 1087–1091

Pike O. J., Mackenroth F., Hill E. G., Rose S. J.,
2014 “A photon-photon collider in a vacuum hohlraum” Nature Photon
05/18/online

Carl Baugh Page Views

I must admit that I like to watch the stats change on Stones and Bones.

I always know when Carl Baugh had been on some preacher's TV show because the hits on Baugh's fake fossils spike. Over the years, they have generated about 10% of my total viewers.

We get mail

I have not been writing posts for Stones and Bones. I have been cruising newspaper discussion forums all this time, as well as getting in a lot of fishing.

I have also been receiving emails from creationists, and even a few fans who have read some of my comments to various public venues. I have thought that I might share a few of these in separate headings of "Fan Mail" and "Hate Mail." The first is the "Fan Mail" basket.

The most recent was last Friday, April 25, 2014, from Mark Sheffield, PhD.

I followed some parapsychology nut's website to an article on a "second DNA
code" hidden in codon bias... which I admit, piqued my interest... until I
saw what utter crap the reporting on it was.

The only bright spot in the 15 minutes I wasted reading the article was
reading your exchange with the creationist commenters. It took some effort
to track you down to email you, but I feel that patience and scientific
clarity like yours deserves to be recognized.

Bravo, sir.

The website I had commented on was the University of Washington's press release office, specifically about their crappy puffery about the discovery of "duons."

That particular discussion thread brought me another email from Joe Smith. Short, but nice;

"Gary,
Cheers good job standing up to the crowd of reflex thinking creationist online. I was looking up the Exonic Transcription... and saw your criticism. Not bad! Yeah the paper is a bit flawed.
~Joe"

Mrs. Jeannie Chatman is back in the saddle again!

She didn't die! And she has a big dinosaur load of of creatocrap.

Global Warming, Panda's Thumb, and My "Mann number" of ~2

I have said that I would try and avoid involvement in the "climate wars." It is not because I think that the issue is not significant- it is the greatest threat to civilization. I mean that unqualified. Nuclear war is grave, but is in fact more likely due to the impending climate crisis. It is just that I have a professional background related to evolution, and creationism that I lack in climate science.

None the less, last night I was reading Michael E. Mann's recent book, “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” (2013 Columbia University Press). And on page 142 (paperback ed.), he wrote about the inspiration for the climate change blog, RealClimate. It was The Panda's Thumb. PT is a science blog I helped start 10 years ago. The goal was to counter creationist fraud and lies.

It seems we helped with public education on global climate, if very indirectly.

Elsewhere, Mann joked about the "Mann number" similar to the Erdos, or "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon." The idea comes about from an attack on climate science via a personal attack on Michael Mann. "Smoking" Joe" Barton (R-Tx) as the Chair of the House Energy and Technology Committee ordered an investigation of Michael Mann conducted by Edward Wegman. As part of Wegman's report was a "social network analysis" of Michael Mann's publication record with the intent of smearing Mann as having too wide a "personal network" to insure adequate peer review. This was also of particular interest to me as I had contributed quite a lot to personal social network analysis in my early career.

So, I recon' that I can get an approximate "Mann Number" of 2.

Noah Berlatsky in the Atlantic, 8, Feb. 2014

I was able to ignore the continuing disaster of my last computer crash by reading this essay on the recent debate by Bill Nye and Ken Ham.

Charles Darwin and the “Atlantic” have a long association. In fact, Darwin helped prepare a pamphlet from three of Asa Gray’s articles in the July, August, and October issues of the 1860 Atlantic Monthly supporting Darwin’s theory. Gray collected them as well in his book “Drawiniana” under the heading, "Natural Selection not inconsistent with Natural Theology." What Asa Gray argued for was an early version of Theistic Evolution. But, this essay by Noah Berlatsky strikes me as oddly motivated. The debate between Bill Nye, and Ken Ham was not informed by the apologetics of William Paley. It was a really a debate between the views of Darwin, and Lyle versus those of Bishop James Ussher.

Darwin commented in his Autobiography of the influence of Paley in his youth. When Darwin went aboard the HMS Beagle, by his account he was “quite orthodox.” However, he gradually came “… to see that the Old Testament was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos (sic).” It was only after this realization, and the consequent rejection of Paley’s Natural Selection, that Darwin was able to formulate his theory of natural selection. Again Darwin has commented on this in his “Autobiographical Notes,” "Although I did not think much about the existence of a personal God until a considerably later period of my life, I will here give the vague conclusions to which I have been driven. The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.”

The subtitle of Paley’s book is revealing, 1802 Paley “Natural Theology: Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature.” Paley, as noted by Berlatsky, held a rather silly view of happy fish frolicking about were a real naturalist would see feeding behavior and the frantic effort to escape the jaws from below. We should also asked if the Intelligent Design creationists see themselves as in the same apologetic as Paley. ID creationist guru William Dembski was categorical in his dismissal of this idea in his essay, “Intelligent design is not a form of natural theology” (2001). Dembski’s principle claim is that the IDC movement explicitly denies that the “Designer” is the Christian God. He is of course lying. He has also stated with equal force (and sincerity) that "Indeed, intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John’s Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." (“Signs of Intelligence,” 1999, Touchstone magazine), and, "My thesis is that all disciplines find their completion in Christ and cannot be properly understood apart from Christ." ('Intelligent Design,' 1999, p 206).

The 2011 criticism of ID creationism by Ken Ham is typically derivative. His substantive argument was built on the unacknowledged essays in 1999, and 2006 by ur-Young Earther Henry Morris. He pointed out;

“Any discussion of a young earth, six-day creation, a worldwide flood and other Biblical records of early history will turn off scientists and other professionals, they say, so we should simply use the evidence of intelligent design as a "wedge" to pry them loose from their naturalistic premises. Then, later, we can follow up this opening by presenting the gospel, they hope.”
Henry Morris, (1999) Design Is Not Enough! Acts & Facts. 28 (7).

“Some of the leaders of the ID movement have been frankly calling it a "wedge" with which they hope to open up the atheistic science establishment, so that teachers can at least acknowledge intelligent creation of life as a possibility.”
Henry Morris, Ph.D. 2006. Intelligent Design and/or Scientific Creationism. Acts & Facts. 35 (4).

The theme that ID creationist writing was a transparent sham to insert creationism into US public schools has been acknowledged by none other than the Godfather of IDC, Phillip Johnson. He admitted, "Our strategy has been to change the subject a bit so that we can get the issue of intelligent design, which really means the reality of God, before the academic world and into the schools." American Family Radio (10 January 2003). This has been thoroughly documented, and debunked by Barbara Carroll Forrest, and Paul R. Gross (2004) "Creationism's Trojan Horse: The Wedge of Intelligent Design" Oxford University Press.
Noah Berlatsky exaggerates the scientific basis of Intelligent Design creationism. The false claim that their approach is “scientific” rather than theological opens the IDC movement to scientific review. It fails as argued in the references below.

Mark Perakh
2003 “Unintelligent Design” New York: Prometheus Press

Matt Young, Taner Edis (Editors),
2004 "Why Intelligent Design Fails: A Scientific Critique of the New Creationism" Rutgers University Press

Laurie R. Godfrey (Editor), Andrew J. Petto (Editor)
2008 “Scientists Confront Creationism: Intelligent Design and Beyond” W. W. Norton & Company

Mt. Saint Helens and Noah

A "Little Grand Canyon?"

For years, creationists have promoted the lie that erosion features following the Mt. Saint Helens volcanic eruption both "proved" that the Grand Canyon was deposited and carved out in the year of Noah's flood, and of course that Noah's Flood even occurred.

Chief in their "proof" is this photo attributed to Steven Austin of the Institute for Creation Research. For 27 years it has been copied to dozens of creationist websites, blogs, and on-line discussions:



I added the red lines demarking three major deposition features. Austin described it this way, "The little "Grand Canyon of the Toutle River" is a one-fortieth scale model of the real Grand Canyon."(Austin, S. A. 1986. Mt. St. Helens and Catastrophism. Acts & Facts. 15 (7)). The original caption reads,

Figure 4. Twenty-five foot thickness of stratified
pyroclastic flow deposit which accumulated in less than
one day on June 12, 1980. The stratified flow deposit
forms the floor of the pit in Figure 1 which was later
eroded by mudflows to make the cliff exposure here.

("Mount St. Helens and Catastrophism" Steven A. Austin, Presented at the First International Conference on Creationism, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, August 4–9, 1986. Published in: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Creationism, R. S. Crowell, editor), pp. 3–9, 1986).

The errors are many, and vary between just plain not true, and subtly not true.

A sequence of events

The first gross error of the "just pain" variety is that this geology is analogous or related to the Grand Canyon. There are actually three reasons it is not, first is that the there is no competent geologist that would think the pictured Mt. Saint Helens deposit was formed by long process. Second, the evolution of this deposit is still very active and the pictured features are merely temporary. Third, to call this a 1/40th scale model of the Grand Canyon is just stupid.

We see in the photo below that the initial (bottom) component in the creationist's photo was produced by landslides. This will produce a well mixed combination of older volcanic deposits, and a smaller amount of fresh material introduced by the eruption. What this deposit will not be is well sorted by size, nor will the larger fraction be at all rounded.

The landslides removed millions of pounds of rock which had held back the eruption. Once that was gone, the next massive event was the explosive eruption of mostly new material that had been under tremendous heat and pressure. The next photo shows us the volume and energy of that eruptive material.

The material we have seen so far is what formed the lower "strata" that creationists claim models the Grand Canyon. It is from landslides augmented with a small portion of volcanic ash.

With the capping material totally removed, the next phase of the eruption began. This was the release of volcanic "ash."

This is not at all like a wood ash. It is composed of tiny particles of volcanic silica, plus remelted and cooled rock fragments. The ash fell over 12 hours, and covered an area of over one hundred square kilometers. The chemistry, geology, and distribution of the ash is available from the United States Geological Survey article,"Properties of volcanic ash."

From the photos above we see that this ash has a mix of lighter, and darker particles indicating slightly different composition. These randomly sort out as the ash falls and settles on the ground. This forms the middle section of the creationist's photo. The small particles drifted down under the main influences of particle size, particle density, and prevailing wind speed. So, layers formed as the ash fall continued for over 12 hours. These layers were quite different from the water carried sediments most people are familiar with, and creationists like to attribute to "the Noah's flood."

The top section of the creationists "little grand canyon" is a well mixed dark colored sediment that is a combination of all the erupted materials, weathered soils, and a strong plant material fraction. The source is what is called a "lahar flow." The next two photos are of the Mt. Saint Helens lahar flows. The first is an aerial shot showing the extent of a late lahar flow.

The following photo has several interesting features. First note that the flow was much higher than the residual deposit. Next, look at the amount of surface vegetation, tree bark and branches that were ground-up and added to the flow. Finally, looking at the exposed bank we see that a lot of weathered dark organic rich soil was added to the ash and volcanic rock mix. This is the source of the dark "cap" from the creationist's "strata" photo.

The creationist photos included this following image. It is striking in that it totally exposes their fraud. The image that Steven Austin described as "Twenty-five foot thickness of stratified pyroclastic flow deposit which accumulated in less than one day on June 12, 1980" is just a small, and untypical segment of the total mass of the 1980 Mt. Saint Helens eruption. Exposed in an actively eroding river bank, it obviously is a small segment that will not survive for very long either.

One last error of the "just plain not true" sort is that not a single one of these features from the Mt. Saint Helens volcano could possibly have formed underwater in the midst of a global flood.

It also forms a sad example of how creationists cannot bring themselves to tell the truth. Steve Austin and his followers hope to make others believe that real geologists would look at the apparent strata from the eruption so far as something that had taken a long time to have formed. They know that geologists don't think this.

PS: I wanted to add a link to a good Mt. St. Helens blog by Lance Wilson.

oops

I killed the CPU on my main desktop machine.

My hard drive is fine, so I'll only need a new box. I might even do a little upgrade.

Back in the Quote Mine

I was confronted by a creationist with several "quotes" from famous scientists that "proved" that evolution was a fraud. Most were already in the TalkOrigns Quote Mine Project." One that was not was,

W. HOWELLS, Harvard, "A great legend has grown up to plague both paleontologists and anthropologists. It is that one of; men can take a tooth or a small and broken piece of bone, gaze at it, and pass his hand over his forehead once or twice, and then take a sheet of paper and draw a picture of what the whole animal looked like as it tramped the Terriary terrain. If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts.", MANKIND SO FAR, p. l38

Published creationist sources;Creation Wiki: Paleoanthropology quotes

Sean Pittman, MD: Thoughts on Evolution From Scientists and Other Intellectuals

The quote was from a 1944 book, "Mankind So Far." I bought a copy which arrived today, 12, Nov. 2013. The "quote" was on page 128, not 138. From personal forensic work, nearly all police agencies are "boy scouts" compared to professional physical anthropologists. The rest of the quote was totally different from the creationist's presentation. A physical anthropologist, Prof. Howells was critical of paleoanthropologists who named a new species nearly every time they discovered a new skull. Howells was a "lumper" who saw great variation in single species as the common fact, and no need for elaborate classifications of species. This was particularly evident in his research on modern human origins. He was a strong advocate of the "out-of-Africa" hypothesis of human origins, and the biological unity of human races.

I agree that most police agencies do look like boy scouts compared to professional physical anthropologists. But of course, creationists have totally mangled the "quote" to change Prof. Howells' meaning. They have cut off the end of Howells sentence, and deleted the rest of his thought to totally alter the meaning of this passage. Here is the actual section, following "boy scouts"

"If this were quite true, the anthropologists would make the F.B.I. look like a troop of Boy Scouts ... and it has led to a certain amount of skepticism in the lay mind regarding the restorations of early man which have been made. But it is not quite true.

The restorations of fossil skulls do not really go beyond what is reasonable; in fact there are one or two cases in which the restoration has been made on a small part of a skull only to have another specimen turn up to give the true form; and in these cases the resemblance has been quite good."

The rest of the page follows in a similar vein, that fossil reconstructions are generally reasonable and based on the comparative analysis of multiple specimens of many species. He concluded with the entirely competent observation that soft tissue reconstructions in the 1940s were entirely speculative. Modern forensic studies, 50 years later, are considered much more accurate.

Jeannie Chatman, Special Blogger

Young Earth Creationist Jeannie Chatman, Special Blogger to the Daily Guide, provided some motive and amusement when she regurgitated a load of YEC nonsense. I rebuked her here several times. In fact, her overall public record helped me to start Big Daddy is Dead.

I have checked periodically for the last 9 months, and her public output has stopped at the Daily Guide. At the same time I have not seen an obituary notice. Hopefully she is reconsidering her support for a young earth.

Utterly Dispensable ID Creationism.

Is Darwinian Evolution "Indispensable" to Biology? by the Disco'tute MD, Michael Egnor takes a poke at Larry Moran's blog post, ASBMB Core Concepts in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology: Evolution. (ASBMB=American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology). The ASBMB offered the following as their nominees for core concepts:

Evolution
matter and energy transformation
homeostasis
biological information
macromolecular structure and function

Egnor's core observation was:

"If you have to periodically proclaim to the world the indispensability of your scientific discipline, then your scientific discipline isn't indispensable."

If you need to beg, whine and mew that your Intelligent Design creationism is really, really sciencey, and that mean ol' Darwinists should stop calling you "creationists," then you are utterly dispensable.

After you eat them, all that is left is a picture

I had a good day aboard the Fury out of Dana Warf.

Photo by Lisa Ray

"Christofascists, and Satan," or "Why don't Fundies Read the Bible?"

The gang of sadistic bastards at Trinity Western 'university' had several additional stupidities in their "Statement of Faith" (Link to a PDF) that I thought were worth mentioning on their own without overlap with their ironically delightful Expulsion of chronic liar Kevie Miller. The first is very simple to expose as stupid:

2. God’s gospel is authoritatively revealed in the Scriptures.
We believe that God has spoken in the Scriptures, both Old and New Testaments, through the words of human authors. As the verbally inspired Word of God, the Bible is without error in the original writings, (etc.)

I'll agree to stipulate this as soon as you show me these "original writings." And while you are looking for some of those, explain why Christian apologists insist that the gross variations, and contradictions within the Bible are due to variations in the oral tradition preceding any written text. The obvious theological significance of this is that the Bible is a mere transcription of what somebody might have remembered about some event, filtered through the lens of their cultural and political expedience. That was before anyone even started editing, adding, and redacting.

3. God’s gospel alone addresses our deepest need.
We believe that God created Adam and Eve in His image, but they sinned when tempted by Satan.

This of course refers to;

Genesis 3 (KJV)

1 Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the LORD God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die:

14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

Not once in this "verbally inspired Word of God" (according to Statement #2), is the serpent called anything other than the serpent. Nor is there any indication that this serpent is "Satan." Nor is that any indication anywhere in the Bible that "Satan" crawled on his belly. Since snakes cannot stand, Psalm 109: 6. "Set thou a wicked man over him: and let Satan stand at his right hand," should indicate that the "serpent" in Geneiss is not Satan at all. In fact, many times the Bible presents Satan as a loyal, if sarcastic, servant of the Hebrew God, El. Even the New Testament Satan was not a reptile, and clearly exercised considerable abilities of movement and speech (e.g. Matthew 4, and Luke 4).

But the best evidence that this "Statement of Faith" is anti-scriptural is the prologue from the Book of Job 1: 6 - 12. El the paramount god of the Hebrew pantheon holds court in the Council of Gods, Hebrew "bene elohim." The paramount god holding court is El, also called "el elohim" or "El, God of the gods." Elsewhere we find this god is called “el elohim Yahweh” or “Yahweh, the God of the gods,” used to assimilate the Northern Israel tradition of El as the paramount god with the Southern Yahweh tradition of Juda. Also give attention to the fact that “the Satan,” in biblical Hebrew "il’shatan," literally translated is "God El’s Satan." Satan is appearing at the command, and under the direction of the God El.

The late Babylonian Empire employed secret agents empowered to act as both judge and executioner. They were ‘agents provocateur’ with the nickname of the “Emperor’s wanderers,” or, "Emperor's roaming eyes." (Akkadean verb “shu-ut” = to wander). The Akkadean "roamer" or "wanderer" is "shatar." Later consonant shifts, and a reinterpretation yielded a secondary meaning “shatan”= to accuse. This leads directly to biblical Hebrew "il’shatan," God’s Satan (God's Wanderer) having the role of the “the Adversary” which is another of the biblical Satan's nicknames. It also provides a rather amusing world play in Job 1:7 since the Satan says he was “wandering about” and the name Satan is derived from the Akkadean verb “shu-ut” = to wander. So an actually literal translation would be "El asked, Where "My Wanderer" have you been? I have been wandering, my Lord God, wandering (and/or accusing) on the Earth, said God's Wanderer."

I recommend reading;

Friedman, Richard Elliott
1987 Who Wrote the Bible? New York:Harper and Row (Paperback Edition)

Pope, Marvin H.
1965 “Job: A new translation with Introduction and Commentary” Anchor Bible Society Vol. 15, New York: ABRL/Doubleday

Smith, Mark
2003 “The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: Israel's Polytheistic Background and the Ugaritic Texts” Oxford University Press.

And be sure to keep a copy of Brown, Driver, and Briggs to hand.

Kevin Miller gets really Expelled

Kevin Miller was the real script writer for the execrable creationist propaganda film "Expelled" (the now dead link went to "Expelled Exposed." The NSCE killed the site rather than defend against the threats from the Expelled frauds). He has had his sorry lying (see "Expelled Exposed") ass fired from a Christian "university" called Trinity Western University. They have a "Statement of Faith" (Link to a PDF) that all faculty must sign.


Here is the "money quote,"

10 God's gospel requires a response that has eternal consequences.

We believe that God commands everyone everywhere to believe the gospel by turning to Him in repentance and receiving the Lord Jesus Christ. We believe that God will raise the dead bodily and judge the world, assigning the unbeliever to condemnation and eternal conscious punishment and the believer to eternal blessedness and joy with the Lord in the new heaven and the new earth, to the praise of His glorious grace. Amen.

All of us that try to explain to creationists the reality of the universe have at one point or another been promised "eternal damnation in the fiery lakes of Hell!!!111!ELEVENSONE!!!! DIE YOU ANTI-CHRIST!!!!!1111 Bwahaahahhaahawahaahhah etc..." This is apparently what happens if you do evil godless things like invent new medical treatments, or improve crops, or anything that isn't the Trinity Western list such as telling the truth about science. The added ugly hate filled touch popular- in fact demanded- by this Christian university is, "eternal conscious punishment." The Trinity Western University Christians are aware that humans hideously tortured will lose consciousness. These Christians won't want anyone to miss a even moment of the eternal agony they envision in their self righteous wet-dreams.

This is of considerable historical interest, as I have discussed elsewhere. Charles Darwin's autobiography was not intended for publication. But following his death, his son Frank apparently was considering it. In one section regarding C. R. Darwin's religious beliefs, Darwin wrote, "I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to wish Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And this is a damnable doctrine.


Six months after her husband's death Mrs. Darwin annotated the passage above in her own handwriting. She wrote, "I should dislike the passage in brackets to be published (from "and have never since doubted" to "damnable doctrine" GH). It seems to me raw. Nothing can be said too severe upon the doctrine of everlasting punishment for disbelief, but very few now wd. call that 'Christianity,' "

In 1882, Mrs. Emma Darwin held, that "very few now wd. call that 'Christianity'." Too bad we still have sick sadists like the faculty, and ministration, and students of Trinity Western.

The "Statement" must be signed, but a minor option exists: you could check, "I agree with the above Statement of Faith and agree to support that position at all times before the students and friends of Trinity Western University. However, I wish to clarify my understanding of an article(s) on a separate, attached sheet."

When Kevin "shit stain" Miller tried to slightly distance himself from the evil sadistic bastards he associates with, They fired him.


So sorry Kevie, I must admit that I find this very amusing.

I have found a great resource

tsjok's blog. Long may they blog!

Kent Hovind, 2013

Patriot Bible University has sold another doctorate to Kent Hovind. He has claimed to have gotten two masters and three doctorates in education, theology, and divinity (honorary). He now claims to have added a doctorate in "biblical ministry."

His 'dissertation' titled "What on Earth is about to happen for Heaven's Sake" is available on-line as a PDF. I think it is better to Google for a current URL in case there are copy right issues.

"ScienceInsider: Turkish Scientists See New Evidence of Government's Anti-Evolution Bias"

ScienceInsider: Turkish Scientists See New Evidence of Government's Anti-Evolution Bias

The Turkish goverment's rejection of a proposal for a summer school program on evolution was justified because. "evolution is a controversial subject."

This is the exact phrase used in the Discovery Institute, and Focus on the Family propaganda supporting legislation to supress teaching biology in American schools.

The "Scientific Method"

I was indulging in some creationist debating the other day. As usual, there was a bull creationist (also climate denier, and all-round right-wing loon). He triumphantly presented the following model of "the scientific method" demanding that it be applied to evolution.




This is a lot over simplified as a "model" of the scientific method, but it is found all over the internets. It is about appropriate for third grade. I'll expand it as it seems needed. But just for fun, let's see how Darwin did this.

"Ask a Question"

In Darwin's case, the question had already been asked 50 years earlier. The question was known as "the species problem." In the short form, the 1700s naturalists (pre-scientific biologists) realized that species were not fixed, they varied a lot, and there were many life forms that had existed than no longer existed. So the question was already asked, "How do we properly define a species to reflect the fact that they are changing, and can become extinct."

"Do Background 'research' "

I don't like the use of the word "research" at this step. A better phrase would be, "Do a Literature Search." There are hundreds of scientific journals published every day, and thousands of books published every year. Today you must ask if your question is a real one that has not already been long answered. Also, because there are actual careers in the sciences it has become a long process of professional education and training before anyone gets to propose and carry out a personal research project. I was lucky to have trained when a university undergraduate could still do independent work.

Darwin's education was quite remarkable as a preparation for his eventual career as a scientist. I sketched it out at "Notes on Charles Darwin’s Education."

The best part of Darwin's training was in Geology. However, his first scientific report was from research he did supervised by Dr. Robert Edmund Grant, who shortly after became Professor of comparative anatomy and zoology at London University (1827-1874). Grant referred in print to two of Darwin’s original discoveries made in 1826; that the so-called "ova of Flustra" were in fact larvæ of a parasitic worm in rock mussels (Mytilus), and that the little globular bodies which had been supposed to be the young state of Fucus loreus were the egg-cases of the worm-like Pontobdella muricata. Darwin had read papers on these observations to the student’s “Plinian Society” founded by Professor Robert Jameson.

An excellent biography was recently published, "Darwin's Sacred Cause" by Adrian Desmond, and James Moore (2009, University of Chicago Press).

"Construct a Hypothesis"

The obvious problem with this step is that hardly anyone knows what a "hypothesis" really is. I recently wrote up a short tutorial, "Scientific Fact, Theory, and Law." I learned from an undergraduate class in the philosophy of science. Our major reading was Karl Popper's "Logic of Scientific Discovery" published in English in 1959, and Carl Hempel's 1965 book, "Aspects of Scientific Explanation." I still have my copies.

But, Darwin's most famous notebook sketch is reproduced below. He drew it while aboard the HMS Beagle on a 5 year scientific, and navigation mission between December 1831 and October 1836. Here is Darwin's hypothesis for the solution of the "Species Problem."

"Test your hypothesis by conducting an experiment"

This is the most easily misunderstood step in the formula above. First, a properly constructed hypothesis must be a logical consequence of your theory. This must be a statement which is observable in principle, and it must be different from any hypothesis derived from alternate theories. For example, Theory #1 "Thunder is caused by Thor." Theory #2, "Thunder is sound generated by the supersonic expanding gasses ionized by the electrical and heat energy of lightening." If we merely watch lightening and listen to thunder, there is no data that select one theory over another. One of the first internationally celebrated American scientists was Benjamin Franklin. In 1750 he published a proposed experiment to test if lightening was electric. His discovery earned him an outstanding scientific reputation. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Science in 1756. Since we know now that lightening was electricity and that sound was energy transmitted by air, the idea that lightening caused thunder is favored. The latter theory was not definitively established until 2003 by spectrographic studies of lightening. So, it is important to remember that a "hypothesis" and its testing can be built on the results of centuries of experiments, and observation.

The second difficulty of understanding the scientific method is the popular misconception of what is an "experiment." The easiest example to describe is from chemistry- mix two chemicals together and determine if they made a new product. You can repeat this thousands of times, and mostly you will get the same result each time. We do similar experiments in biology- increase or decrease the expression of a gene and see how this changes the function of a cell, organ, or animal. But, there is another form of "experiment" which is the repeated observation of a natural phenomena. This is the experimental method of astronomers who don't need to create stars in laboratories. They repeatedly look at the light, or other radiation from stars or planets and note any variation in position, or spectra. Geologists can study tectonic plates without needing to create a planet in their laboratories. They make repeated observations of the chemistry, mineralogy, and structure of rocks from specified locations and compare any variations to other study locations.

The variety and distribution of life on Earth is of much greater complexity than thunder and lightening. Charles Darwin wanted to explain these facts; life forms had existed in the past which no longer existed, life forms had existed that were very different from those found today, plants and animals geographically near to one another were more closely related even when they varied physically, plants and animals geographically distant from one another were less closely related even when they were similar physically. The most popularly recognized research work by Darwin was his five year journey around the world (1832 to 1836). Unless they have read Darwin's best selling book, "Voyage of the Beagle" (1839), most people don't realize that Darwin spent weeks and months at a time ashore conducting research on geology, and the biology of plants, animals and fossils. One of Darwin's first important publications was the 206 page book "The structure and distribution of coral reefs. Being the first part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle, under the command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. during the years 1832 to 1836," (1842. London: Smith Elder and Co.). This was followed in 1844 by, "Geological observations on the volcanic islands visited during the voyage of H.M.S. Beagle, together with some brief notices of the geology of Australia and the Cape of Good Hope. Being the second part of the geology of the voyage of the Beagle, under the command of Capt. Fitzroy, R.N. during the years 1832 to 1836" (London: Smith Elder and Co.). In these works Darwin's explanation for the formation of coral atolls was presented which is still our modern understanding.

Many biological studies were also published (1838 to 1843) by other scholars with Darwin having provided the collected material, and their geological contexts. What will surprise most people is that once back home in England, Darwin undertook an 8 year intensive study of barnacles. From 1846 to final publication in 1854, Darwin wrote a total of 4 books, two on the modern species, and two on the fossil. While this work was seen as a distraction by Darwin's friend Thomas Huxley, Darwin was obviously testing his ideas about evolution by the systematic study of a globally distributed, and easily collected group of species. It should also be known that these studies are still highly regarded by professional specialists today.

So, from 1832 to 1854 Darwin was actively "conducting an experiment" in the proper sense of making systematic observations of nature.

"Analyze your data and draw a conclusion"

"Report your results (Was your hypothesis correct?)"

It is getting time to wrap this up. There are several plain mistakes in the "scientific method" model above and this is from either the practical approach favored by Thomas Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions," or the abstract philosophical approaches of Popper, or Hempel. And it is contradicted by my 40 years of scientific work, and publication.

First, in a properly conducted research project, the result of your analysis is your conclusion. There should not be any large step between the results and your conclusion. For example, my most recent publication was last month. In it, I and my collaborator Prof. George E. Miller analyzed the elemental composition of clays, and pottery from archaeological sites, and river drainages in S. California using neutron activation analysis. These geochemical data were then subjected to statistical study used to match the ancient pottery to clays and minerals which identified the source materials used by pre-historic potters. The results were our conclusions. There was categorical evidence that the pottery had been manufactured at, or near the locations where it had been found. There was no evidence that this pottery had been traded in from distant locations. We had designed the project so that whatever the results were, we could state them as an either/or contrast.

Darwin's problem was much more complex. He in fact did need to organize his thoughts to present first the pattern of the biological data, and then how his theory of natural selection on inherited traits, produced new species following common descent, and extinctions. We know that he worked on the resulting publication between 1854 and 1858. What caused him to stop worrying at minor details was the letter he received from a fellow biologist, the young Alfred Russel Wallace on 18 June 1858. In that letter, Wallace sent a manuscript of a paper about evolution. Darwin saw that it was essentially the same ideas he had been working on for decades. As a result, the paper by Wallace, and one by Darwin were read at the London meeting of the Linnaean Society the following month. Darwin's "On the Origin of Species," was completed and published on 24 November 1859.

Scientific Fact, Theory, and Law: A creationist tutorial

 

There is a common error made by creationists discussing evolution regarding the ideas of "fact," "scientific theory," "hypothesis," and "scientific law." It is common enough to warrant a separate comment.

Quoting from the National Academy of Science (USA):

In science, a "fact" typically refers to an observation, measurement, or other form of evidence that can be expected to occur the same way under similar circumstances. However, scientists also use the term "fact" to refer to a scientific explanation that has been tested and confirmed so many times that there is no longer a compelling reason to keep testing it or looking for additional examples. In that respect, the past and continuing occurrence of evolution is a scientific fact. Because the evidence supporting it is so strong, scientists no longer question whether biological evolution has occurred and is continuing to occur. Instead, they investigate the mechanisms of evolution, how rapidly evolution can take place, and related questions. 2008 "Science, Evolution, and Creationism"

Now lets consider the idea of a hypothesis. In science, it is a statement that there exists an unobserved phenomena, or event which is a critical prediction of a scientific theory. This was proposed as a way to test the validity of a scientific theory called "the experimental method." We trace this back to Francis Bacon in the 1600s. By the 20th century, the notion that a "good" theory must generate experimental tests became a central topic of philosophers like Carl Hempel, and Karl Popper. Even before actually testing a hypothesis Hempel and Popper in a rare point of agreement between them, thought that a "good" theory had to generate hypotheses.

When asked if evolutionary theory was testable, J.B.S. Haldane famously replied, "Show me a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian." This was reportedly in reply to a question about the falsifiability of evolutionary theory.

Next there is the gross misunderstanding of what a "scientific law" is, and how it is related to a scientific theory. A scientific "law" is a generalization of empirical observations that is typically reduced to a mathematical formula. These "laws" are always bound within the observational frame, or external conditions of the observations. They are not explanations of the observed phenomena. My favorite example is Ohm's Law, I = V/R. It will always work under the conditions that Ohm used to observe electrical current (I), voltage (V), and resistance (R). However, you cannot find in Ohm's Law a theory of the electromagnetic field. You cannot even derive one. Further, Ohm's Law is invalidated at extreme temperatures- the classic example is resistance free superconductors- variable voltages, and extreme voltages. This does not mean that Ohm's Law is not useful, but it is only useful for the external conditions that allow it be applied.

A scientific theory does not "graduate" to being a "law" or a "fact." There is a second common error made by creationists which is repeated in nearly every discussion with creationists, and that is that evolution has not been expressed in the mathematical precision of a "law." It will surprise some people, but this was published in 1908, over a century ago. The exact example is the generalized Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium equation. For computational reasons, they presented it as, "IF evolution did NOT occur, then ...Equilibrium" which can confuse some students.


Hardy, G. (Jul 1908). "MENDELIAN PROPORTIONS IN A MIXED POPULATION.". Science 28 (706): 49–50. doi:10.1126/science.28.706.49. ISSN 0036-8075. PMID 17779291

Weinberg, W. (1908). "Über den Nachweis der Vererbung beim Menschen". Jahreshefte des Vereins für vaterländische Naturkunde in Württemberg 64: 368–382.