Role Reversal? Nope.

Gil Dodgen over at Uncommon Descent, an Intelligent Design blog maintained by, among others, William Dembski, posted an interesting tidbit of ID philosophy on Friday:

Even the most vociferous and vehement ID opponents (e.g., Richard Dawkins) admit that design in nature appears to be self-evident. Why then, the heroic efforts to explain design away, with such silliness as random variation and natural selection providing the engine that produced highly sophisticated biological software and information-processing systems?

I remain completely bewildered by the fact that intelligent, educated people cannot recognize this obvious act of denial and desperation.

Mr. Dodgen's issue with evolutionary science doesn't seem to be that its conclusions are wrong; rather, he seems to take issue with the fact that Dawkins and others like him are even trying to come up with an explanation for the origin of life that doesn't involve God when design seems intuitively obvious.

Putting aside the obvious objections regarding his all-too-quick dismissal of evolutionary explanations of apparent design, the most disturbing thing here is the fact that if it looks like God did something, we shouldn't even look for disconfirmatory evidence - we should just say "well, chalk another one up for God" and move on! Somehow I don't think science would have gotten very far if it had stuck to that philosophy from the start. Don't make me drag out Galileo here, Gil.

My nomination for forum post of the year

The Skepchick forums have bestowed upon us a bounty of crazy the likes of which have not been seen since the glory days of Gene Ray.

It's all there. Kabbalah. I Ching. Numerology. Aliens. Bullshit martial arts. Vibrations. Pineal gland as the third eye. Atlantis. The Pyramids. Da Vinci. Nostradamus. Cayce. Shangri-La. Falun Gong.

And the pictures - some of them are so utterly random. Hitler, the Premier of China, and the five pictures of typical grey aliens. For some reason there's even a picture of a Magic card in here. Look, there's nothing I can say that will do justice to this post. Just go and read it, and bask in the pure insanity radiating from your computer monitor.

Richard Milton's "alternative science," part 2

http://www.alternativescience.com/talk.origins-transitions.htm

One of Milton's longer articles, this page is a critique of Katherine Hunt's talk.origins transitional fossil FAQ, with a focus on the section concerning the evidence for a transition from early jawless fishes to cartilaginous marine vertebrates such as sharks, skates, and rays.

Hunt begins her "FAQ" by drawing a distinction between transitional fossils that show a 'general lineage' and those that demonstrate 'species-to-species transition'. The latter she defines as 'a very fine grained sequence documenting the actual speciation event.'

This is a courageously unambiguous definition and one that leads any rational person to expect that Hunt will then present evidence for such a 'fine grained sequence' that documents an 'actual speciation event'. Unfortunately, however, that is not what is presented in her "FAQ".

[Milton goes on to quote from the jawless fish to shark section of the FAQ]

Notice that, where we are promised a 'fine-grained sequence documenting an actual speciation event,' what we are actually given is conjecture and suppositions ...

Milton is indeed correct that the definition of a species-to-species transition given by Hunt here is rather unambiguous. However, nowhere does she say that the transition discussed here is one such instance. Indeed, in the section where she differentiates between the two different kinds of transitional fossil sequences, she is careful to emphasize that "General lineages are known for almost all modern groups of vertebrates, and make up the bulk of this FAQ." Nowhere in the definition of a species-to-species transition series are marine vertebrates mentioned. However, she does specifically mention that "Many 'species-to-species transitions' are known, mostly for marine invertebrates and recent mammals (both those groups tend to have good fossil records)...."

If Milton wanted to present a truly withering critique of the FAQ he should have gone after what were explicitly described by Hunt as the strongest transitional sequences. Instead, he characterizes the jawless fish to shark sequence as though it's presented as a clear species-to-species transition, when Hunt said nothing of the sort.

Milton even quotes her as saying that "[We] don't know which jawless fish was the actual ancestor of early sharks." At the very beginning, in a section Milton himself quotes, Hunt makes it abundantly clear that the FAQ includes descriptions of both general trends and specific transitional sequences in evolution, so why on earth would Milton assume that this is one of the latter when Hunt herself expresses unsureness about the exact ancestry? Portraying the jawless fish -> shark fossil record as characteristic of the strongest transitional fossil sequences is ridiculous, and a clear case of misrepresentation. I'm starting to see a pattern here.

So why didn't Milton pick something more strongly supported to criticize? Well, it just so happens that the FAQ goes in chronological order - and as jawless fishes were some of the first vertebrates, this one happens to be the first one listed. From reading this article, I would guess that Milton didn't read the entire FAQ in order to find a strong sequence to critique, or even a representative sequence. I would even go further and say he didn't get past the first page - he saw that the first sequence presented was not very strong, wrote up a few words about it, and summarily dismissed the rest of the FAQ as being no better without having read it. There will be more evidence for this in a bit.

In the next section, Milton criticizes the idea of looking at not-entirely-complete transitional fossil sequences as a method of establishing descent. Indeed, the question of how one can determine where divisions between species occur is a rather hard one when only fossils are concerned, as there can be no test of what can reproduce with what.

What this means is that there remains only one valid scientific test that would enable an objective observer to claim that one fossil is related by descent to an earlier fossil and that is an unbroken (or practically intact) chain of evidence linking the earlier and later fossils.

It is sometimes said that this demand is for an impossibly high standard of evidence -- like expecting an archaeologist to find an intact tomb of Caesar or Cleopatra with their personal diary beside the body. The reality is somewhat different.

Three-quarters of the Earth's land surface is covered with sedimentary rocks. A great proportion of these rocks are continuously stratified where they outcrop and the strata contain distinctive fossils such as sea urchins in the chalk and ammonites in many Mesozoic rocks. The case for Darwinism would be made convincingly if someone were to produce a sequence of fossils from a sequence of adjacent strata (such as ammonite species or sea urchins) showing indisputable signs of gradual progressive change on the same basic stock, but above the species level (as distinct from subspecific variation).

[...]

Yet there are so many billions of fossils available from so many thousands of strata, that the failure to meet this modest demand is inexplicable if transitions have taken place in the way Hunt describes.

It ought to be relatively easy to assemble not merely a handful but hundreds of species arranged in lineal descent. Schoolchildren should be able to do this on an afternoon's nature study trip to the local quarry...

Finding transitional fossils should be easy, then! So since we haven't found more, it's clear that evolution has not occurred, and modern species have not descended from primitive equivalents. What other possible explanation could there be for not finding a complete, undeniable transitional sequence for every single modern organism?

Oh wait, there's an explanation of exactly this on talk.origins that Milton conveniently ignores.

And it's in the exact same FAQ that he's supposed to be critiquing.

This is absolutely mind-boggling - he's written multiple paragraphs on how there should be loads of transitional fossils just waiting to be found, and failed to see an answer by Hunt to this exact position, just one paragraph after a section that he quoted earlier . One wonders if Milton willfully ignored that section while writing this or, as I suggested earlier, he simply didn't read the FAQ.

Incidentally, the talk.origins page on the creationist claim that there should be lots of transitional fossils makes for some good reading on this topic, as the equivalent section in Hunt's FAQ is rather long.

Milton has little or nothing to say about the rest of the FAQ, including the more well-supported transitions, such as those found in marine invertebrates - which he brushes away as not constituting speciation ("shells getting a little longer or a little shorter"). Good thing too, my head is starting to hurt.

In short, Milton's article is a mess. Not only is it abundantly clear that he has done little outside research on the subject (for instance, he claims that biologists see the peppered moth as evidence of speciation), he apparently neglected to read extremely important parts of the FAQ he purports to be presenting a critique of, and grievously misrepesents the author on more than one occasion. This cavalcade of ignorance and seemingly willful misrepresentation is hardly isolated, as seen in his complete catastrophe of an article on speciation. Anyone who sees an article like this as a serious threat to any part of the mdoern theory of evolution needs to do some homework, and find a source that has done the same.

Richard Milton's "alternative science"

For the most part, the talk.origins archive is a great reference for responses to common creationist arguments. It's essentially a compendium of arguments for and against evolution, with refutations of common fallacious arguments and various essays and debates on the subject. The amount of information contained within is massive, and it can be kind of intimidating to slog through if you don't know exactly what you're looking for.

Until now I haven't found many creationist sites that respond to talk.origins directly. Most seem to tread the Behe/Dembski party line of "information theory disproves evolution" or parrot the old, tired arguments that even Answers in Genesis is wary of (moon dust, helium, the strength of Earth's magnetic field, etc.). On a forum that I frequently attend, however, someone posted a link to a site - or rather, a subsection of a site - that takes on talk.origins directly.

http://www.alternativescience.com/faq_or_fiction.htm

The site is maintained by Richard Milton, author of such books as The Facts of Life and Shattering the Myths of Darwinism, who appears on the talk.origins site in a debate over the hominid fossil record. Mr. Milton purports to set straight "a few of the more gross errors of scientific fact" in the talk.origins FAQ archive in a series of four pages: a response to the Observed Instances of Speciation FAQ, another to the Transitional Vertebrate Fossils FAQ, a third to Kathleen Hunt's account of equine evolution, and finally, a discussion of whether the development of antibiotic resistance among modern disease-causing organisms can be considered "Darwinian evolution."

I'm no biologist, but when browsing through the first of these responses, a couple of rather glaring problems caught even my eye:

Under the promising heading 'Telling whether a speciation event has occurred', [Boxhorn] says that 'One advantage of the Biological Species Concept is that it provides a reasonably unambiguous test that can be applied to possible speciation events. Recall that under [this definition] species are defined as being reproductively isolated from other species. Demonstrating that a population is reproductively isolated (in a nontrvial way) from populations that it was formerly able to interbreed with shows that speciation has occurred.'

This only leaves one question: what exactly does Boxhorn mean by 'reproductively isolated'? A little later he tells us. 'Behavioral isolating mechanisms,' he says, 'rely on organisms making a choice of whether to mate and a choice of who to mate with.'

So there you have it. If two individuals choose not to mate then, according to Boxhorn's definition, they are 'reproductively isolated.' And if they are reproductively isolated then -- voila! They are now no longer the same species. A 'speciation event' has occurred.

This seems like a deliberate mischaracterization, if not a straw man. The determination of what is and what is not a species depends not upon individuals, but upon populations. Additionally, the example that he proceeds to give of size-discrepant dogs like Great Danes and Chihuahuas being "reproductively isolated" is actually untrue. If you ask your friendly local dog lover, they'll probably tell you many hilarious tales of smaller male dogs trying to mate with larger female dogs, or of tragic and messy results when the opposite is attempted. Comedy aside, such unions can and do happen - a dachschund/rottweiler cross, for instance, is hardly unheard-of.

Milton's conjecture about Boxhorn only using behavioural isolation as a delineating factor between species because he's writing a FAQ defending evolution is similarly bogus. Including behavioural isolation in the definition of species is quite common in biology, and characterizing it as some kind of dodge on Boxhorn's part seems ignorant at best and intellectually dishonest at worst. Of course, defining what exactly makes a species is a pretty controversial topic and probably will be for a long time to come, so for now we can accept Milton's rather conservative definition - a population can only be said to be a different species from its neighbours when a union between the two produces either no offspring or infertile offspring. While some would of course argue that two populations that are behaviourally isolated - say, due to the fact that one mates in winter and the other in summer - should not be considered different species on this basis alone, I doubt anyone would argue that two populations that cannot produce fertile offspring through interbreeding are the same species. Amazingly, Milton manages to find a well-supported example that fits this rather strong defintion of speciation, though he doesn't recognize it. Here, he quotes a citation from the FAQ:

5.3.1 Drosophila paulistorum

Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).

I had to read this twice to assure myself that it wasn't a practical joke. Boxhorn is saying that two fruit flies which he asserts are different species, successfully mate and produce offspring (thereby proving conclusively that they are not different species but the same species.) He calls the offspring 'hybrids' in an attempt to smuggle their 'different' species status in by the back door. Later some of the offspring exhibit 'behavioural isolation' (like Chihuahuas and Great Danes) but this is irrelevant as a sign of species status. So where, in all this, is there an instance of speciation -- or one species turning into another?

Milton's response here seems to be a complete misunderstanding of the FAQ's citation. While the Colombian strain was initially able to produce fertile hybrid offspring when mated with the Orinocan strain, the same was not true five years later. Attempted crossbreeding of the same Colombian strain with conspecific Orinocan strains produced only infertile male offspring, indicating that speciation had occurred. Behavioural isolation appeared only later on in the study (assortative mating, in this case, is a form of whole or partial behavioural isolation).

Either Milton has misread the article or he has failed to understand his own carefully chosen definition of what constitutes speciation. By any defintion, even the behaviour-independent one used by Milton, while two species may produce offspring through interbreeding, they cannot be considered the same species unless the result of such a union is fertile. By citing this study, Milton has completely shot himself in the foot - a population of Drosophila, once able to produce fertile offspring when crossed with conspecific populations, became unable to do so with the same populations after five years of reproductive isolation. This is speciation, and unless I've missed something major in my reading of Milton's article and the quoted FAQ it seems ridiculous to characterize it otherwise.

There are a few more errors and fallacies in Milton's articles, and I might go into them sometime later. Incidentally, the guy who linked me to this article is a veritable fountain of crazy on his own - he think evolution is bunk, not because he's a creationist, but because he believes Falun Gong tells him otherwise. Homosexuality is unnatural and immoral, lasers are actually death rays from Atlantis, Shangri-La was razed to the ground by the Chinese Communist Party to prevent a spiritual awakening by the Chinese people, and Edgar Cayce was the greatest prophet the world has ever known. He also believes himself to be a reincarnation of the Egyptian god Thoth. I could probably get a whole series of articles out of him, but I suspect there's more on the way, so I'll hold off for now. In the meantime, expect more entries on Milton in the future!

Free Republic bingo

I have a new game that I just invented. I call it Freeper Bingo. Find any Free Republic thread with 50 posts or more, and go nuts:



Not surprisingly, this also works as a drinking game.

Truth for Youth parody

Hello!

It's been forever since my last update, thanks to a wonderfully short attention span and a similarly constrained schedule. But, I made a parody comic for the Something Awful forums and need somewhere to semi-permanently keep it, so here it is.

It's based on a "Truth for Youth" anti-evolution comic, which can be found here. It's the usual creationist talking points that have been postulated, refuted, and regurgitated a thousand times over the last century or so, along with some spectacular non-sequiturs, so I decided to spice it up by giving the professor some actual knowledge of science.

So, without further ado...

58 Lines about 44 Aliens

Commence Beating.

I guess there's not much I can say about this kind of list telling you the signs that you've been abducted by aliens that hasn't been said before. Barnum descriptions, not uncommon to have a lot of these signs, sleep paralysis, et cetera. That's all pretty obvious, and if you want to learn more you can read up on it here. But just for a minute, let's imagine someone who has NEVER been abducted by aliens. EVER. That is, someone who goes against every single one of the signs listed on that page. Some of the stuff wouldn't be too unusual to not experience, like not being interested in UFOs (though I admit I was at one point!), not channeling telepathic messages from aliens, and so on. But the rest... well, you'll see. Let's go through item by item. Feel free to follow along!

-First off, you have never had "missing time" - having time go by without noticing. Clearly, you're not a gamer, nor do you ever watch heavily edited Schwarzenegger movies on TBS.
-You never see flashes of light in your home or elsewhere. You are probably blind.
-You have never seen beams of light outside your home. Either you don't live close to a street or any other place where headlight-equipped cars would go at night, or the blind hypothesis is starting to gain ground. Or perhaps both!
-You have never dreamed of UFOs. This suggests an isolation from alien-obsessed popular culture, which is just what one would expect from some kind of blind hermit.
-You have never had one or more UFO sightings. Putting aside the blind jokes for now, you have never seen a flying object without immediately being aware of what it is.
-You have never been interested in ecology, the environment, or vegetarianism. You are not a hippie.
-Never in your life have you had the feeling that you are special or that you're here for some purpose. I guess Mother wanted a girl, didn't she?
-You have been able to explain every single event in your life. Presumably this is because you haven't yet gotten to the point where the answer is always "aliens did it."
-You have never felt that something is going to happen before it happens. With the rate of coincidences about thinking about something and then having it randomly happen, you are one hell of an unlucky person.
-You have never woken up in a different place from where you remember going to sleep. This means that you don't roll around in bed, sleepwalk, or drink to the point where you start thinking that the Discovery channel should really interview that Stanton Friedman guy more.
-You do not remember ever seeing an animal look at you from outside. I guess your carless retreat is animal-free, too.
-You never wake up in the middle of the night startled. So you never have dramatic nightmares about a homicidal maniac coming after you and he's getting closer and closer and about to kill you when you trip like people always seem to do in these movies and then you look up and the lawnmower blade he uses as a murder weapon comes down and you wake up screaming and sweaty, sitting up in bed and panting then maybe starting to laugh about what a crazy dream that was until he bursts in through the door and plunges his Lawn Boy into your sternum. Then the aliens come and exact their revenge by giving him sporadic headaches and making streetlights go out when he walks underneath them.
-You don't have a phobia of anything, including snakes, spiders, heights, or lawnmower-related serial killers.
-You haven't had self-esteem problems, despite the fact that you have never considered yourself to be a beautiful and unique snowflake.
-You have never seen someone, especially someone you sleep with, become motionless. Insert joke about sex after marriage here.
-You have never had a strange stain on your sheet . . . You know what? I'm not even going to bother.
-You have no interest in UFOs and aliens
-You LOVE UFOs and aliens!
-You never feel like driving or walking to someplace you've never been. Were you born blind at this animal-free wilderness retreat? And if a wolf didn't nurse you from birth, what did? ALIENS, PERHAPS?
-You haven't seen a strange fog or haze that should not be there. So, I guess you've never lived in a major metropolitan area or played late 90's first person shooter games, which makes sense if you were raised from birth in the wilderness.
-You have never heard a strange humming or pulsing, implying that you are a total newbie when it comes to rave culture.
-You have never had random nosebleeds, you sexy person you.
-I'm not touching #34
-You have never had a back or neck problem or woken up with any kind of stiffness in any part of your body. You have befriended the grizzly bear, nature's chiropractor!
-Street lights don't go out as you walk under them
-You never get ringing in your ears, again suggesting that you don't go to many raves.
-You avoid medical treatment, or at least any that doesn't come from your fine ursine companion.
-You have never had headaches, whether frequent or sporadic.
-You're not going crazy, no matter what the talking chiropractor bear says.
-You are not a paranoid schizophrenic. See above.
-You were never afraid of your closet. That's a point in your favour at least, because everyone knows that's where aliens hide. You know, when they need to get away from it all.
-You have never had a problem "getting an erection," if you know what I mean.
-You have the feeling that you're not supposed to talk about odd stains on your sheets or genital soreness. This is probably a result of the fear of doctors.
-Your family has never talked about any problems listed here, like headaches or back pain.
-You have tried to resolve problems like these, and met with unequivocal success!
-You remember being abducted by aliens. (Reread the last bit of the link if you don't believe me.)

So, let's recap. You're a blind hermit living in the wilderness, in an area with no animals except a friendly bear who cracks your spine for you every so often. Perhaps as a result of your isolation from modern civilization, you experience no self-esteem problems, back pain, nosebleeds, stiff muscles, sexual problems or headaches, and have never been to a rave. In spite of this you are not special in any way, and you are not a hippie, though you fear nothing and can explain every event that has ever happened in your life and identify every flying object you've ever seen. You're completely content with where you are. You have a clear memory of being abducted by aliens. If all of these things are true, there is absolutely NO possibility that you have ever been abducted.

I can only hope such a paragon of normalcy exists somewhere in this world of ours.

Wiolawa Press: Aliens and UFO Art - Part 2: The Reptile Strikes Back

(This is part 2 of a 2-part series on the website http://www.wiolawapress.com .)

Naturally, Wiolawa's quest against the reptilian invaders has not been without reprisal from the powers that be. In addition to killing some of her friends with their most fearsome weapons, car crashes and Hepatitis, the fiendish Reptilians have also attempted to end Wiolawa's life by using a helicopter to drop pieces of cardboard on her car and putting foxglove (digitalis) extract in her carrot juice. Pulse weapons, of course, also make an appearance:

they have zapped me with their pulse weapons quite a few times... seriously.. on my heart chakra above my bed.. through the roof..i could not move for 6 hours.. and my husband and i agreed they would attempt to further kill me if we called the ambulances

ZAPPED me to the right of my sternum from my back .. ( several times ) &.. in the Superstitions while hiking .. and often to my head.. left temple area.. was extremely severe in further car chases.. i had an ice pack for three days on my temple.. from one severe shot.. so much for CoL Alexanders NON LETHAL weapons.. i assure you two of those blasts were meant to be lethal

Obviously these chakra-targeting pulse weapons are nonphysical, perhaps controlled by thought. So not only have the Reptilians mastered the use of ineffective poisons and the fine art of using cardboard as a murder weapon, they now have psychic pulse weapons, and I've heard tell that they can kill a yak from 300 yards away with their mind bullets.


That's telekinesis, Kyle.

As if attempted murder wasn't enough, several servants of the Reptoid overlords have taken to posting on Wiolawa's forums -- going back several years, in fact! Not only has the leader of the snake people himself been posting on an Internet conspiracy forum, there have also been appearances by Tom DeLay and the President himself! Note that Mr. Bush overuses exclamation marks and substitutes Yen signs for apostrophes, clearly indicative of the fact that North Korea, which is totally really close to Japan, is a puppet state of the USA and is currently being aggressive for the sole purpose of blinding us to the coming reptilian invasion.

Despite the intimidation tactics, Wiolawa soldiers onward, ever a spiritual warrior in the quest to expose every single disease or world event to happen in the last century as a reptilian plot.

AIDS? The tragic result of vampires cross-breeding with humans.

Ebola and bird flu? Genetically modified (that's sciencese for "evil") snake viruses meant to drive our species to extinction. Hell, Ebola already looks like a snake, and you don't even have to run it through Photoshop.

SARS? A genetic virus intended to turn future generations of humans into reptiles, by causing Harlequin ichthyosis (WARNING: some pictures in this link are not safe for work or for the mind of anyone who is not already an empty jaded husk of a human being thanks to the internet), a birth defect that existed long before SARS and which is almost invariably fatal within a few days. Clearly the reptiles have been at work on Earth laying the groundwork for the development of SARS even longer than originally suspected.

I shudder to think where we'd be without Wiolawa Press. For one thing, the US, without knowing that Baghdad was protected by an energy shield before the last Iraq war, would have been entirely powerless. Plus we wouldn't be aware of the secret cattle-mutilating UFOs disguised as innocent-looking clouds, or even the black lasers and reptile sexcopters that resulted in the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia. And I don't know about you, but I couldn't be happier than I am with that knowledge.

So for these reasons and more, I salute you, Wiolawa. Shine on, you crazy, crazy diamond.