Is Evolution the Drunken Man as Behe claims?

I was listening to the latest episode of 'The Things That Matter Most' with Dr. Michael Behe, the man that put forth the idea of Irreducible Complexity (IC), as guest. Wow. Some of the worst arguments for Intelligent Design (ID) I've heard to date. It's no wonder that his colleagues at Lehigh University have disowned him.

I've blogged on the many problems of the IC concept before and, even though it is impossible to believe that Behe has never heard of the complete and utter refutations by others with far more expertise than I (little-known people such as Richard Dawkins, Ken Miller, PZ Myers, Jerry Coyne,....), he continues to espouse this idea. Even his mousetrap has been found to be reducible. I'm sorry, Dr. Behe, but this makes you a dishonest broker. 'Irreducible complexity is this fancy phrase that all it means is that you've got a machine like a mousetrap... that has a number of different parts all of which are required [for it] to work.' The mousetrap is a red herring because I have yet to see a mousetrap replicate. Since the primary mechanism by which Natural Selection is removed, the analogy is false one.

Behe arbitrarily declares that structures serving other functions can't be co-opted to be brought together for a new function. 'Even if you are hoping to use those things [parts] for something else, like a doorstop, a doorstop has nothing to do with catching mice.' What's he done here? He's concocted a straw man (hardly original) of Evo. He presumes that catching mice (function) is something not only desirable, but a necessary end point. But function is something we ascribe to a system - the genes themselves do not care what or even whether they provide a function, only that they impart survival value.

So, what we should always be looking for is whether a genetic change imparts a survival advantage, not whether the change maintains function. The latter is simply irrelevant. DNA does not care about any one of its gene's functions, or whether there even is a function for it, only the effect of the gene on survival probability. To illustrate this using the mousetrap example, let's say that a cell contains the parts that are required for the mousetrap and the catching a mouse results in an increase in the chances of survival. If bringing some of the parts together confers some survival advantage (or is benign in terms of survival) then the changes will tend to be passed on to the next generation. In other words, bringing two parts together can increase the chances of survival more than the parts being separate. Then, in a future generation, another part gets added, conferring even more survival value, and so on. Thus, structures better and better suited to survival are produced. Here's the kicker: the function of the early versions of the mousetrap need not even have involved catching mice at all so long as some net survival advantage was gained by combining parts! When looked at in these terms, there is no basis on which to deny the base of the mousetrap to have originally served as a doorstop!

At some point, the functions of the structure changed from whatever they were to by catching mice. This is immediately apparent to anyone familiar with Natural Selection and Behe's poster child for ID, the bacterium flagellum. When Behe artificially rules out functional change the flagellum seems 'irreducible', but he provides no good reason that we should accept omitting such evolutionary paths to this structure. He is simply invoking an artificial restriction that he claims Evolution can not violate (yet it clearly can and does) simply because it makes IC look good and for no other reason that anyone can fathom.

Does the Type III secretory system, which comprises part of the flagellum motor, lose its function when combined with another part on its way to powering the flagellum? Quite probably. Does this matter? Not at all if a net advantage is gained.

For all his philosophizing he has yet to perform a single experiment to confirm irreducible complexity. I can think of a number of experiments off the top of my head to test the validity of IC. One is simply looking at the parts of a complex structure such as the bacterium flagellum and seeing if the parts have analogous structures in related organisms. That the individual proteins of the flagellum are completely conserved and have wholly different functions in related bacteria does not bode well for IC at all and clearly points to an evolutionary process. Why would you, if you wanted to design a mousetrap as opposed to evolve it, use a blender? I think if you wanted to make a mousetrap you would do what is already done - create the individual parts specific to the task.

The blood clotting cascade, another of Behe's examples, can also be tested as to whether it fits the IC model. In this case, we do not have a single structure composed of several proteins, but a series of biochemical reactions. Ideally, one would like to be able to remove one or more enzymes catalyzing reactions in the cascade. Can this be done? Absolutely. Genetically engineering mice to inactiveate genes is routine these days. Dr. Behe has never even suggested such experiments, let alone performed them. Fortunately, less lazy researchers have. Knocking out one gene or even several encoding enzymes in the cascade does not stop the blood of mice from clotting. That knockout mice blood doesn't clot as well is irrelevant, since Behe predicted there should be no clotting ability at all. Of course, all that has to be done is look at the blood clotting cascade in whales and dolphins to see that they have what Behe would have considered an incomplete cascade already.

Indeed, all examples held up as for IC are similarly fatally flawed. Behe claims that 'blind searches do not lead to complex systems.' Really? Again, this is a blanket assumption for which he has no evidential basis for making, and Dr. Behe has never made an attempt at experimentally verifying his ideas. For purely random processes this statement is true, but Natural Selection is anything but random. For examples of such complexity arising from blind searches just google 'genetic algorithms'. A word to the wise: If you are going to put forward a radical idea such as this, you'd better have something to back it up with and that something had better be more than half-baked philosophizing.

Interestingly, Behe says 'I think the most compelling evidence for common decent is when you see features in organisms that seem not to have any particular function but look like genetic accidents and if that's the case then a kind of a parsimonious or a reasonable explanation is that these organisms are both descended from some previous organism. This genetic accident happened in the previous organism and both lines descending from that earlier one inherited the change.'

Wait a minute, Dr. Behe - You accept common decent, but deny macroevolution? What the....? Is he trying to tell us that bacteria containing the flagellum, which are closely related to bacteria having the Type III secretory system from which it evolved, both have a common ancestor, yet the flagellum needed to be added to the 'design'? For this to work, the molecular genetic evidence pointing to close relationship to these two types of bacteria must be wrong. Not bloody likely. He's trying to have his cake and eat it, too, by picking data supporting his position and ignoring all other data.

The question must be asked: why does Dr. Behe accept some parts of Natural Selection while discarding others? The answer is simple: he has a major problem explaining the existence of broken genes. I once heard PZ Myers say what he'd like most explained by supporters of ID, why a 'designer' would equip humans and other primates with a broken enzyme catalyzing ascorbic acid synthesis. This is exactly why Behe brings a limited version of Natural Selection into his world. He realizes that ID, as originally formulated, has no answer to this. But if you accept one part you must accept, if you are to remain intellectually honest, Natural Selection in its entirety. Note to Dr. Behe: the Theory of Natural Selection is irreducibly complex.

I've already blogged about the example contained in his new book, Edge of Evolution, where Behe claims that the development of malarial resistance to chloroquine through evolutionary processes is improbable. Behe again arbitrarily says that two mutations are required for any level of chloroquine resistance without explaining why no resistance is conferred by a single mutation in the right place except that it suits his argument. 'But suppose in order to be effective it needed not just one but it needed two and with just one that it didn't help or might even hurt the organism. So it had to get a change not only in the left side of its DNA but somewhere in the middle of its DNA as well. Then it turns out that that is a whole lot more difficult than just getting one [mutation].' Sorry, but as many have pointed out, mutation is not the bottleneck in Evolution. The arbritrary assumption that multiple mutations must take place at the same time is simply baseless. And what exactly is he saying? That a designer is making malarial parasites more resistant to human medical interventions in order to make them better killing machines? I don't think he's thought this through...

But my biggest objection is his analogy of the drunken man to Evolution, which falls flat on its face. (I know, I know - bad pun. Bad!) Behe describes his analogy thus: 'Suppose there were this drunk, this dizzy fellow, who had a blindfold on, and you want to get from some place in the city to the top of some tower in the downtown and suppose he's in the suburb. Well if he had to follow a rule that whenever possible you feel the ground going up you have to take a step up and you can never go back down because going back down means becoming less fit in a Darwinian sense, then if this fellow walks along he will climb up onto roofs of cars or onto porches of houses. Once he's up there he'll get stuck and he's not going to find his way to the tower downtown.' Here he's plagiarizing Dawkins' Climbing Mount Improbable example, the peaks of Dawkins' version correspond to the car roofs and porches in Behe's. Such a view gives the false impression that point B is some kind of objective. In Natural Selection there is no desired end point, just what is working at this point.

Behe twists Dawkins' version to make it appear as if the tower (the highest mountain peak in Dawkins' version) can't be reached by random processes without outside help because it is only one person. The likelihood that one person will reach the tower through a random walk with the rule that you can't take downward steps is indeed extremely low. But Evolution is an ensemble of organisms each taking paths going in any direction without any thought as to where they will end up, not a single one trying to get from A to B. To make this analogy work better, you need many, many drunks (an experiment which seems to be carried out spontaneously during Stampede Week every year). As in Behe's version, you will have many drunks finding car roofs or porches, but there will be those that do indeed get to the tower. In fact, with enough drunks all apexes in the search space will be occupied. His is a horribly inaccurate analogy and I've done my best here to try to correct it.

Are there limits to what can and can not be done by Natural Selection? Absolutely, but it's quite clear that Dr. Behe has not found the Edge of Evolution yet at all.

Yet another nail in the coffin of ID

Seen any of the Terminator movies lately? If so, you may want to wait a while before reading this, but this is cool. Trust me. Even if you spell it 'evilution', you are going to think this is cool. Really cool. Alan Bellows did a writeup on hardware evolution, a brand new area of study, which has direct parallels to biological evolution. The main figure in this article is a Dr. Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex. The experiment that has so wowed me involved the use of a field-programmed gate array (FPGA) to distinguish between two tones. The FPGA used was small, only 10 x 10 cells in size, and removed access to the system clock (I presume that this ensured that the program could not time the waveforms coming in and accidentally result in a program that just measured the waveform frequencies). Dr. Thompson programmed in a random set of binary data, the initial DNA if you will, and judged the ability of each set of digital DNA. The programs which produced the best ability to differentiate between tones were kept for the next generation, with a bit of random mutation thrown in for good measure.

"For the first hundred generations or so, there were few indications that the circuit-spawn were any improvement over their random-blob ancestors. But soon the chip began to show some encouraging twitches. By generation #220 the FPGA was essentially mimicking the input it received, a reaction which was a far cry from the desired result but evidence of progress nonetheless. The chip's performance improved in minuscule increments as the non-stop electronic orgy produced a parade of increasingly competent offspring. Around generation #650, the chip had developed some sensitivity to the 1kHz waveform, and by generation #1,400 its success rate in identifying either tone had increased to more than 50%.

Finally, after just over 4,000 generations, [the] test system settled upon the best program. When Dr. Thompson played the 1kHz tone, the microchip unfailingly reacted by decreasing its power output to zero volts. When he played the 10kHz tone, the output jumped up to five volts. He pushed the chip even farther by requiring it to react to vocal "stop" and "go" commands, a task it met with a few hundred more generations of evolution. As predicted, the principle of natural selection could successfully produce specialized circuits using a fraction of the resources a human would have required. And no one had the foggiest notion how it worked." And that is what is so cool about this. Until the program was back-engineered, how it did what it did was a complete unknown and totally up to the selection process.

And that was where the surprises were found. A mere 37 of its logic gates were used, compared to hundreds of thousands in a sound processor designed specifically for the task. Even though only a very few gates were used, they were organized in a complex and completely unexpected way. "The plucky chip was utilizing only thirty-seven of its one hundred logic gates, and most of them were arranged in a curious collection of feedback loops. Five individual logic cells were functionally disconnected from the rest– with no pathways that would allow them to influence the output– yet when the researcher disabled any one of them the chip lost its ability to discriminate the tones. Furthermore, the final program did not work reliably when it was loaded onto other FPGAs of the same type." The purpose of the seemingly unconnected logic cells seems to be in supplying magnetic flux, and the program makes use of this in lieu of not having access to the system clock.

"These evolutionary computer systems may almost appear to demonstrate a kind of sentience as they dispense graceful solutions to complex problems. But this apparent intelligence is an illusion caused by the fact that the overwhelming majority of design variations tested by the system– most of them appallingly unfit for the task– are never revealed." This concept is key in understanding why proponents of intelligent design (IDiots) see conscious design everywhere. Natural selection eliminated the 'designs' that didn't work, so we only see the ones that do! So everything around us are the resulting successful designs. It's no wonder why engineers see god everywhere. But it's all an illusion, complexity arising from a simple set of rules. What works moves on, what doesn't is discarded. Random mutations occur ensuring that falsely optimized configurations don't occur. Evolution is such an elegant process!

From Pharyngula, PZ Meyers writes: "That looks a lot like what we see in developmental networks in living organisms — unpredictable results when pieces are "disconnected", or mutated, lots and lots of odd feedback loops everywhere, and sensitivity to specific conditions (although we also see selection for fidelity from generation to generation, more so than occurred in this exercise, I think). This is exactly what evolution does, producing a functional complexity from random input."

I think there are limits on the analogy to biological evolution, but the parallels are immediately obvious. There will always be those out there that say that Dr. Thompson was the designer because he set up the initial conditions. But simulating the initial conditions and creating them (as many IDiots are wont to say of the ) are two very different things, so reading that kind of IDiocy into this is reaching. One thing this experiment makes abundantly clear is that by following the rules set out by natural selection apparent complexity can become manifest in a relatively short amount of time.

Science is so cool.

God vs Evo - Last Installment

Many of us that have looked at religious or anti-religious blog comments will have seen this inanity: "If there were no god nothing would stop me from killing and raping" or some similar idiocy. I have news for people that believe this crap. Morality is innate. This has been well-demonstrated scientifically. If you want to review the literature on the subject, I highly recommend reading Marc Hauser's Moral Minds.

It not only totally confounds me, but insults me to no end this idiotic, stupid and dispicable belief that people chose to believe Evo to be the path that life took must be immoral. Why is this belief prevalent? Kent Hovind espoused this crap and look where he is. Don't bend over for the soap, Kent. Believers think this to be the case because they believe that atheists must be denying god even though for some reason we know god exists. Evo is part of our denial. This silly and prejudiced belief is born of arrogance. How can anybody not believe god exists when I 'know' he does? This so-called 'inner knowledge' is synonumous with belief, and is therefore not knowledge at all. Knowledge requires evidence, for which there is (again) none. The internet show The Things That Matter Most did a whole show entitled Evidence for God Within Our Souls and Desires without ever first providing evidence for the very existence of the thing they are using to provide evidence for God!

Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Creationists deny the Science behind Evo at every turn! I've shown clearly that creationism is born of ignorance. In the 21st century, this is inexcusable. The new form of ignorance is so-called 'intelligent design', an idea completely devoid of substance. There is no Science here, folks. Who designed life? How was life designed? How was the design implemented? Without answers to these questions, you are essentially left with goddidit. Empty and vacuous.

Don shows he is no different, and I was absolutely insensed by his quoting Julian Huxley. Don has, to his credit, apologized (I'm not sure he knows exactly what for, though), but this is irrelevant. He believes this travesty, and so has raised my ire... We begin yet again with the last part in this series.

"The world's leading evolutionist, the late Sir Julian Huxley, grandson of Thomas Henry Huxley (Darwin's Bulldog) and brother of Aldous Huxley, once said on the Merv Griffin show that scientists would have not been so ready to accept Darwin's theory of evolution except for the fact that the idea of God was not compatible with their sex mores." Now Don has really pissed me off. What he implied is that those that accept Evolution are really just looking for an excuse to remove God from their lives and deny God's existence, even though they know somewhere in their minds that God exists.

Let me tell you something, Don,. I don't just deny God's existence, I have absolutely no thought as to God's existence until some theist tries to convince me otherwise. In essence, anyone that believes as 'Sir' Julian Huxley, that atheists use Evo as an excuse to be 'wicked', is projecting their prejudice and bigotry onto their inability to understand atheism. Kent Hovind said as much in a debate with Prof. Pagliucci that I blogged about some time ago. I find it ironic (and not without some self-satisfaction, I'm embarrassed to admit. Well, no, but I have to say that…) that I am where I am, and he is where he is now. I have actually had someone ask me on my blog, what I did that I don't feel that I can be forgiven for? My reply is 'Nothing. What did you do that you feel YOU need to be forgiven for?' Religiosity of a society has been shown to have a direct link to crime, spousal and child abuse. Yet, I would not stoop to call religious people wife-beating, child molesting criminals. I would not even say that religion is a cause for these undesirable activities. That would be an improper conclusion. 'Sir' Julian Huxley can (figuratively) go to hell.

I'm not looking to be saved, nor am I looking to for myself. I know who and what I am. I like my life. You say that Christians are supposed to 'witness' (what were they witness to?) and not coerce, but the two look very much the same. America seems well on its way to making that dream a reality. I have seen the faces of evil, and they look a lot like Jim Baker, Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart and the late Jerry Falwell, amongst a host of others. People that have created corporations selling fear of what will happen in an afterlife they have no idea even exists. Hope does not beget reality.

I must admit, your engineer friend did change my mind about one thing: Sam Harris is right. I now realize that the PC attitude I had towards religion is only an invitation to be trampled by Believers. To quote Christopher Hitchens, 'Religion becomes philosphy as astrology becomes astronomy.' It is my fervent hope that this happens.

Your friend asked how I will handle death. As Mark Twain is attributed as saying, "I do not fear death, in view of the fact that I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it." Amen. Atheism makes one realize that the one life we have is precious and by extension we understand that everyone's life is precious. I'm not so sure religion promotes this, particularly those with the promise of an afterlife, as I have seen ample evidence to the contrary. I'll keep my atheism, thank you.

I just don't see a point in any further response. But I will keep listening to your show [The Things That Matter Most]. I am very pleased that you do not limit yourself to Believers as many would do, and many of your guests (believers or not) have been quite interesting. I'm looking forward to the interview with Vic Stenger.

Randy Tyson

God vs Evo - Part III

So how does an engineer come to believe that life was designed, discarding a heck of a lot of data to the contrary, as well as a perfectly good explanation? It didn't take a lot of thinking. The first is obvious. Having grown up in a religious setting makes for a prediliction of seeing design in life. We often borrow ideas from nature and incorporate them into things we actually do design. The mind is prepared by both a religious upbringing and a career in engineering to see design. But nature does what works, discarding things that don't. This creates an illusion of design.

Remember, 99% of all species that have ever lived on this planet are long gone. We see a progression of complexity everywhere we look. The eye is more complex in new species than in phyla which have been around longer. The brain of humans is more complex than that of a chimpanzee, but not dissimilar. There are so many examples that I could give, but other authors have said it better elsewhere. Common descent is the only explanation for the similarities and the dissimilarities that we see.

Anyhow, back to the battle. I left off with Don attempting to tell me that atheists want minority rule....

It is instructive to look at a more secular society in comparison. From here in The Great White North, we look southward and see politicians tripping over each other in their eagerness to demonstrate that they are more religious than their opponents (it's embarrassing to watch…); we see biblical references in what should be secular institutions like judicial buildings even though neither your legal system or ours has anything to do with them and the law must be for everyone, not just Believers; we see official favoritism towards Christian groups even though the First Amendment was placed in your own constitution to prevent that very thing. That's just for a start.

In Canada, no one running for public office either expresses their religiosity or questions that of others; we do not place obviously divisive symbols representing only one group (and thereby giving that group preferential treatment) in our public institutions. I was asked to take an oath last year. In Canada, there are different oaths depending on whether you are theist or atheist. Both are equally legally binding. This kind of accommodation hurts no one and at the same time does not show any favoritism. It works incredibly well and completely circumvents the current hiccups in the American system due to theocratic 'reforms'. I was not a vocal atheist at all until my eyes were opened by people like Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly and their intolerant ilk. We don't have them up here, yet there are many theist politicians in Canada. It just doesn't matter to us unless their religiosity starts to become policy. It's not that we don't care about beliefs, it's just that we accept that everyone is an individual and we go out of our way to accommodate widely varying beliefs. As a result, we have almost completely avoided the problems that occur when religion is mixed with politics. We have seen what happens when societies become theocratic. Life under the Taliban was truly repressive, and if you don't think that America can end up that way you are kidding yourself.

I was surprised that Don didn't bring up Michael Behe's concept of irreducible complexity, though he does list his book as reading material at the end. The only thing as discredited as the concept of irreducible complexity (demolished even before the book was published) was his atrocious and laughable testimony at the Kitzmiller trial. Behe can't even be bothered to keep up with the relevant literature, so how can he be taken seriously? Contrary to Don's belief, there is no conspiracy in Science to keep ID out of the journals. From Science classes, yes, but that's because ID contains no Science. It's vacuous. The trick to getting published is to present positive evidence for something, not negative evidence against something else. ID has no positive evidence in its favor and Judge Jones recognized this in the Kitzmiller trial. The only place where Evo is in crisis is in the court of public opinion and the Disco Institute has done a remarkable, if harmful, job of it. The US is the laughing stock of the world, ranking second only to Turkey in rejecting Evo.

In essence, and as usual, the sum total of evidence presented for design was zilch, unless you count "I am an engineer. I know design when I see it. This is design." This sums up the ID position in toto. The rest just seems to be twisted attacks on Evo, which is to say, not evidence at all.

And since he spoke of Newton, perhaps the greatest mind in history, Newton found the inclusion of God unnecessary in his Principia till he hit a snag. He couldn't get the planetary system to stabilize in his math, so what did he do? You guessed it. He invokes God. Perturbation theory solved the problem later on, of course. I mention this because it shows that even the greatest minds jump to a supernatural conclusion when they find that they can't explain something. God has always been the God-of-the-gaps. Your friend himself retreats into this trap himself several times. For instance, he says "If evolutionists know that life evolved from non-life why don't they create life in the laboratory." (He never did answer my question as to why a designer would incorporate a broken enzyme into the design. There are a lot of other reasons, all in a similar vein, to reject the design hypothesis- the eye (wired backwards), the ureter (makes a rather unnecessarily circuitous route), etc. As an engineer, I'm surprised that he has missed all this. I mean, what kind of designer throws away 99% of his designs after he builds them? "if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck….", you fire the duck's ass for incompetence.)

As to the complexity of the brain, I don't know enough about devo to answer his criticism properly. But then, neither does he to have made it in the first place. (I've asked a devo specialist for insight into this...) But I do know that the brain does self-assemble under biochemical control, which places it under the purview of Evo (actually, Evo/Devo). A great deal is known about brain development, and none of the explanations involve magic. My limited understanding that chemical signaling is important, which means that the timing of when genes are turned on and off is critical in terms of the final outcome. A gene for consciousness, you ask? There isn't one, of course. Don seems to maintain this strawman view of Evo – one gene, one trait. There are a couple of reasons why mathematics is a bad way of dealing with Evo. First, Evo simply doesn't lend itself well to mathematics, though it is used in simulating it with computer modeling. Second, there aren't many (if any) mathematicians out there that are also well-versed in the nuances of Evo. Evo is not for the faint of heart (or mind), and William Dumbski [sic] especially seems utterly incapable of understanding it. Spend less time trying to prove that brain development is magic and more time looking at how it does in fact develop. And Don wonders why I think mathematicians without training in Biology (like Dumbski [sic]) should stick to mathematics.

"Science is built on truth not consensus," Don said. Sort of, but I'm not sure what truth means. Is truth the observation? It's certainly not theories. Truth is an absolute. Scientific theories are provisional hypotheses which: explain the current data; explain data obtained after positing the hypothesis; makes testable predictions; and is falsifiable. Theories model reality (truth). In discussing the current thinking about a particular theory, it is often useful (as in the case of Evo) to poll the experts. Each individual expert, however, judges the validity of the theory according to the characteristics that I have just listed. Truth is the ideal goal, but I don't think that any scientific theory has accomplished this. Pretty much everything he wrote was just a rehash of failed apologetics mixed in with Disco Institute PR releases (which is all they have ever produced on ID).

Don brings up the old 'evil atheist' list. But the implied insult to all atheists is that old canard of the evil atheist list, and I took it personally. Very personally. Is he saying that I am prone to mass murder? That in being an atheist, I am evil? Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler... Wait - Hitler? Sorry, while ideologues all with personal ambition (to the point where they were really promoting religions without a deity), Hitler was a THEIST. He was born and raised Catholic (and tellingly never excommunicated) and said often that in his final solution he was doing God's work. I would not insult any Believer with a list of theists that committed atrocities in the name of religion, even though the body count would be far higher my list, starting with numerous characters in the Bible, to de Torquemada, to Jim Jones, to David Karesh, to Paul Hill. (Ooops. That's a list, isn't it?) I don't like to speak in biblical terminology, but if there is such a thing as evil, Jerry Falwell (a man who promoted hatred and fear in his followers) would be my candidate as its personification. George Bush Sr. knowingly allowed 500,000-1,000,000 Iraqis (the estimate provided to the White House by the NSA) to die due to ineffective sanctions post-first Gulf War. All he had to do was give the Shiites and Kurds ammo and Hussein (a man Bush himself helped to power) would have been toppled with far less loss of life. Not ideal, but far better than what actually occurred. Most of those sanction victims were children. That puts him in amongst the top killers of all time, but history is written by the victors. After all that killing by proxy, I don't remember George acknowledging his atheism. In fact he has been quoted as saying he doesn't think atheist Americans should be considered citizens. How Christian of him.

I live a very moral life, though my morals and ethics may be different from yours and your friend's, I will put them up against anyone else's for comparison any time. I would much prefer to speak of those atheists that have done something with their lives, like Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln (probably a deist, but certainly not a Christian), Thomas Paine (a deist, but with significant atheist leanings), Oscar Wilde, Albert Camus, Isaac Asimov and many, many others, as I would of theists that have performed similar works. Religion is no guarantee of morality. The Bible itself condones slavery (amongst other unsavory behaviors), something that today we find reprehensible. To make that list and recite it to me, your friend made my case for me against religion. I am dismayed, despondent and insulted beyond measure by the response. The Evolution of our species (and others, it has been found) has resulted in an innate set of moral rules. The so-called Golden Rule is just a codification of this. Mere babies will behave in accordance to this rule, far younger than they could have been taught it, or acknowledge the existence of God. Science has at every turn peeled back the layers of religious belief till there is essentially nothing left but denial.

In the final part, Don shows his true baseless prejudice against atheists (and pissed me off) when he quotes Julian Huxley....

God vs. Evo Part II

I just realized something last night. I really should have asked these people if I could put the communications I have had with Lael and Don up on my blog. It never occurred to me till now to do that, and for that I do apologize, but seeing as it's a bit of a fait accompli....

One thing you will clearly notice with creationists in general is the selective change in standards of evidence used for and against anything related to religion and its war on Science. For instance, yesterday my comments about the complete and utter lack of evidence for the biblical Jesus. There are no contemporary sources accounting Jesus' life (Josephus wasn't even born yet and there are major problems with using Tacitus, since it is likely that not only did he NOT write anything about Jesus, that the writing was done much later and someone attempted to attribute the authorship to him), no corroboration of the 'historical' account (there was no census taken at the time of Jesus' birth, except one that was NOT done by Pontius Pilate, and that one some time prior to even the earliest possible birth date, no Massacre of the Innocents is recorded anywhere but the Bible, no accounts outside of biblical codices of even his existence). With Caesar, we have the man's own words, the dedications to him and an unbroken history of political rulership which includes him. We have none of this with Jesus.

I mentioned yesterday that Don keeps demanding hard scientific evidence to refute the at-first-glance impressive odds against life-by-natural causes, while thinking that anecdotal evidence of people saying they saw something that might be Noah's Ark is the motherload of proof! What's needed in any discussion like this is an evidentiary standard that encompasses both positions. A good start would be a framework that has already shown itself to work, so let's try the legal framework. Jesus: No substantiation or corroborating evidence, no eyewitness accounts, no physical evidence. In short nothing. Noah, Moses and David fall short as well. Evo, on the other hand, has comparative morphology, paleontology and molecular genetic evidence all corroborating each other under one framework theory. Kind of tough to dispute it, but Don tries. He mentions the finding of a fossil fish that pushes back the earliest date of this form of complex life and claims that by altering our timeline as we must do in this situation makes Evo unfalsifiable. Sorry, but that's bullshit. I did know of this recent finding. Was I worried? No, because even though it did indeed change the timeline, but IT DID NOT FORCE AN OUT-OF-ORDER SEQUENCE. If you find a fossil rabbit in the Cambrian, then we've got a problem and ToE is falsified. Not only is Science not dogma, it continually works towards divesting itself of dogma.

Don mentions Simon Greenleaf's conclusion after viewing all the evidence that the Ascention actually occurred is hardly impressive in the light that he came from a very religious family (that all the family members had biblical names was a bit of a clue) and his standard of evidence was likely to have lowered in favor of inclusion rather than exclusion of questionable sources. Kinda like Don...

On to Part II....

(Continuing from "Don attempts to tell me...")

that Christians were the founders of Science. Baloney! Ask Galileo (persecuted for scientific conclusions not held by the Church), Descartes (forced into fleeing to the Netherlands by religious authority), Hypatia (murdered by a Christian mob incited by "Saint" Bernard) and others what religion thought of their scientific advances. Early scientists professed their Christianity, therefore Christianity was responsible for the invention of modern Science?!? This is spurious logic. We don't know how many of them were actually atheists. Those that professed their disbelief had a nasty tendency to be murdered by religious authority. These men were thinkers in spite of religion, NOT because of it, and it was Christianity that tried to suppress their work and do them bodily harm. Hypatia (from what little we know of her she was a remarkable woman) was flayed alive with abalone shells by a Christian mob! Christianity has an uninterrupted history of suppressing knowledge. For instance, the church even attempted to suppress the invention of the printing press! Far be it for the church to allow the common man to read the scriptures! They might start thinking about it for themselves! For once they were right. The Bible has turned more people to atheism than anything else. Besides, it was the ancient Greeks, not Christians, which started the modern process of Science. Islam had at one time a much better record than Christianity for fostering modern scientific thought. The word 'algebra' and most star names are of Arabic origin, and we use Arabic numerals.;

that there are real prophecies in the bible even though every last one is either self-fulfilling or fulfilled within the biblical text. Sam Harris has likened the latter are much like prophecies made in The Fellowship of the Ring coming to fruition in The Return of the King! C'mon, every generation since the beginning of Christianity thought that the prophecies were being fulfilled and that they were in the End Times! They aren't at all specific and require 'interpretation', just like Nostradamus'. Let's put this claim that all these prophecies have come to fruition to the test. Remember, I only need to show one failure. How about Ezekiel's Tyre prophecy (Ezek. 26: 1-11; 29:17-20)? Tyre was supposed to have been destroyed. A quick look at a map will show where Tyre still stands. He also predicts that Babylon would conquer Egypt. I don't think that one will ever be fulfilled for some reason... As a prophet, Ezekiel, well, sucked. Utterly. And forget the Book of Daniel prophecies, since scholars agree that it was written in ca. 165 BCE and not 6th cent. BCE that it claims, and thus simply wrote prophecy through the eyes of then recent history. Looked good while the fraud lasted, though. The list just goes on and on and on. A full (and very long) list of failed prophecies is available at The Skeptic's Bible. I'd like to see one, just one so-called prophecy that wasn't self-fulfilling, unambiguous, doesn't require 'interpretation' and wasn't made after the event actually took place. Just one.

implying that Einstein was correct when he said God does not play dice when time has shown us that Bohr was correct and God does indeed gamble. I'm not sure where Don is going with this quote, other than continuing his disingenuous quote mining. Einstein's 'god' has absolutely no relation to an Abrahamic god, or any personal god. He was quite clear on that subject. In 1935 Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky proposed an experiment called the 'EPR paradox' in a vain attempt to refute Quantum Mechanics, the results of which they thought were impossible. It's unfortunate that Einstein never lived to see the results of the actual experiment, for which Einstein's 'impossible' outcome was indeed observed. I like to think that he would have dropped his objections to QM having seen the results.;

that because we have so few transitional fossils that Evo is discredited (without accounting for the actual many transitional forms that have been found. Can anyone say bird? horse? whale? etc.?). I'm not a big fan of Stephen Gould (the more I learn about him the less I like him), but he may have been correct about punctuated equilibrium (the debate goes on). However, this was so obviously a quote mine. Gould may very well have said "We fancy ourselves as the only true students of life's history, yet to preserve our favored account of evolution by natural selection we view our data as so bad that we never see the very process we profess to study.", yet he remained a scientist staunchly committed to the study Evolution right through to his death. I frown greatly upon quote mining, and Don does this all over the place.;

that there is some sort of crisis in biology over Evo (You have GOT to be kidding me. I'm in the field and have never heard one peep about it till now...). I think I saw that book in a store last summer and on the jacket the promo started with 'There is a quiet controversy…', at which I started laughing [you might remember that incident in McNally-Robinson, Boomer]. It's so quiet it's silent.;

that "Christ commanded Christians to be witnesses not coercive." WHAT!?!?!? Coercion doesn't have to involve putting someone to torture. It means attempting to subvert them to your belief in any way, INCLUDING 'WITNESSING'! There is a double standard here. When Believers 'witness' it is not only acceptable, but many think it is commanded by their god. When atheists try to reason with Believers about the illogical nature of their (blind) faith, whoa, Nelly! That's evil! The only thing that atheists have ever wanted was to have a level playing field. Even most of the militant ones. Why do you think they went militant? If theists respected nontheists (or believers in religions other than their own) they would see how their views of how things should work impinge on them. Putting the Ten Commandments in a secular building is favoritism towards a group, in this case the Christians (the Ten Commandments were indeed NOT the basis for the legal system, but rather has Hammurabi to thank for its basis.) Let's face it. It is the Christian right that is doing all the trampling, NOT atheists.

"Atheists don't want minority rights, they want minority rule." Bullshit. The way I see it, the Christian right wants a theocracy, and all others (including, but not limited to, atheists) are simply fighting for their survival. Debbie Schlussel believes that freedom of religion does not include freedom from religion, something I doubt the Founding Fathers intended the First Ammendment to mean. Ann Coulter- well, no one gives a hoot what that guy thinks. Doesn't anybody see the danger inherent in this kind of intolerance? Such a slippery slope leads to the logical conclusion of returning to the days where nonbelievers, or believers in other religions, were oppressed. What Don mistakes for an attempt at 'minority rule' is simply the inevitable (and well-deserved) backlash of those that the religious right has wronged. The religious right has had it coming for some time now.

I talk a bit about our significantly more secular (for now) society, whether or not Science is about Truth and comment on the 'impossible' complexity of the brain in Part III.

My ongoing conversation with the religious at The Things That Matter Most...

Well, anyone that is still with me after reading that monstrous, convoluted blog entry of yesterday is truly hardcore. For those who have not read the prior blog entry on this, it is necessary to at least refer to it to fully understand this and the next several entries. I'm going to give people a bit of a break and separate my response out into several parts. I'd like to say that these things are labors of love, but I don't think the word 'love' is appropriate. Certainly, they're not my usual cup of tea, since I like to pick a topic, write succinctly and clearly on that without going off on tangents, and not bore/confuse you poor readers to death.

I don't know that I will ever send this off to Don Ortloff (via Lael Arrington), but I will post it here. The quote mining of Don's I ignored, as I did the anecdotal emotionalistic claptrap at the end designed to try to convert me. To quote Bugs Bunny, 'He don't know me vewy well, do he?' It begins.....

Don:

plays the same invalid numbers game that Dembski plays. William Dumbski [sic] has been thoroughly debunked elsewhere and in the interests of brevity I won't get into it here. All one has to do is google it. Suffice it to say that these number games are self-interested convoluted methods of promoting the argument from personal incredulity that show no more than that DNA sequences could not arise through random chance. Fancy that. ToE says the same thing. The massive fallicies in his arguments have been pointed out to William Dumbski [sic], yet he continues to say things like 'we can not explain cellular machinery without invoking a purposeful design' and then usually brings forth Behe's example of the bacterial flagellum when it has been shown clearly in the literature how in fact the bacterial flagellum could evolve. This makes Dumbski a LIAR. He wants you to believe that a non-purposeful evolutionary process is the same thing as saying it is random. Bullshit. Natural Selection is anything BUT random.;

tries to tell me that Tacitus and Josephus were contemporary sources on Jesus. It is in doubt as to whether Tacitus even was the author of the missive on Jesus, and neither Tacitus nor Josephus had even been born before the supposed Ascention! I reiterate: there are no contemporary accounts of the Jesus/Horus myth! As for the existence of Caesar and why his existence is (now) accepted without question, scholars had long ago established from numerous sources (not all literary) that Caesar was a genuine personage. The reason no on questions his existence is that his existence was established long ago. At least we have Caesar's own writings, which is much more than we have for Jesus. Unlike for Julius Caesar's life, the data surrounding Jesus' birth, life and death is completely uncorroborated even though records from the period are available.;

hypocritically accepts hearsay data of the absurd account of Noah and the flood, and then asks for 'real' evidence for Evo (which he doesn't accept anyway). People say that they have seen reminants of the Ark (you mean that geological formation that people keep mistaking for the Ark?) and finding a bit of wood of approximately the right age. Yes, there was wood, even in the time of Noah. Of course, the whole myth is just a retelling of Ziusudra and the flooding of the Euphrates in ca. 2900 BCE for which we actually have evidence of the event. The same can not be said for poor Noah, nor for the myth of Moses and the Exodus, nor for....;

tries to tell me that the 2nd law of thermodynamics can be applied to preclude the generation of order in an open system (He's trying to snow a Chemist with this?! Boy, was he barking up the wrong tree.);

that asymmetric synthesis is impossible without direction when all that is required is a surface for one optical isomer to be preferred in a reaction. The synthesis of one optical isomer of dl-pairs, such as l-amino acids, over their . l- and not their mirror image d-amino acids are exclusively the building blocks of enzymes, yet have identical physical properties. (asymmetric synthesis is big money in the pharmaceutical industry, which according to him isn't possible);

that Evolution includes the origin of life in its theory, when abiogenesis is a completely different problem. The only relationship between the two is temporal – abiogenesis had to occur before Evo could start its work. We've come a long way since the Stanley-Urey experiment. This is primary evidence that Don has never read anything on Evo outside of Christian 'Science' lit;

that behavior has no biochemical basis (in answer to his question of what part of the genome governs emotions like love, a number of biochemicals like oxytocin, the genes that encode their synthesizing enzymes and the genes which control their activation come to mind immediately) and therefore cannot be under evolutionary control (I would like to know how he then explains the observed genetic changes in the Russian silver fox experiment of Dmitri Belyaev if genetics play no role in behavior, where silver foxes were bred for either tameness or viciousness). Your friend seems to think that one gene-one enzyme is how DNA works. It does not. Genes interact, sometimes in unpredictable was (definitely the case in the Belyaev experiment, unintentionally resulting in changes to coat color and tail stiffness). Emotions such as love are just as likely to develop as fear. Co-operative behavior is just as effective in species which use social coherence as a survival strategy as the fight-or-flight response, even in tooth-and-claw natural selection (there is no such thing as Darwinism). None of this takes away from the actual feeling of love itself or makes it any less wonderful. Again evidence that Don has never read anything on Evo outside of the Disco Institute's official reading list (which means all he knows of Evo is the usual strawman the Diso Insitute disingenuously touts);

Part II tomorrow....