It’s the 22nd of February. 365 days since since the earthquake in Christchurch. At time of writing it’s getting closer and closer to 365.25 days, as it happens.

The Student Council at my school decided to hold two minutes of silence to commemorate the anniversary. This was thoroughly mucked up.

For one, they got the wrong time: the quake happened at 12:51 pm, and not 12:57 as they thought. Secondly – due, ironically, to earthquake strengthening – parts of the school are inaccessible and various bells aren’t working. Thus, much of the school did not hear the bell ringing to signify the beginning and end.

But it still happened, albeit as much as 10 minutes late in my Chemistry class.* And that’s all that matters.

Why am I blathering about this here? Well, next in the queue from Science Essentials is Shake, Rattle, and Lift? It’s about natural disasters, especially earthquakes. She begins:

My son is having nightmares. Not different ones, but the same nightmare every night for the past week. You see, his dad is spending time in Haiti on a mission trip. Considered the least developed country in the Western Hemisphere and one of the poorest in the world, Haiti remains on most Christians’ minds. However, that’s not why it’s on my son’s mind. He is scared there will be another earthquake while daddy is there.

Ah, Haiti. There are too many earthquakes in the world. If you’re wondering, later weeks suggest that the father has returned. I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do on a ‘mission’, but that’s not my problem.

Charles Darwin, considered the Father of Evolution, observed the aftereffects of a large earthquake himself. In 1835, off the coast of Chile, Darwin observed a nearby island that was uplifted as a result of the quake. He was able to measure the distance from sea level to the top of the old waterline. However, his conclusion of how that island, and mountain chains in general, got there is in deep contrast with the conclusions of modern mainstream geologists. “In Darwin’s view, a mountain chain, with its axis of plutonic rock, is the effect of ‘an almost infinite series of small movements.’” (Herbert, S. 2005. Charles Darwin, Geologist. Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 228.) These movements, he believed, were earthquakes.

I have a feeling that that’s a bit of a quote mine. Mountains build: earthquakes certainly help that.

But as we know today, earthquakes are not known to lift continents or mountains. Granted, earthquakes open up large pieces of the ground, and can cause landslides, volcanoes, and tsunamis, but they do not cause a mountain range to appear, or to be lifted higher than it once was. And although Darwin’s future colleagues disagree with his hypothesis, they are still inclined to look to some degree of evolutionary thought in order to explain the existence of today’s high mountain ranges, which instead appear to have been elevated in a recent powerful event.

Er no, that’s completely wrong. Earthquakes do lift things, including mountains. Whatever you say about mountains, they certainly weren’t all raised at once – I believe the Appalachians and the Rockys are usually used to demonstrate that kind of thing. And consider the marine terraces above: what you have there is the coast being uplifted and then eroded several times – that would take awhile, and it’s a genuine case of uplift.

Which type of natural disaster do you find the most scientifically interesting to discuss from a creationist perspective?

Well that’s an odd question. Asteroid impacts, maybe? I mean to say, how was the Fall supposed to divert them into striking Earth? They surely can’t have been always going to hit us…

Now, with the accuracy problems that this post has, there were always going to be comments. The first half-dozen or so were supportive, until:

Besides plate boundaries, one of the other most common places where earthquakes occur is along mountain belts. In my area of Colorado, earthquakes occur along the mountain ranges quite frequently. But here it is mainly because the mountains are wearing down and isostatic rebound is taking place. The Himalayas have been measured to still be rising, and the uplift is associated with many earthquakes. The seismic signatures of these Himalayan quakes can be measured and show to be dominated by compressive stress which logically results in crustal shortening and mountain building.

Yes, this is from “Chris Shorey”. The next one of interest is:

Dr. Forlow,

I have questions concerning the teaching of Geology… From the biblical creationist view,
would a cross section of the earth (with it’s layers) appear to be the same as a drawing that
a secular scientist would produce? Is there agreement there? If not, what are the differences?
Where could I find a biblical creationist’s version of this?

Thanks,
Mark L

Yes, the rot of creationism goes so far that people will ask if they are allowed to believe in this or that scientific theory. That’s…ridiculous. They really think that being a ‘secular scientist’ will mean that you get different results. Honestly…

Forlow replied:

Mark, It depends upon which ‘layers’ you are referring to. We would agree with the basic construction of the layers of the earth (inner, outer, mantle, crust), while still keeping in mind that some of the information even in this is still theoretical as scientists have only been able to drill down a fraction of the crust. The disagreement would be as to whether the construction of these layers were Designed or did they spin down from a cosmic dust cloud billions of years ago. One good article to read is From Rocks to Brain, pg. 17 of the Septemeber 2011 Acts and Facts issue.

My response to that at the time was:

In short: “Darwinism is a religion.” Another one for the Bingo page.

Sherwin attempts to sow doubt in every subject that he touches – remember, just because we don’t know something now doesn’t mean we never will. And creationists really do need to brush up on the literary techniques – they know ‘biblical allusion’ almost too well, but they really don’t get metaphors.

Should that be amended to ‘Darwinism is a Conspiracy’?

That article doesn’t answer the question – again, it’s Sherwin sowing doubt everywhere he can. And we have in Forlow’s response a bit of the creationist ‘you need eyewitness evidence’ idea of science: So what if we have only been able to drill down a small way into the crust? We can make measurements either way. And still nobody has said why the creationists even could disagree with what ‘secular science’ has produced here.

Cass Collins asks:

It’s a little off-subject but I have always wondered how evolutionists answer the question of why, if it supposedly took the Colorado river millions of years to form the Grand Canyon, we don’t have thousands of “Grand Canyons” all over the place.

Because the ground in those parts is uplifting, so the river goes deeper. That doesn’t happen everywhere, you know.

David Glaze says:

The lifting and sinking of the continents on the grand scale is due to the tetonic plate movments. But surely during a earthquake or valcanio there can be a lifting or sinking of land mass. Also no one mentioned the breaking up of the contenents is the day of Peleg. No that must have been a great event to have lived through.

Mr Glaze may wish to read this.

Next up was The Effect Problem:

The most certain and universal of all scientific principles is that of causality, or the law of cause and effect.  The implications of this principle have been fought vigorously in the theological and philosophical disciplines, but there is no question of its universal acceptance in the world of experimental science, as well as in ordinary experience.

Read more about The Effect Problem.

As we’ve already gone over, the ‘law of cause and effect’ is not a thing.

The K-5 activities read as follows:

Background Reading: Earthquake

1)      Research a career as a geophysicist. Some of the divisions include: seismologist, marine geophysicists, exploration geophysicists, petroleum geophysicists, mining geophysicists, environmental geophysicists, atmospheric physicist, gravity geophysicist, magnetic geophysicist, electromagnetic geophysicist, and electrical geophysicist. Present your findings to the class.

2)      Build your own seismograph using products found around the house!

3)      Watch this video about earthquakes. Be aware, this is a secular site.

4)      Monitor earthquakes regionally and globally. Plot them on a map.

What has she got against PBS?

The only comment is from a person asking for a picture of seismograph activity.

Then come the 6-12 ones:

Background Reading: Earthquake

1)      Use the Earthquake Slip Experiment to help your students determine whether the time of the next earthquake or the amount of slip in the next earthquake can be predicted.

I’m not entirely sure how that helps.

2)      Using the recent earthquakes in the Northeast portion of the US (8/2011), in Japan (3/2011), in Haiti (2/2010), in Iran (12/2003), in Seattle (2/2001), and in Turkey (8/1999), have students research to answer the following questions:

• What was the magnitude of this earthquake?
• Why was this earthquake so devastating?
• Which earthquake zone was involved?
• What are the names of the tectonic plates that intersect in the earthquake area?y
• How far away was the earthquake felt?
• Did the earthquake trigger any other disasters?

That’s an odd list. Where’s Christchurch? Or the Boxing Day Quake/Tsunami?

3)      Explore real-time earthquakes. Discover by fault or map the areas that have experienced the highest levels of recent activity. Discuss if there are other factors which may have contributed to the recent activity.

Interestingly, their world maps seem to exclude NZ quakes. They’ve probably been inundated. See here for what you’re missing.

4)      Have students prepare an Earthquake Emergency Plan for their own town. Include information on the impact of an earthquake in their town, an analysis of the kind of buildings that may be in danger during an earthquake, a plan for how and where to provide shelter and food for those displaced during an earthquake, and a warning system for the town citizens in the event of an earthquake.

Here, of course, we hope the (city/regional) Council have made a good enough plan for us, and concentrate on individual ‘quake plans.

No comments here. The next is Ask Dr Rhonda: Dinosaurs and the Bible. It’s fairly predictable, including the quote mine (without the quote):

No other creature, alive or extinct, was as large as behemoth and had a tail that was like a long, straight tree.

The tail wasn’t like a cedar tree, it apparently moved it ‘like a cedar tree.’

Some comments:

Did God create all the oil and gas we are using today or was it created by the flood?

and

Hi Ron,

There are several theories about that, one stating that oil and gas are biofossils, similar to coal. Within a creationist framework they would then be results of aggregating vegetation in between sedimentary layers, where the pressure of subsequent layers and heat would help turn that vegetational matter into coal, oil and gas.

Another interesting theory I have found was that oil and gas, are not biofossils, but have a abiotic origin (as proposed by Russian and Ukranian geologists). The debate surrounding this theory seems similar to that surrounding creationism at large, in that the basic tenet ‘oil is formed out of biological materials’ is accepted without question and proof, often on the contrary.

Research ‘abiotic origin of petroleum’ if you are interested, and draw your own conclusions.

Start here, I would say.

Finally, the DSs:

Classroom Starters:
Does the earth open up during an earthquake?

For the older student: Are there certain months of the year that are more seismically active than others? If so, which ones?

Not so far as I am aware.

Dinner Table Starters:
What should you do during an earthquake? How can we help others who have survived an earthquake?

Get out of the kitchen and head to the bedrooms, in my case – I don’t want to fall though the floor.

For the older student: Some people believe that earthquakes are happening more frequently than in the past. Would an increase in the number of earthquakes mean Jesus is coming back soon? Why or why not?

That’s the kind of lunacy you usually only see from Andy Schlafly. Here, btw, is an old DpSU from Brian called More Earthquake Data Does Not Mean More Earthquakes. “Young-Earth creationists actually can do real science reporting“.

And that’s a good place to end it, at the end.

*A class we may hear about again, as it happens.

[It was working a minute ago...] As you can tell merely from the title, this video is all about the supposed improbability of abiogenesis.

Feeling lucky? Some people believe that a four leafed clover will bring them good luck, but finding one is pretty rare – about one in 10,000.

And yet people do find them – wikipedia claims that some collectors have found more than a hundred thousand.

Don’t like those odds? Well don’t try poker: the odds of getting an ace-high royal flush are about 646739 to one – not a good gamble.

But again, it does happen. More importantly, you don’t need it to happen to win. And yes, he said about in this context.

And don’t even think about playing the lottery – the odds of winning that are about 14 million to one. What a waste!

Which lottery? In many cases somebody has to win on Saturday night. Just not necessarily you.

Interestingly, these three examples all demonstrate three different flaws in the creationists’ argument, and before they even manage to make it. We are presently 30 seconds in to a one-and-a-half minute video.

How about these odds. Scientists tell us that the building blocks of life are amazingly complex. Basic life needs a minimum of 200 proteins, each of which can have anywhere from twenty, to many thousands of amino acids that must be present and in the correct order.

That’s a smaller number of proteins than I’ve seen…

That’s about 1 in a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion chance for life to exist.

…But a larger figure for probability.

You’d have a better chance being struck by lightening or attacked by a shark.

Now, there a various problems with this line of argument – you can see a good refutation here. One thing I would like you to consider here is an analogy concerning cities. This ‘basic life’ argument is the equivalent of asking how a modern city came to be. These ’200 proteins’ are like taking a tiny green ‘eco-village’ and counting the components, and then saying that there a still quite a few. Thus, cities are too complex to arise without divine intervention.

But that’s not how cities ‘evolved’. Modern cities have replaced older cities, wiping out medieval London and all the rest of it. Similarly, the original life most certainly got wiped out by more modern kinds, which were genuinely better. It is fallacious to claim that the most primitive extant life is the ancestor of more complex varieties, and that it represents the far side of the chasm that must be jumped. Just in the same way that London did not evolve from this eco-village.

And yet we see the wonder of life all around us because our creator designed every detail of every living thing, all with great purpose. Nothing was left to chance.

And here’s another counter – considering that we are here, it really makes no sense to argue against it from this direction. Shark attacks are indeed uncommon, but if a friend has a shark bite you cannot claim that it’s really the result of tripping and falling on the basis of the low probability of an attack.

While we’re here, this is a piece of ideological inconsistency – the creationists maintain that weeds and parasites and carnivorous animals are all the result of the fall, while simultaneously claiming that God “designed every detail of every living thing, all with great purpose.” Arguing that God planned the fall doesn’t fix this – there is an inconsistency here.

So maybe you’d better forget about gambling on the lottery, or cards, or even hunting for that elusive four leafed clover: the odds are not in your favour. Better to bank on the marvellous life God gave you, which he called very good.

See also: faith healing.

And that’s all for this video. Here’s Dr Shorey’s latest:

The very first of these was called Surgeon Says Human Body Did Not Evolve – considering that there’s nothing there that’s different from the one we saw the other day in ATP Synthase and Joseph Kuhn it doesn’t even deserve a place in the title. Moving right along…

The next one is Evolution Made Cavefish Go Blind? Mr Thomas’ argument (if it can be called such) is summed up in his introductory paragraph:

Evolution maintains that as more time passes, living things evolve to acquire better and more useful traits. As such, shouldn’t the loss of a useful trait, such as eyesight, be regarded as the opposite of evolution? Not so, say recent news reports on blind fish.

This is more-or-less equivalent to saying:

• Cars are supposed to be able to turn right
• This is an example of a car turning left
• Therefore, cars do not exist

Additionally, the following is pulled out of thin air:

But obtaining the fish sight system required an input of a massive quantity and quality of information. And making the fish blind merely required the loss of some of that information. How could attributing these opposite processes to “evolution” be scientifically accurate?

Does Mr Thomas know that the blindness was caused by a loss of information? The eyes have skin over them – while it is not unlikely that they are decayed in some way, this would have happened after the skin moved over them. Did that require more or less ‘information’? If B.T. actually knows the answer, he isn’t giving his sources.

While we’re here, these eyes are ‘vestigial organs’, things that we have already learned that the ICR denies the existence of. Admittedly, that video only deals with humans, but there is no reason for only other animals to have such organs.

Next up was New Study Explains Fast-Moving Magma, about a paper in Nature called Kimberlite ascent by assimilation-fuelled buoyancy. You can listen to a reasonably lengthy explanation of this paper here, but for our purposes here are three paragraphs from a ScienceNews article:

Diamond mines tap volcanic rocks called kimberlites, which contain many kinds of crystals that must have formed at high pressures 150 kilometers or more deep, in the planetary layer known as the mantle. How those mantle crystals make it to the surface has been a puzzle, since magma gets denser the more crystals it picks up. Most geologists have assumed that the magma must bubble gases to keep it moving up, but no one has been able to explain exactly how.

Russell and his colleagues realized that gas could do the trick if the magma starts out relatively poor in silicon dioxide, a major component of the Earth’s crust also known as silica. As magma rises through cracks it begins to dissolve the surrounding rock — especially that containing lots of orthopyroxene, a mineral rich in magnesium, iron and silica. The orthopyroxene releases its silica into the magma, and as the silica content rises the magma’s ability to hold dissolved carbon dioxide drops. The gas bubbles out and by the time the kimberlite gets to the surface, it erupts at supersonic speeds.

…

The research could explain why the gem-laden kimberlites appear only in ancient parts of continents, known as cratons, like those in northwestern Canada and southern Africa. Cratons contain lots of orthopyroxene, allowing the magma to gobble it and ascend. “We’ve always wondered, how do the kimberlites find the craton?” Russell says. “They don’t. Their passage through the craton converts them.”

Now, what did Mr Thomas do with this?

The Deccan Traps in India, and especially the Siberian Traps, have vast quantities of lava rock near the earth’s surface. Many geologists have assumed that this formed over millions of years. However, recent studies testing that assumption have shown just the opposite—the magma moved rapidly from great depths.

Err…no. This study is about kimberlites, which the both Deccan and Siberian Traps are not. Having established that, as usual, Mr Thomas has no idea what he’s talking about I think we can just leave him to his blathering.

The final one of the three was by Frank Sherwin, and not Thomas, and was called Animal Laughter Study Doesn’t Help Evolution. It’s a strange, and unjustified title. It’s not supposed to ‘help’ evolution, any more than medical research is supposed to ‘help’ germ theory.

Sherwin begins:

Scientists recently studied laughter in different animals, such as rats and primates, by tickling them. One study compared the sounds made by humans and great apes:

[The researchers] found many acoustic similarities, which has led them to believe that laughter in great apes shared the same evolutionary origin as laughter in humans, suggesting a common ancestor that giggled when tickled.

They concluded that “laughter is at least 30 million to 60 million years old.” With a range of 30 million years, though, it’s safe to assume that evolutionists have no idea when laughter evolved.

Er, no – they have narrowed it down to a specific 30 million year range. Or, in other words, they have probably just found a clade, which had a common ancestor around that time.

Also, does anyone remember Humphreys – the creationist physicist who ‘predicted’ the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus. His prediction, which creationists tend to hail as a triumph, had error bars of an order of magnitude either side of the predicted value. Here, the upper limit is merely twice that of the lower one. So what?

The BBC reported that tickling a gorilla “sounds a lot like human laughter.” However, evolutionists maintain that people evolved from chimpanzees—not gorillas.

He doesn’t get it, does he? To the right is a family tree of Humans and related geni. For one, nobody’s saying that we evolved from chimps, any more than we’re saying chimps evolved from us. Second, if you can establish, say, that a given trait is found in both Gorillas and Humans that pushes it further back than if you only found it in chimps (Pan).

Also, macaws, parrots, and other birds can mimic human laughter even more closely than any primate can, but evolutionists don’t suggest that people evolved from parrots.

That’s mimicry, Frank, which doesn’t count.

And recent reports found that pigeons have numerical abilities like those of primates. Researchers observed pigeons employing “abstract numerical rules” that are “indistinguishable from that displayed by monkeys.” Does this mean that primates share the same evolutionary origin as pigeons?

No, it means that “abstract numerical rules” aren’t all that hard to develop.

The case for laughter could be compared to shivering. When mammals, as well as some large insects and birds, get cold by an external stimulus, they react by shivering. This is the rapid contraction of large muscle groups generating heat, otherwise known as involuntary thermogenesis. An ability to shiver doesn’t suggest that the creatures that do it come from a common ancestor. The same goes for laughing (the reaction) when tickled (the external stimulus).

Shivering is apparently a ‘warm blooded’ thing, which is a trait shared by only a few large groups of organisms. It suggests that the creature is part of one of these groups, though not that the groups themselves are related.

So, it would make sense that rats would react, albeit subjectively, to the tickling. A variety of animals do, but does this reveal anything about how human laughter evolved? The answer is “no.”

Really? Nothing? That has has to qualify the rat’s reaction already tells us something.

But that’s all for today.

Back in late November – yes, Mr Thomas is that late in getting to the story – it was reported that a mummified skeleton of a toddler with a 20 inch head had been found in Peru. What possible explanation could there be for such a find? Mr Thomas is going with Giants:

Some say that giant humans are too incredible to have been real and that the Bible’s references to them are fiction.

However, many extra-biblical records corroborate the existence of giants, including sober accounts from early explorers like Magellan and ancient texts like the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Hebrew Book of Enoch, and the Book of Giants.

Now, a mummy skeleton found in Peru looks like a giant toddler. If that is indeed what it is, then it adds more weight to the idea that giants were real.

The ICR’s position on Gilgamesh is tat it is a corrupted, derivative work based on the original Genesis story (everyone else has a more-or-less opposite view). The Patagon’s encountered by Magellan were a hoax and/or an exaggeration. That doesn’t leave any credible genuinely extra-biblical (that is, indisputably separate from the Jewish religion) giant accounts in B.T.’s list. Skipping past the evidence that the skeleton is indeed that of a toddler:

If the youngster had fully matured, he would have qualified as a giant. The skeleton has other unique features, including large eye sockets, a unique molar structure, and an unusual shelf on its chin. Ritos Andinos Museum Director Renato Davila said, “It’s 20 inches tall, which doesn’t coincide with the stereotypes of humans.” Some anthropologists are reluctant to call it human.

Who are these anthropologists? There is a citation there…to the Daily Mail: Is this an alien skull? Mystery of giant-headed mummy found in Peru. You can see why people refer to the paper as the Daily Fail, can’t you?

Let’s take a look at this article, then:

A mummified elongated skull found in Peru could finally prove the existence of aliens.

The strangely shaped head – almost as big as its 50cm (20in) body – has baffled anthropologists.

It was one of two sets of remains found in the city of Andahuaylillas in the southern province of Quispicanchi.

‘Scientists are baffled’ – always a good sign.

Davila Riquelme said three anthropologists, from Spain and Russia, arrived at the museum last week to investigate the findings and agreed it was ‘not a human being’ and would conduct further studies.

He added: ‘Although the assessment was superficial, it is obvious that its features do not correspond to any ethnic group in the world.’

The remains of an eyeball in the right socket will help determine its genetic DNA – and clear up the controversy if it is human or not.

And there’s a controversy too. Lots of red flags here.

The remains bear a striking resemblance to the triangular crystal skull in the 2008 Indiana Jones film Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – which turned out to be of alien origin and have supernatural powers.

The ‘journalist’, Paul Milligan, may need to be reminded of the fictional nature of said movie. Additionally, the skull looks nothing like the ‘Crystal Skull’ – this one has the forehead going up and up, while the C.S. goes back. And many, many other differences with what is, when it comes down to it, a movie prop.

The Mail article isn’t completely credulous, however. After the article finishes there is another section, entitled “The truth may lie in a simple piece of cloth…”, which begins:

The alternative explanation for the bizarre discovery is that the skull was artificially deformed as part of a tribal ritual.

The practice of skull elongation – to signify group affiliation or social status – dates back 9,000 years.

Aha. So, the alien stuff was for what, exactly?

To return to Mr Thomas’ article, we find that he doesn’t even mention the existence of a caveat. Presumably he read it, but if he did he’s not telling us. I’m going with intentional deception here – reasonable doubt seems to have been exceeded.

I’ll try to catch up with everything else soon. The Forlow’s are in Canada this week, apparently, which helps.

Happy belated Darwin Day, btw. I didn’t do anything for it – I don’t have to. We’re doing ‘human evolution’ in Biology right now, and this morning was spent viewing the second episode of Walking with Cavemen and looking at skulls. Just another day, far far away from religious fundamentalists…

Said ‘motor’ is ATP synthase, the enzyme that produces ATP (as you might guess). The paper is Subnanometre-resolution structure of the intact Thermus thermophilus H⁺-driven ATP synthase in Nature. It’s a highly technical paper that I don’t pretend to understand:

Here we present a 9.7 Å resolution map of the H⁺-driven ATP synthase from Thermus thermophilus obtained by electron cryomicroscopy of single particles in ice.

You get the picture. Mr Thomas describes the findings in a very mechanical way, so as to spin them in such a way as to justify the title and imply irreducible complexity:

A stream of protons from an acidic area flows through ATP synthase to power its spinning rotor, which in turn activates rocking cams to make ATP. It can also run in reverse, acting as a proton pump.

The device takes clever advantage of the tendency for acid to neutralize itself. ATP synthase harnesses the pressure of concentrated protons and converts it to mechanical energy as a spinning rotor and axle. It then immediately converts that to chemical energy in ATP. The full assembly includes the asymmetrical axle, six rocking cams, two stators, a bushing, a 12-part rotor, and two half-stroke cylinders.

His conclusion reads as follows:

The authors did not mention evolution in their description of this remarkable biological machine. And that’s very appropriate, since such a sophisticated system could never have resulted from natural processes. It could only be the work of a sophisticated Designer.

Again, I don’t quite understand all this stuff along the lines of “after a Glu 63 residue is deprotonated by the cytoplasmic half-channel”, but I can operate the ‘find’ function in webrowsers. I can confirm for you that there is no mention of evolution in this paper, but also that the only things mentioned by the names given by Thomas out of “the asymmetrical axle, six rocking cams, two stators, a bushing, a 12-part rotor, and two half-stroke cylinders” is the rotor. And when it comes down to it, the rotor isn’t all that amazing.

Now, this enzyme is certainly complex – and Brian is out only to make it sound more so – but as we learnt the other day, mere complexity is not out of the reach of evolution. No, it needs to be irreducably complex, specifically in such a way as to prevent evolution from evolving it. And that is not something you can claim without evidence.

While we’re here, there are two other things to note. First, as B.T. himself admits here:

…every living cell—from bacteria to brain cells—depends on one or another version of ATP synthase.

There are different versions of ATP synthase – it is not a case of there being only the one design that works. If the enzyme can change and still work, what’s to say that it could not have gradually evolved?

Second, here’s a different news item on the same protein: Moonlighting enzyme works double shift 24/7

The discovery, featured in the current issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that plants evolved a new function for this enzyme by changing merely one of its protein building blocks.

And you can read the rest at that link. Now, if you can evolve a new function for the protein, perhaps its evolution was driven by a different function? There are many, many ways it could have been done that Mr Thomas cannot simply rule out.

Second, from the third of Feb, was Baylor Surgeon ‘Dissects’ Darwinism.

If you’ve been following The Controversy in other places beside this blog lately you’ve probably already heard about this. You may have read, for example, this post on WEIT, or these two posts on Sandwalk. To quote Dr Moran in one of those latter posts:

Joseph A. Kuhn is a physician at the Baylor University Medical Center at Dallas. This is a Christian medical center associated with Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Joseph Kuhn published an article in a recent issue of Baylor University Medical Center Proceedings: Dissectring Darwinism.

Kuhn has an M.D. degree. He is not a scientist and he has no obvious expertise in biology and/or evolution. He is a Roman Catholic. He is definitely an Intelligent Design Creationist.

That will do for background. Mr Thomas is just singing Kuhn’s praises and parroting his points, so reading those posts will do for a refutation of him too.

I’ll comment on a footnote, however:

If curriculum writers could adequately describe some of evolution’s weaknesses, then Missouri might also use their products, assuming that the state’s currently proposed Bill No. 1276 becomes law. The bill would protect teachers who wish to discuss origins in the classroom. It proposes that authorities not hinder teachers “from helping students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of biological or chemical evolution whenever these subjects are taught within the course curriculum schedule.” Missouri House Bill 1276, “AN ACT to amend chapter 170, RSMo, by adding thereto one new section relating to teacher academic freedom to teach scientific evidence regarding evolution,” posted on house.mo.gov.

You can read it at the link given there, or at RationalWiki – that and a number of other creationist bills have been uploaded there over the last few weeks. I (or anyone else) haven’t gotten around to writing an article on it yet, but for now all you need to know is that it’s a standard “strengths and weaknesses” (well, “scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses”) Academic Freedom Act. And you can’t make a law to ‘protect’ the act of violating the US constitution, at least as far as I am aware.

They’ve finally gotten around to putting up a new That’s a Fact video. It’s about ‘dumb luck’ or something – I haven’t managed to watch it yet.

The week of Science Essentials posts from… I’m not actually sure at this point, it’s been so long, was on the subject of the aforementioned scientist and inventor. In other words, this was another ‘man of science, man of god’ week.

There seems to be a slight misconception about Carver’s inventions from what I can tell:

How many of you use glue for craft or school projects? Or use shaving cream to spell out words for early readers and spellers? Or what about washing your clothes using laundry soap? (I hope so!) If you use any of these, then you use items by the famous inventor George Washington Carver, who developed these and roughly 400 other products.

The actual situation seems to be that Carver developed cheaper alternatives to help economically struggling southern farmers. The Sumerians had shaving cream; but the aerosol kind that Dr Forlow is alluding to was not invented by Carver. Just a point that needs to be raised on the factual accuracy of this post.

The next two paragraphs do seem to be accurate background information, though I note that there is no references (both in the post and that I can find elsewhere) as to Carver’s beliefs both on biblical inerrancy and on Evolution. Nevertheless, Carver was clearly Christian.

Why is all this on a science blog, you may ask? Because it is important to teach your students about famous scientists who were not only brilliant, but who also believed and lived a life of belief in God. George Washington Carver was such a man. The epitaph on his grave depicts a life of character that I hope to mimic: “He could have added fortune to fame, but caring for neither, he found happiness and honor in being helpful to the world” (Wikipedia, accessed 1/11/12).

That’s not actually an answer to the question – if hers was a blog about teaching butchery (as in, meat cutting), would this be relevant there?

Which of Carver’s products is your favorite? For a complete list, click here.

I haven’t used vary many of the products listed – even assuming that the ones I use are descended from his inventions – but my favourite just from reading that list is ‘peanut surprise’, in that it comes after a rather long list of other peanut products.

There are a lot more comments now than there used to be. There are a good 12 here, although none of them are really worth commenting on.

The next post for the week was Everything Has a Cause:

In ordinary experience, one knows intuitively that nothing happens in isolation. Every event can be traced to one or more events which preceded it and that, in fact, caused it. We ask: “How did this happen?” “What caused this?” “Where did this come from?” “When did it start?” Or, more incisively, “Why did this happen?”

Click here for more information on Everything Has a Cause.

This is the First cause argument. It fails on a number of counts, one of which being the existence of events without cause, such as the nuclear decay of atoms. Nevertheless, the creationists still try to pass off the existence of a ‘law of cause and effect’, even despite it failing the definition in that bastion of scientific truth, Missouri House Bill 1227:

(10) “Scientific law”, a statement describing specific phenomena about the physical universe which has been verified by observation or experimentation and has no exceptions of verified empirical data. The statement may be described by formula;

But who’s to expect consistency from creationists?

There are two comments here:

The Law of Cause and Effect is essential to understanding the reason creationism is the only concept that fits with reality. Dr. Morris correctly pointed this out. Creation evangelism owes much to Dr. Morris’ explanation of this law. I’ve used it many times personally, particularly his quote “…since the universe is not a ‘multiverse,’ the god who created it could only have been one God, not two gods or many gods.” (Biblical Basis p. 37) People are really blown away by that, never having considered the implications.

See what I mean? And:

Every event can be traced to one or more events which preceded it and that, in fact, caused it. A refreshing point of view, I should say. ;) Great…!

That’s enough of that. The next post consisted of the K-5 questions:

Please be aware of any nut allergies in your students before completing some of the activities below.

Very important disclaimer.

1)      George Washington Carver loved to talk to God while he was outside in the midst of nature. One way he did this was through painting. Have students paint a nature picture on a smooth rock.

2)      Make your own paints! (You may find an example here.) Use items around the kitchen to help, such as strawberries or blueberries, paprika, turmeric, or cinnamon, or the crushed petals of different-colored flowers.

3)      Make Sweet Potato Pie as a class while you reflect on the many things George Washington Carver invented using sweet potatoes.

4)      Great plant activities can be found here!

5)      Have students choose a vegetable or food staple to research (for example, onion skin). Once finished, have them brainstorm possible usages for that food in an invention. Choose one invention and present it to the class.

Nothing remotely related to creationism here. There are no comments on this post – next up are the 6-12 activities:

1)      Go on a Botany Hunt! Have students collect 10 specimens of flowers, leaves from bushes or trees, and weeds from around the school or house. They should keep each specimen in a separate plastic bag and classify it using a label listing name, description, habitat, and notes. Have the students share their findings with the class.

2)      If you have access to a digital camera and computer software such as “Painter,” this is a wonderful site on Painting Botanicals!

Clearly, they should all be using GIMP.

3)      Check out the lab Observing Osmosis in a Plant Cell.

That’s quite a nice experiment, at least in the way my class did it last year. It also serves as a good example of how thin on the ground Forlow’s teaching is – there is no background information here, no indication of the importance or function of osmosis, just ‘do this, do that’. This is really no way to teach.

4)      Dissect a peanut plant. Using the scientific method, have students answer the following questions: a) What can I do with a peanut? and b) What can I do with the shell and the seed? Have them complete a repeatable experiment in order to support or disprove their theory.

I’m not overly sure if that is the best application of the scientific method, but we’ll go with it.

5)      Have students interview a farmer to learn how crops are grown, rotated, and harvested, then have them present their findings to the class.

Are crops still rotated these days? I thought people used fertiliser. Not that I’m a farmer or anything. There are no comments on this post either.

Next was Ask Dr Rhonda:

What are the main points to teach my child about creation?

In keeping with last week’s post about choosing K-12 scientific resources that promote science from a literal, 6-day creationist perspective, this week I thought I would answer this question asked by busy teachers, parents, and church leaders. I put together a simple list of the basic creation points to teach a child.

Click here for Simple Points to Teach Your Child about Creation.

How do you break down the specific details of creation for your child?

The entirety of the given pdf is theology – there is no science, and certainly nothing that would help defend against arguments based on, say, carbon dating or anything else.

There are six comments here:

I’m not quite sure how to word this, but it seems to me that the list of “Creation Basics” could possibly be affirmed by someone with a progressive creation or framework view of Genesis. (Well, as long as they held to unique and separate creation of humans.) That may be a good starting point for discussion and examination of evidences (biblical and non-biblical) that would support a 6-day young-earth position.

Yes, the heretics can use it too! Oh dear…

Yes, Bryan, this is a simple list of creation basics to begin a discussion with children and students about creation. Many people I speak with on a regular basis have asked for guidance in where to start.

Forlow is apparently saying that they’ll get to the exorcisms later.

Nice summary but needs graphics….many Moms and Dads might use it but will be reaching for something that has color and shape to go with the suggestions. You would not have to do it, but a couple links might be good.

Yes, Forlow’s blog is rather light on pictures – all she has are stockphotos and the That’s a Fact videos, themselves filled with stockphotos.

Very straight forward (SIB-KISS, see it big-keep it simple sailor) for anyone looking for the truth and as What has suprised me are the number of churches that, politely put, avoid discussion on the topic of creation. Creation studies supports the rest of the Scriptures. Additionally, when has a human author ever written a book where the first chapter had nothing to do with the rest of the story. Keep up your great work.

There’s probably more than a few books that end their first chapter with “…and he woke up, sweating. The alarm read 06:00.”

The final comment (which is repeated twice) begins with:

Trying to get information to the youth at our church to counter the evolutionary teaching that they get at school. Here is what I think may be effective:

…and is filled, filled with PRATTs.

The final post for the week was the discussion starters:

Classroom Starters:
How many uses for the peanut did George Washington Carver invent during his life, and which one is your favorite?

For the older student: What character qualities do you think George Washington Carver demonstrated when he invented so many products from just one plant?

Dinner Table Starters:
Why do you think George Washington Carver chose not to become wealthy from his inventions? What can we learn from him?

For the older student: George Washington Carver wrote a list of virtues that included the advice “Be clean both inside and out.” What do you think he meant by this?

zzz Actually, according to wikipedia Carver only patented three of his inventions, none of which were commercially successful. It’s technically possible that he simply gave up on that aspect. Somebody will have to look it up….

Why does he think that last year was ‘frustrating’ for evolution? It’s based, it seems, off the selection provided in the 2011 Editors’ choice article in Nature from back in December. As Sherwin says:

Of the nine stories, only one addressed evolution—a paleoanthropology article by Fred Spoor entitled “Malapa and the genus Homo.” Nature reported that scientists uncovered “a newly discovered hominin species, Australopithecus sediba” and “the same [research] group has now published five reports detailing additional fossils and further analyses.”

Here’s a list of all nine, for some context:

• Epidemiology: How common is autism?
• Organic chemistry: Overcoming catalytic bias
• Complex systems: Unzipping Zipf’s law
• Cosmology: A monster in the early Universe
• Palaeoanthropology: Malapa and the genus Homo
• Precision measurement: A search for electrons that do the twist
• Behavioural neuroscience: Fruity aphrodisiacs
• Stem cells: The dark side of induced pluripotency
• Forum ageing: Longevity hits a roadblock

If it comes down to it, they would probably be complaining if there were more evolution stories in that list. It’s really a case of the stories all being from different disciplines.

Also, the palaeoanthropology story isn’t directly evolution – it’s not about the mechanisms, more findings in the context of evolution. And the same is true, to a lesser degree, about all the other biology stories (the stem cells for example, and especially the neuroscience one). And the Cosmology story, while not at all ‘evolution’, would most likely be labelled as ‘evolutionary’ by the creationists at the ICR, if it came up. Why has Sherwin picked up on the A. sediba story? Because we’ve encountered it from the ICR before:

ICR News reported in 2010 that A. sediba was an out-of-place fossil that had primitive feet and supposedly 1.9 million-year-old residual brain tissue. Both of these facts show that the creature was not human or a human transition and that it couldn’t be very old if it still had intact organic tissue—which would’ve decayed after only thousands of years.

The cite for that is an old DpSU, A New Evolutionary Link? Australopithecus sediba Has All the Wrong Signs. It falls to the same problems as the ‘why are there still monkeys?’ argument – namely, what we would consider an earlier link in the ‘ladder to man’ (or whatever) isn’t going to just die out. Here’s an old post from me on the subject of A. sediba, btw.

Sherwin finishes:

The rest of the editors’ choices for 2011 included a supermassive black hole, alkene metathesis reaction, autism, and other scientific stories.

But isn’t evolution supposed to be an all-encompassing theory that—if omitted—makes science null and void? Is this story on A. sediba the best on evolution out of the whole of 2011?

It would seem the editors had to shoehorn in an evolution story among the science contributions even though it was unconvincing and had a number of serious scientific problems.

There is this year, but it’s likely that 2012′s discoveries will not help evolution any better.

This story was not billed as ‘the evolution story’. As I’ve already said, there are many others that also have an evolutionary context to them – it is Sherwin that is doing the shoehorning here.

The DpSU for the 23rd was called Study Finds Molecules Evolving in Wrong Direction. Basically, we have a paper in Nature (and a news article also) that shows how complexity can arise in protein rings.

Their method involves a pre-existing protein ring made of a single kind of protein. The gene for this protein duplicates, and now we have two identical proteins that can be used to make up these rings. However, these two genes will mutate away from each other. What can happen, in this case, is that the genes mutate in such a way that it prevents certain linkages of proteins. In the case described in the news article, their are two proteins that now are only able to bond with each other, forming a ring of alternating proteins (see the picture here) – the real-world situation in the paper is a little more complex.

At the end of the day, you’ve evolved complexity. What the creationists are latching on to is the fact that this involves the loss of function – the proteins are now unable to bond with certain proteins. In doing so, they divert attention from the fact that this is ‘complexity’ arising from evolution – something which they generally say is impossible – and better yet, through ‘devolution’, which they so deride.

Now, nitpicking. We have the following sentense from Mr Thomas: “In response to this research, biochemist and well-known critic of neo-Darwinian evolution Michael Behe told Evolution News:”, followed by a quote. Now, considering that Evolution News And Views is the official blog of the Discovery Institute, and that Behe wrote the entire blogpost being quoted, did he in fact ‘tell’ the blog this? Should I introduce all my quotes with “former biology teacher and well-known creationist loon Brian Thomas told ICR News“? I’ll have to try someday…

Next was Paddlefish Are Tuned to Eat Only Plankton. This post consists entirely of ‘isn’t the Paddlefish’s system of hunting plankton so amazing,’ and, as Mr Thomas told ICR News:

This means that the first paddlefish had to have every necessary component perfectly fitted together from the beginning in order to find its food. And that means that paddlefish were unquestionably created.

When, if it comes down to it, having only some of the things listed would be better than none, but worse than having all. If the fish could only “detect the presence of plankton”, but not “their distance from its mouth”, it would have a better time of it than it would being able to do neither.

The one for the 27th was Fossil Whale Brain Proves Paleontologist Wrong. We have a brain, of a whale, that’s been fossilised, and a paleontologist was of the opinion that such a thing was totally unheard of, until he (his last name is Thomas, as it happens) actually saw it.

It’s been mineralised, Brian – the other Thomas was of the opinion that a brain would be unlikely to get fossilised in the first place, but if it does it’ll last as long as any other rock. *yawn*

And the final one was Why Dogs Don’t Need Snow Boots. This is like the paddlefish one, in that he’s saying how amazing it is, but he doesn’t go the irreducible complexity route.

I’ll try to catch up with everything else before March. School starts this week, so there may be more of these entire-week posts. There was no That’s a Fact video this week either.

Ok, this one will be very quick. It was once thought that Ichthyosaurs suffered badly in an extinction event at the Juarassic boundary: a paper in PLoS ONE (New Ophthalmosaurid Ichthyosaurs from the European Lower Cretaceous Demonstrate Extensive Ichthyosaur Survival across the Jurassic–Cretaceous Boundary) shows that this was not nearly as severe. Darren Naish, who has had his work used and abused by Mr Thomas before, was a co-author of the paper and has a lengthy blogpost explaining the facts behind the paper.

There is no reason for Mr Thomas to be latching onto this paper, and indeed he goes off on a tangent about finding multiple kinds of fossils in the same fossil bed. *yawn*

Next, on Thursday, was Google Doodle Celebrates Creation Geologist. Said ‘creation geologist’ was working in the 17th century, somewhat before a non-creationist viewpoint was scientifically tenable. Mr Thomas sows confusion by saying that this geologist “summarized his ideas about how rock layers formed and how fossils came to be in them. At the time, many naturalists reasoned that what looked like seashells and bones in the earth—today called fossils—were produced by the earth, since they could not fathom that the middle of land masses could ever have been covered by an ocean.” That’s…not even wrong.

Nicolas Steno – for that was his name – was indeed genuinely religious, to the point of being canonised by the Catholic Church for his role in the counter-reformation. As well as his fossil stuff (what actually happened there was that he determined that shark teeth he had in his posession looked rather like some “stony formation” found embedded in rocks; the reason why people thought they grew in situ was that they could not concieve of how they got into the rock) Steno is credited for determining such laws of geology as the fact that ‘the layer on top is younger than the one beneath’ etc, which are very important in what we might call ‘evolutionary geology.’

The question remains: so what if he was a creationist?

On Friday Mr Thomas expressed outrage that a New Book Says Universe Came from Nothing. He writes:

[S]trict science tests that which is repeatable, and history is not repeatable. Science did not write the Big Bang story. That required immense imagination and deliberately ignoring a wide range of scientific observations that contradict the Big Bang, such as the universe’s clumpy mass distribution and galaxies that appear to be billions of years more mature than the model predicts.

Having seen both these objections raised in DpSUs before, I am not overly impressed by them. Another quote:

Krauss cited Edwin Hubble’s now famous scientific observation of redshifted starlight, which is a repeatable observation and is therefore science. But to interpret this as being caused by expansion is not directly scientific. And to extrapolate an expanding universe backward in time all the way to when everything supposedly burst forth from nothing is philosophically motivated history, not science at all!

I don’t think Mr Thomas fundamentally understands the nature of ‘science’ either – it’s not just natural selection, or any other topic.

I’ll cover the remaining articles later. Some other happenings:

• There is no That’s a Fact video for this week
• However, there is another refutation video from Dr Shorey out, which you can see here.
• And also, I was interviewed on Stuart Robbins’ Exposing Pseudo Astronomy podcast the other day, and the interview is now up. You can struggle to understand my heavily nasal voice here.

And that’s all. I’m also behind on the IEE and  Acts & Facts stuff, but that can wait.

The source is a paper – you can see the full text here – that details an experiment investigating the speed at which fish adapted to breeding in hatcheries. They found that the fish managed to do so in a single generation, but that this came at a cost to their survivability in the wild. Mr Thomas, author of the DpSU, expresses his incredulity at this being the result of natural selection, as was credited.

To quote:

How do these observations compare with various ideas about how species change? The authors correctly identified how traditional ideas of natural selection over many generations could be verified: If the “rapid fitness decline” that the fish experienced after adapting to the hatchery was the result of either a very high mutation load or of “many generations in captivity,” then natural selection could presumably explain the changes.

But these fish only needed one generation to experience dramatic changes.

Moreover, the changes, which the study authors wrote were “possibly correlated,” occurred in multiple traits at once. And the evolutionary idea of random-based biological changes does not fit with such correlated changes.

I would like to register my incredulity that Brian Thomas knows what he is talking about at all: this is exactly how natural selection would operate.

What we have here is a population of fish that have a mix of traits, as is normal. Their environment changes: they are now reproducing in hatcheries. The fish are adapted to the wild, and not the hatchery, but after only a single generation of selection they will be better adapted for their new conditions. but this has a tradeoff: they are now less adapted for their old environment. And, because of the nature of the game, it is harder for them to adapt back – natural selection acts to weed out the traits that are helpful in the old setting but are harmful in the new.

With that in mind, changes in gene frequency can and will occur in “multiple traits at once.” The sentence after that is just plain nonsense. He is confusing mutations with natural selection. Natural selection is not random – and thus neither is evolution, as it happens.

So, since the salmon evidence refutes typical evolutionary explanations for such changes, then what does explain them best? The study authors said that the changes were enabled by the genetics already within the fish: “The wild population contained the requisite genetic variation for rapid adaptation to captivity.”

No, within the gene pool. Honestly, Mr Thomas was a biology teacher…

This implies that the potential was not conferred on the organism by anything outside of it.

Wut?

Confusingly, however, senior author and Oregon State University professor Michael Blouin told TheFishSite.com, “What this study shows is that intense evolutionary pressures in the hatchery rapidly select for fish that excel there, at the expense of their reproductive success in the wild.”

Confusing for Mr Thomas, maybe: it makes perfect sense.

But the study never identified or measured any specific “evolutionary pressures,” nor did it specify what entity did any selecting.

There’s no talking to some people. You’ll note another instance of the “you need a selector to select” meme.

Instead of evolution selecting “fish that excel,” perhaps biological mechanisms within the fish “selected” the best combination of genes for the next generation to most successfully survive and reproduce in its new hatchery environment. The resulting fish multiplied and filled the hatchery, but in the process lost some of the genetic information that enabled their forebears to better survive in the wild.

That’s called Lamarckism, and if Mr Thomas wants to propose it as a watertight theory he needs evidence, and not speculation. “Perhaps” indeed.

And, bar the typical ‘credit … belongs to the Creator’ conclusion, that’s it. Is Mr Thomas really completely ignorant of the process of natural selection, or is he just playing dumb? I still can’t tell you.