How does U.S. healthcare compare with other countries?

Many have already seen this nice article by T. R. Reid in the Washington Post, but it's such a worthwhile read I thought I'd give it some mention here.  The short answer to the question in the title above is summed up nicely near the end of the article:

In many ways, foreign health-care models are not really "foreign" to America, because our crazy-quilt health-care system uses elements of all of them. For Native Americans or veterans, we're Britain: The government provides health care, funding it through general taxes, and patients get no bills. For people who get insurance through their jobs, we're Germany: Premiums are split between workers and employers, and private insurance plans pay private doctors and hospitals. For people over 65, we're Canada: Everyone pays premiums for an insurance plan run by the government, and the public plan pays private doctors and hospitals according to a set fee schedule. And for the tens of millions without insurance coverage, we're Burundi or Burma: In the world's poor nations, sick people pay out of pocket for medical care; those who can't pay stay sick or die.

More details on the proposed U.S. healthcare system changes - and the many myths and outright lies about those those changes - at:

• The White House - Health Care Reform
  
• 10 Health Care Reform Myths - CBS News
  
• Factcheck.org - search for "health care" and "3200"
  

Photos of species passed

Here are a few old photos of now extinct megafauna - some you might not have heard of, and others you most certainly have.

From: http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/images/Tasmainian_wolf.jpg

More photos at http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/

Science, according to the Creation "Museum"

On August 7, 2009 I attended the SSA group tour of the Creation "Museum" near Petersburg, KY along with 300+ other non-creationists (mostly atheist, agnostic and/or science types).

To share some of that experience, particularly the ways science and scientists were portrayed, I'll be making a series of posts on the place, updating this page to include the new additions.

External Links:

• The NCSE's open letter against the scientific inaccuracies at AiG's Creation "Museum"
  

My Posts on the Creation "Museum":

• Part 1: Quick Summary
• Part 2: Chameleons & Weeds
• Part 3: Intelligent Design
• Part 4: Filling the Grand Canyon with Doubt
• Part 5: Natural Selection vs. Evolution?
  

Related Posts:

• Creation Astronomy by Jason Lisle
• Social Experiment: A Christian Visits the Creation "Museum" as an Atheist

Creation "Museum" Part 4: Filling the Grand Canyon with Doubt

The winding path that is the heart of the creation "museum" begins with a whole lot of questions and no answers. Why? Presumably to instill doubt about the real science, and in doing so make room for their version of things. Lets have a look.

First, you may remember that I mentioned that my impression from the "museum" was that they supported their pseudo-scientific claims by:

1. The assertion that their interpretation of the Bible is truth, and
2. the logical fallacy (false dichotomy) that non-creationist science is largely wrong, therefore they're right.

After waiting in line by the animatronic child next to the velociraptors and the displays mentioned previously, your ticket is scanned and you begin your tour of the "museum" proper. As you head into the long and winding path of exhibits inside the museum the first display is (I know, kind of random...) The Grand Canyon.


While insignificant compared to the rest of the place, a mere 10 feet past the entrance and the natural history of the Grand Canyon is all wrong.


Walking though a faux sandstone slot canyon, you see a "Myrtle's" Yellow-rumped Warbler (that's the eastern race of the Yellow-rumped Warbler, the western "Audubon's" race is different enough they used to be considered separate species), a Collared Lizard clinging to a vertical wall (they're actually not too fond of vertical terrain), and a tarantula-like plastic spider completely upside down on the ceiling (maybe possible, but hardly typical for desert, ground dwelling tarantulas).

To be fair, you do see these sorts of blunders in plenty of actual museums, nature centers, and the like - although I can't say I've ever seen 3 in a row clustered together right at an entrance before this day.

Next came the first of many "creation geology" propaganda pieces that seemed primarily aimed at instilling doubt about the common sense (and science-backed) explanation of how canyons are formed...

Definition: Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience.

This video subtitles continue...

over a very long time
We know that mudflows from the crater of Mount St. Helens
carved this canyon out of soft rocks in only hours,
and this canyon out of solid rock in less than four years.
So how were canyons really formed?

... and that's it! Why all the questions but no answers?!

They, do provide their answer later on: the (scientifically baseless) claim that Grand Canyon was formed by the Flood ~2350 years ago.

Other displays in this first room include a similar line of questions, all following the same format:

The evidence is in the present... 

[description of some item or organism]  

But what happened in the Past? 

[3 or 4 more specific questions].

The subjects of these displays include "Lucy" (the famed Australopithecus afarensis specimen), meteorites, sapphires, dinosaur fossils, underground caves... you get the picture.  Basically lots of things that take "millions of years" to form (so say the scientists), all presented along side questions that practically beg you to doubt the science.

Having had a few friends and family in the military, and having watched the movie Jesus Camp, this reminded me of that ages old method of "breaking them down, then building them back up" - classic indoctrination. 

Back to the grand canyon. So what's the origin of that huge gash in the Arizona desert?

View Larger Map

The evidence-based and very plausible explanation you might have heard is that it was formed by the Colorado River carving out millions and millions of years worth of sedimentary rock, and dumping the sediment at the Colorado River delta in the Sea of Cortez.

The Creation "Museum" instead asserts that it was formed by the great flood. The evidence to back the claim? [See how annoying those unanswered questions get after a while? ;-) ]

But what kinds of questions were not found in the displays? The criticisms creationists have been trying to rationalize away for years... If there was a global flood, why aren't there more grand canyons in the world? What's so special about this area? Where did the flood waters "suddenly retreat" to? Why does the canyon twist and turn so much if it was caused by retreating flood waters? How did all those rock layers get formed (by the flood? then eroded so quickly?

After fanning the flames of doubt and mistrust in the science, the creation "museum" then tries to rationalize why even if modern science was indeed correct - it wouldn't matter.  How? By rejecting a particular notion of uniformitarianism to suggest the scientists are wrong about the past. The catch phrase for this idea: "The present is not the key to the past" - the negation of a quote attributed to Charles Lyell - the father of uniformitarianism.

In short, they're basically saying "Things were different back then! So floods, population genetics, nutritional requirements, animal behavior, the weather, the water cycle... scientists can't just assume all these things worked the same way back then!" 


Anyway, if you've made it this far, I'll stop there and leave you with yet another video in the form of subtitles (maybe short one or two lines) - this time on the pseudoscience of flood geology. I can't address the numerous problems I have with some of these statements, so instead I'll include a few links to relevant information (feel free to offer any up in the comments section).

When we look at geological features around the world,
many of them are radically different from anything being formed today -
like thick mud layers over continents,
or coal seams covering entire states,
or fossil graveyards,
or frozen mammoths,
or miles of underground cave passages,
or thick ice sheets moving over continents,
or craters of supervolcanoes,
or canyons cut thousands of feet deep.
It looks like the present is not the best way to explain
the geological features of the past.

The Bible, however, offers another way to explain features from the past,
Noah's flood was a global judgment -
a violent catastrophe - upon the earth.
Based on this truth revealed in God's Word,
scientists are developing a series of models to explain how the Flood,
and it's aftermath, could have shaped the world today.
In the course of the Flood, erosion washed away mountains of rock
in some places, while miles of mud and sand were piled up in others.
The earth's crust was thickened in some places, and thinned in others.
Like jostled ice cubes sink and bob up to their proper level in the water,
some sections of land sank after the Flood,
while other sections rose.
Supervolcanoes and superquakes rocked the world after the Flood.

As centuries passed, the catastrophes became rarer and smaller.
Modern earthquakes and volcanoes are dim leftovers
from this violent period of earth's history.
Warm oceans after the Flood produced violent weather -
possibly even "hypercanes,"
huge hurricanes like the Great Red Spot on Jupiter,
which may have persisted for centuries.
High rainfall after the Flood filled enormous lakes,
eroded large canyons, and carved large cave systems.

As animals left the Ark, multiplied, and spread over the earth,
many of them were preserved as fossils.
Some were buried in ash and mud,
some were preserved by unique chemical conditions,
and others were frozen.
Truly, the present is not the way things were in the past.
Instead, the Bible is the key to help us understand
geological features around the world.

More critiques of creationist flood geology, can be found here.

Donate to a good cause!

Most people have heard of Doctors Without Borders (the U.S. branch of the humanitarian-aid organization, Médecins Sans Frontières) but how many of us have contributed to their organization?

If you ever wanted to donate, here's your chance!



Following the apparently fraudulent fund raising activity of an evangelical YouTube user that goes by the name VenomFangX (who claimed to be raising funds for the The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Ontario), user DPR Jones and others launched their own effort to do some real fund raising for the Sick Kids Hospital. Not stopping there, they took it one step further to try and raise money for Doctors Without Borders.

You can contribute to their campaign to raise $10,000 for Doctors Without Borders by donating through the website First Giving (per DWB's request).

No excuses folks, it takes less than a minute and the donation form is right here.

---

Update

Over at ScienceBlogs, Orac has a couple of posts about the Sick Kids Hospital supporting complimentary and alternative medical treatments with an apparent disregard for the existing evidence against them. Hopefully feedback from the science and medical community can shift them away from their "neutral stance" on these matters to an "evidence based stance" that better serves their patients.

Math, Computers and Intelligent Design Pseudoscience

Here's a recently published paper (PDF reprint) by intelligent design (creationism) proponent William Dembski. Strong criticisms of the paper (and how it's being misused by other intelligent design creationism proponents) have already popped up on blogs in some posts like these, and even in Dembski's own blog - which he promptly put a stop to by disabling comments.

Instead of focusing on the paper itself, I wanted to illustrate how it (and other mathematical or computational results) can be misused in promoting ID. Before I begin, feel free to read through the blog posts and skim the paper.

After that, we can start in on this blurb from the Discovery Institute as an example of this sort of misuse by asking "So does this paper support intelligent design creationism??"

The paper itself specifies (in the abstract) what they did, and how they applied it (here and below, I have used a bold font for emphasis):

This paper develops a methodology based on these information measures to gauge the effectiveness with which problem-specific information facilitates successful search. It then applies this methodology to various search tools widely used in evolutionary search.

I happen to know a thing or two about using mathematical models in science, and this paper is a fantastic example of what I consider mathematical equivocation - using the power and complexities of mathematics as a logical tool to try and back a claim that really isn't backed by the math. It's significant because, unlike typical rhetorical arguments, the math obfuscates the assumptions and logical arguments being made, and can at times require graduate level background to decipher - so the equivocation is a bit harder (if not impossible, for some) to actually notice.

While the paper says nothing about intelligent design creationism, others (including Dembski himself) claim that it applies. Lets start with the title of the Discovery Institute piece. First, they claim this is a pro-ID publication. Second, we have our first logical fallacy: the appeal to authority. It seems that the holy grail of ID creationist efforts is to have some science-cred to wave around, and a "peer-reviewed scientific article" is exactly that. So what about the pro-ID claim?

In this blog post we get the Discovery Institute's take on what the paper is really about:

A new article titled "Conservation of Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success," in the journal IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cybernetics A: Systems & Humans by William A. Dembski and Robert J. Marks II uses computer simulations and information theory to challenge the ability of Darwinian processes to create new functional genetic information.

To understand why the paper has absolutely nothing to do with real functional genetic information (despite this claim), requires knowing about information theory (an unknown topic to the vast majority of people, scientists included) and that the kind of "information" discussed in the paper is very different from genetic information in a biological context. Indeed, the word genetic only appears on the first page of the article when mentioning "genetic algorithms", and there's no mention of "functional genetic" anything in the paper.

Unfortunately, intelligent design creationists frequently misuse or improperly apply the concept of "information" (which can be defined in a number of ways). Demanding a clear definition is always a good way to keep on track with what's actually being said.

Here's the closest we come to definitions for interpreting information in this paper:

1. endogenous information, which measures the difficulty of finding a target using random search;
2. exogenous information, which measures the difficulty that remains in finding a target once a search takes advantage of problem specific information; and
3. active information, which, as the difference between endogenous and exogenous information, measures the contribution of problem-specific information for successfully finding a target.

Getting back to the Disco Institutes blog post, besides the equivocation this blurb is also largely fueled by another common logical no-no found in many pro-ID arguments - the combined false dichotomy and straw man arguments fallacies whereby (in a debate context) you misrepresent your opponents position with something you can refute, then pretend you refuted your opponent's true position, and then assert that their being wrong makes your position correct.

Here's the Discovery Institute spinning the article against evolution "unguided" by an intelligent designer:

Darwinian evolution is, at [it's] heart, a search algorithm that uses a trial and error process of random mutation and unguided natural selection to find genotypes (i.e. DNA sequences) that lead to phenotypes (i.e. biomolecules and body plans) that have high fitness (i.e. foster survival and reproduction). Dembski and Marks' article explains that unless you start off with some information indicating where peaks in a fitness landscape may lie, any search — including a Darwinian one — is on average no better than a random search.

Note that the implication (at least to me) is that evolution requires "some information" (e.g. an intelligent designer?) if it's going to work "better than a random search." Also note the false dichotomy at play here, as the blog post seems to imply that it's a "pro-ID" publication because it allegedly refutes evolution.

Just to clarify the staw man, evolution by natural selection is equated with evolutionary algorithms, which are then criticized and it's all put forth as being "pro-ID".

So far, I don't see how any of this supports intelligent design creationism or refutes evolution by natural selection. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here!

So what's really the take home message from this paper?

Returning to the matter of equivocation, MarkCC's blog post helps to clarify the meaning of "information" in the paper, although only implicitly:

In terms of information theory, you can look at a search algorithm and how it's shaped for its search space, and describe how much information is contained in the search algorithm about the structure of the space it's going to search.
What D&M do in this paper is work out a formalism for doing that - for quantifying the amount of information encoded in a search algorithm, and then show how it applies to a series of different kinds of search algorithms.

In terms of evolution, it's really just asking how much of the information about the space (i.e. the fitness landscape) is tied up in the algorithm (i.e. natural selection), which given that natural selection is all about the relative number of offspring contributed to the next generation, these results really don't seem surprising or problematic.

The conclusions of the paper seem to be awkwardly stated and kind of amusing:

CONCLUSION

Endogenous information represents the inherent difficulty of a search problem in relation to a random-search baseline. If any search algorithm is to perform better than random search, active information must be resident. If the active information is inaccurate (negative), the search can perform worse than random...

Hmm... So in order for evolution by natural selection (as an algorithm) to work better than random, it needs to include correct information from genetics, developmental biology, ecology, and so on? Got it. If we get it wrong, it'll perform worse than some other random hypotheses? Got it.

This section also has some either very ironic or very well chosen wording...

... Accordingly, attempts to characterize evolutionary algorithms as creators of
novel information are inappropriate. To have integrity, search algorithms, particularly computer simulations of evolutionary search, should explicitly state as follows: 1) a numerical measure of the difficulty of the problem to be solved, i.e., the endogenous information, and 2) a numerical measure of the amount of problem-specific information resident in the search algorithm, i.e., the active information.

Nice - "attempts to characterize" are inappropriate because we're not using your particular definition of information? Gee, now THAT sounds familiar.

To be honest, I have no real expertise in algorithms, but from what I could dig up I don't think this use of "integrity" means anything out of the ordinary. I'll run this by some computer science friends of mine and any insights will appear below.

Until then, my best response to the question "So does this paper support intelligent design creationism??" is decidedly, No.

Secret "UFO Files" released by British government

No, seriously - I'm not kidding.



Fortunately, this isn't just the British government waiving it's arms around about alien invasions or attempted kidnappings (although it does have that feel in places).

Instead, it appears to be a collection of reports about UFOs that does a decent job pointing out that Unidentified Flying Objects are exactly that, unidentified. While they don't go as far as explaining why that doesn't at all suggest aliens are the culprits, they do at least avoid fanning the flames. Anyway, as far as UFOs go, it appears that whenever they actually do get identified - well lets just say that so far, no extraterrestrials...

As it turns out, I myself once witnessed some UFOs back in Colorado during the summer of 1997 (give or take a year). I was driving up to the mountains one evening to visit friends, and off to the west, I could see 2 hovering bright balls of light, way up in the sky. These were much, much larger than any start or comet and looking perfectly motionless other than a sort of eerie shimmer to their bright glowing light. As I watched, to my amazement a third then a fourth appeared out of nowhere, forming a line with the other lights... mind you, I didn't (and still don't) believe there are alien visitors cruising around our atmosphere, but I was a little freaked out by what I'd seen. I just couldn't come up with any better explanation!

As it turns out, my UFOs - like so many others - became "IFOs"... they were identified (following other reports) as aireal flares that dropped during training exercises out of the nearby Ft. Carson military base. I've since had closer views of such flares dropped during training exercises, which appeared exactly like what I had seen that night out in the prairies as I drove up into the foothills.

Anyway, getting back to the British UFO files, one Dr. David Clarke and his books are rather prominent on the site. His take on all this talk about UFOs and aliens?

To my way of thinking, the cultural factors which influence people to 'believe' and to 'see' UFOs, and how those stories are then passed on by word of mouth, the media and the internet, leading to more belief, is the most fascinating aspect of the subject. UFOs, in my view, tell us more about ourselves than they do about 'alien visitors.'

Have fun browsing the archives, checking out the highlights, and (if anything) learning about the human mind as its great capacity to misinterpret and fear the unknown. I guess you might even let it serve a bit of a warning about the importance keeping your B.S. detectors honed and ready to counter your most persuasive of foes - your own mind.

Human Origins & The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis

I just saw this post by Greg Mayer (this Greg, not this one) over on Jerry Coyne's blog, Why Evolution is True, which knocks TED for spreading what Greg considers pseudoscience: the aquatic ape hypothesis. It does seem like a valid criticism, and not just a reaction to her calling evolutionary biologists "evolutionists" in the first few seconds of the talk.

Have a look at the video, and browse the above critique by Jim Moore, plus John Hawk's blog posts for more details.

Social Experiment: A Christian Visits the Creation "Museum" as an Atheist

While many of the people that visited to the Creation "Museum" last week as part of the SSA tour were self-described atheists trying to better understand the creationist "world view", Aaron Gardner and his wife went for a slightly different reason.

Both Christians, they joined up with the SSA group on the "museum" tour in order to better understand how atheists experienced the place, and to answer a couple of questions:

What would it be like to be a Christian and a fly on the wall as a group of atheists peered at exhibits that attempted to prove them wrong? How would the creationist lecturer react to challenges and would he gloat when he wins a point?

So how was that experience??

My wife had been there before, and as we pulled into the parking lot her first reaction was to how many extra security were visible. She said that she did not remember more than one or two officers on her last trip, but even before we left the car there were at least 6 clearly visible in front of the facility.

I might add that the museum security also has it's own K9 unit, which was hard to miss coming and going from the museum (click image to enlarge)!


So, what was it like to be that fly on the wall?

I'd highly recommend you read his account from the blog post "Scarlet 'A' for a day" (including the comments!), but this comment just about sums up how he seems to have felt after the experience:

There have rarely been times in my life that I have been ashamed of people that I call “brothers and sisters in Christ.” This was one of them.

Responding to a comment on this same post, Aaron goes on to write:

[Other commenter:] But to Ken Ham and his minions we atheists are bogeymen, inherently immoral and evil.

[Aaron:] That is exactly what was so difficult. I am planning on writing an entire post about just that issue, but to sit in a lecture [by Jason Lisle] that was titled “The Ultimate Proof of Creation” and to be told that atheists are inherently amoral, immoral baseless nuts was nearly too much for me to stomach! What does that have to do with their message that creation is true?

Kudos to Aaron for his initiative to attend the SSA tour of the Creation "Museum" and for speaking out against some of the unfortunate behavior on display there. Well done!

Creation "Museum" Part 3: Intelligent Design

Intelligent Design Creationism has been recognized by both the scientific community and our very own court of law as religion, and not science. Not surprisingly, it pervades the displays and signs in the Creation "Museum".

One of the many "intelligently designed"
creatures showcased in the video below.

To give you an idea of how they present intelligent design, I'll let another of their looped videos do the talking. This one was entitled Wonders of Creation: Common Designer (the version playing during my visit had captions, which is the primary source of the transcript below).

Organisms are similar in many striking ways.
They're made of similar chemicals,
run by similar genetic code,
and designed with similar cell structures,
similar organs,
and similar complex organ systems,
like skeletons and nervous systems.
Why do we find so many similarities at so many levels?
Many people believe these similarities arose
because of common descent,
but a biblical perspective suggests a different reason.
The Bible tells us that God created all things in the beginning.
If a common designer made everything
to coexist in the same universe
and follow the same natural laws,
you'd expect to find many similarities
among the things He created.
After all, even human designers
integrate similar parts in different things they design.
Architects and engineers choose similar materials,
write similar instructions,
and incorporate similar components and systems
in their buildings and machines.
The similar, integrated chemicals, codes, and systems
found in living organisms
give compelling evidence of a common designer,
God.
Creation is sprinkled with similar wonders of design
that are clearly God's handiwork.
Consider the spiral forms in galaxies,
ferns,
and snails,
which suggest a designer who loves beauty in his designs.
We also find complex integrated systems in different animals,
which no one believes arose by common descent.
Sleek designs for swimming in mammals, fish, and plesiosaurs.
Marvelous designs for flying in mammals, birds, and pterosaurs.
And elaborate horn-like designs in mammals, dinosaurs, and insects.
In every corner of the universe,
at every level of organization,
the hand of God is clearly seen.

"For the invisible things of God from the creation are clearly seen."
[Romans 1:20]

In case you were curious to know whether or not there was something in Roman's 1 that specifically addresses the origins and diversity of life here on Earth, here's the New International version (others here) of Roman's 1:18-23, just for context (Romans 1:20 is in bold):

God's Wrath Against Mankind

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Er, umm... Maybe it's just me, but I see absolutely NO connection between the verse and the point of the video. Why not use quotes from Genesis? After all, that's where we're supposed to learn about Creation, right??

Oh, right, maybe because the creation story in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 don't quite agree with one another? Sort of a "which came first: man, plants or animals?" kinda thing. So much for using a literal interpretation of the Bible as a source of biological details...

This video is yet another example of the kind of bad science on display in the Creation museum, despite Ken Ham's assurance that AiG's "own full-time PhD scientists and many other scientists who work in the secular world provided the research for the museum scripts."

For example, in the above transcript...

We also find complex integrated systems in different animals,
which no one believes arose by common descent.
Sleek designs for swimming in mammals, fish, and plesiosaurs.
Marvelous designs for flying in mammals, birds, and pterosaurs.
And elaborate horn-like designs in mammals, dinosaurs, and insects.
...

Really? No one? Not even, say, pretty much all evolutionary biologists? Maybe I'm misinterpreting things, and the video really just means to say that no one believes "common descent" is how these similarities came to be. After all, the majority of evolutionary biologists would almost certainly say that evolution by natural selection is the appropriate answer.

But if those "museum" scripts are mincing words like that, it would be sort of misleading, don't you think? I'll assume they wouldn't intentionally do that (though I can't say I'd be surprised), so who knows how they came up with such a wacky statement...

Anyway, the irony here is pretty darn laughable... The rest of this last quote actually gives some fine examples of convergent evolution. That is, these are similar adaptations that arose in these very unrelated creatures via the processes of mutation and natural selection because they all faced the same challenge: swimming in the first example, and flying in the second.

Indeed, having taken a closer look (e.g. doing the real science), these don't at all look like similar "integrated systems" that were "designed." Instead, taking the bat and bird wings as an example, they look like gradual adaptation over many generations - i.e. entirely consistent with the theory of evolution by natural selection.

(From www.mun.ca/biology/scarr/Analogy_of_forelimbs.htm)

Creation "Museum" Part 2: Chameleons & Weeds

Before we even get into the museum proper, the first of many looping videos appears (what PZ Myers referred to as the "videos that tell you what to think"). So which one was showing? None other than the case of the chameleons (and, big surprise, why these lizards were "intelligently designed" and not a product of evolution). The video captions read as follows.

The chameleon is an amazing animal.
The chameleon can see 360 degrees,
like having eyes in the back of your head,
and two eyes rotating independently,
seeing totally different things at once.
If you tried to do that, your brain would go crazy.
The chameleon has a tongue
that can project up to two times his body length.
He instantly calculates the projection path,
launches his tongue like a catapult,
snatches his target with an ingenious suction cup,
and snaps his tongue back into place, ready for the next shot.
Amazing! It all works together, just as if it were made that way.
The chameleon's skin can change color.
Maybe he's cold and wants to absorb a little more sunlight,
so he gets darker.
Or maybe he wants to cool off and not boil his blood.
He turns lighter.
Or maybe, he wants to catch the eye of a lady.
That's when he really puts on a show.
The Chameleon is truly a wonder of nature,
but where did it come from?
Did it evolve from other simpler creatures?
Could small accidental changes over millions of years
provide small benefits and then these changes
make even more amazing features?
Like a brain that can process images
from two independently rotating eyes?
Or a spring-loaded tongue that shoots twice as far as its body?
The origin of such complexity is a mystery to evolutionary scientists,
but it makes perfect sense if a Creator put all this complexity
into the original DNA of the chameleon.
Chameleons are masterpieces of design,
and the more we study them, the more complex they prove to be.

So what do non-creationist scientists have to say about Chameleons? Quite a lot, actually. This, of course, is because their goal is to understand and describe chameleons and how they live in an objective and evidence-based manner. Clearly not the sort of thing the Creation "Museum" would be interested in...

But, it isn't so much what the video says about Chameleons that's worth talking about here - it's what they don't say (ok, that, and the whole "The origin of such complexity is a mystery to evolutionary scientists" thing, which I'll address below). Indeed, you might have already noticed that there's no mention of the role their color changing ability (or any other novel features) might play in avoiding predation or being better predators themselves! Why leave that stuff out? Well, it all has to do with the Adam and Eve, sin, and the "Fall of man."

Later in the museum, after the point at which Adam and Eve eat the forbidden fruit, we finally get some insight into why any talk of predation is so taboo...


So, what's going on here???

Ever since Darwin brought the theory of evolution to the world, many have had a problem with viewing individual existence as a constant struggle for survival. As far as I can tell (and please correct me if I'm wrong here), matters of suffering, violence and death in the natural world have long been used to attack religion (e.g. Christianity) by calling into question the nature of God.

The solution? It wasn't God's fault - it was man's fault... Predatory dinosaurs? Vegetarians gone bad. Weeds? There were originally none, since all was in perfect balance:

Before Adam's Sin: No Weeds

God created a perfect balance in the beginning, as plants produced exactly the amount of food needed by the animals of the earth.

After Adam's Sin

Once animals began overproducing to replace the dead and diseased, they would eat too many plants. So God introduced overproduction of plants to replace the plants that would be lost.

As a result:

• Plants struggle against other plants for sunlight
• Plants grow where they are not wanted (weeds)

That's right - the existence of weeds and the fact that some plants grow in the shade of other plants (such a gruesome struggle!) is a consequence of Adam's sin back in the Garden of Eden, since this lead to death and disease in animals, which lead to the "overproduction" of animals to replace them (wait, huh?), which prompted God's subsequent overproduction of plants to replace the plants that were lost due to the increased herbivory. Hmmm...

In true form, they also neglect to provide any evidence (not even any Bible versus) to back up their claims of sin-induced overproduction of plants and animals.

But I digress... back to the chameleon video!

So, what's to be made of that little remark mentioned above?

"The origin of such complexity is a mystery to evolutionary scientists..."

Like I mentioned previously, the "museum" portrays science as misguided and wrong, while their interpretation of the Bible provides the undeniable truth about everything. Simply put, they make an argument for Creationism based on (1) a presupposition that the Bible is literally true, (2) a small number of hand-picked or entirely absent empirical facts (e.g. that dinosaurs fossils exist) combined with (at times, surprisingly vague) Bible quotes, and (3) one big false dichotomy: that science is wrong, therefore Creationism is true.

I wonder why none of the skeptics were convinced last Friday??

PZ Meyers on the Creation "Museum" visit

Here's a lengthy post by PZ Myers on the recent group trip to the Creation "Museum" - while heavy with his usual atheist gusto, it also provides a number of insights into the sorts of things on display at the "museum".

Creation "Museum" Part I: Quick Summary

I spent today at the Creation "Museum" in Kentucky (along side 250+ other critics, mostly from the Secular Students' Alliance), and I've got hundreds of photos worth of anti-science/pro-Creationism displays to mull over for future posts to this blog.

In the meantime, I thought I'd start things off with a quick summary on my thoughts of the "Museum", and hopefully a little insight into the messages that I would assume a lot of folks probably take away from the place.

First, the "Museum" (or the Creation ministry, as I might refer to it below) is run by Answers in Genesis, a non-profit (ahem...) Christian apologetics ministry that believes in a literal interpretation of the Bible (at least some of it, Genesis in particular).

Their stated goal is NOT to run a real museum based upon honest, empirical facts and good science. Instead, their mission (as given on their website) is ...

Goal: To support the church in fulfilling its commission

Vision: Answers WorldWide is the Missionary Arm of Answers in Genesis. Our purpose is to provide the “global Christian” with answers for his faith (1 Peter 3:14) and to expose the world to the Creator God of the Bible.

Mission:

• We take the absolute truth and authority of the Bible to the world.
• We teach the relevance of a literal Genesis to the mission fields of the world.
• We obey God’s call for global evangelism for all ethnic groups in the world.

Not surprisingly, the big "take home messages" from today's visit seem to be the following:

1. Science is wrong about things like geology, biology, astronomy, etc. and
   
2. the Bible is indisputably correct, and in some cases can even be proven correct.

Interestingly, a lot of the "evidence" provided to justify the second of these claims often amounted to little more than repeating the first assertions above without justification followed by some form of "but the Bible got it right" - but, I'll get to more of that in future posts.

So what are some examples? Here are a couple from the displays in the lobby - before you even get into the "museum" proper!

(Click images to enlarge)

"Creation Astronomy" by Dr. Jason Lisle

When I heard there was going to be someone speaking about "Creation Astronomy" during my upcoming trip (in a couple of hours, actually!) to the famed Creation "Museum", I snooped around for a preview of what I was in for. Here's a taste...



Before I get into some of what he says in this talk (see the rough transcripts I've included below), lets take a moment and have a look at Jason Lisle.

While some might roll their eyes at the notion of "Creation Astronomy," Jason Lisle is no hobby-astronomer-turned-evangelist... According to his biography at Answers in Genesis he seems to know his stuff way better than the average Joe when it comes to Astronomy:

Dr. Lisle graduated summa cum laude from Ohio Wesleyan University where he double-majored in physics and astronomy, and minored in mathematics. He did graduate work at the University of Colorado where he earned a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. in Astrophysics. While there, Dr. Lisle used the SOHO spacecraft to investigate motions on the surface of the sun as well as solar magnetism and subsurface weather. His thesis was entitled “Probing the Dynamics of Solar Supergranulation and its Interaction with Magnetism.” He has also authored a number of papers in both secular and creation literature.

For another look into Jason Lisle's take on "Creation Astronomy" check out this critique (or this one) of his "What Does the Bible Say About Astronomy?" which contains many of the points made in the video above (and much of what I expect to hear this Friday during his talk.)

IMHO, he seems like a pretty darn smart guy who's just stuck bending the facts so that they fit his world view. Anyway, on to the video above...

According to Lisle (in the talk above, starting around 12:00) "the Bible is not an astronomy text book, but when it touches upon astronomy, it's right." What follows are some vague quotes from the Bible that in a sense (in most cases, a very loose sense) are consistent with what we know about planets, stars, and the like. This is a classic case of handpicking where the Bible gets a few things "not wrong" and jumping to the conclusion made above: "when it touches upon astronomy, it's right."

For example, the Bible allegedly gets it right that the earth is a sphere. In the video he presents that there are...

some statements the Bible makes that are sort of astrophysical in nature, they're not intended to be, you know, for, necessarily for Ph.D. scientists, they're just statements that God has made that are true, and we would all agree are true today, even though the science of the times didn't necessarily agree with these statements.

For example, the Bible talks about the earth being round in Isaiah 40:22 [760-698 B.C.], it says ... it talks about the circle of the earth [God sits `upon the circle of the earth...']. And there's some other passages in scripture as well, like in Job 26 ["Job 26:10 (-2000 B.C.)"] where it talks about the line between light and darkness being described by a circle ['He drew a circular horizon on the face of the waters, At the boundary of light and darkness.'].

Slam dunk, right? Earth clearly indicated as a sphere, yeah? Er, no.

First, these quotes are super vague. They just as well assert that the Earth is a circle as it is a sphere... it could be a circle in a plane or a disk-like cylinder as far I as can tell. Heck, it could even just as well refer to God sitting on the moon (I could see a poetic association between the moon and "the circle of the earth", can't you?) - it's all a matter of interpretation.

When the Biblical quotes get really iffy, he's careful with his wording. He doesn't call such statements vague or difficult, he calls them...

some beautiful poetic statements like God 'hangs the earth upon nothing.' [Job 26:7 (200-1800 BC)] which seems like a description of the earth floating there in space. And I grant you it's kind of a poetic statement, and it's made by Job not God, so we have to be a little bit careful, but it does sound like these ancient peoples new something about astronomy.

Yes, "a little bit careful" indeed. But, while these ancient peoples did know a thing or two about Astronomy, they got a few things wrong. Most notably, that the sun, moon and stars don't all revolve around a stationary Earth.

This little fact was left out of Jason's talk: the well known and very obvious fact that the Bible consistently talks about "the Heavens" in accordance with a geocentric view of astronomy.

So at this point, I'm starting to get the feeling that one could make at least as strong an argument that when creationists mention astronomy, they mostly get it wrong.

Anyway, it just keeps on going... again, quoting the video above:

The universe is expanding. God 'stretches out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in.' [Isaiah 40:22 (760-698 BC)] the Bible says many many times that the universe is being expanded. And it's interesting because it wasn't until the 1920s that the secular science, um, kind of caught up with that and realized that indeed the universe is being stretched out.... Really amazing. You know, this is a little more abstract, but I do believe the Bible teaches the conservation principle. That is the Conservation of Mass: the amount of stuff that is in the universe is constant. Because, we know that God - all things were made by God - furthermore God stopped making things at the end of the creation week. According to Genesis 2:2, God finished his work of creation. [All things were made by Him... John 1:3, and 'And on the seventh day God ended his work...' Genesis 2:2]. So we would not expect anything new to come into existence, you see. And, furthermore we would not expect anything to cease to exist, because God upholds all things, and by him all things consist. [God 'is upholding all things...' Hebrews 1:3, and '... by him all things consist.' Colossians 1:17]. We now call that the conservation of mass, or the conservation of energy. Einstein tells us that mass and energy are the same, really. So it wasn't really until the 1800s that was codified in terms of science, but the Bible got it right.

It seriously pains me to listen to these shaky rationalizations! Are we really to believe that from statements like "on the seventh day God ended his work", "[God] is upholding all things", and "by him all things consist" we get the conservation of mass? Seriously?

It just keeps coming...

This one again is a bit abstract: Entropy is a complicated term, sort of a measure of messed-up-ness, if you will, and, um, the Bible talks about the Universe, heaven and earth shall wax old like a garment. They're aging, they're running down - wearing out. I would say that's a consequence of the second law of thermo dynamics, unrestrained (and I'll qualify that in a minute). [The universe (heaven and earth) 'shall wax old like a garment' -No reference given.]

But, it's interesting because you could say "well it's pretty obvious that things wear out, that's not very profound." And I would say that it's obvious ON EARTH, that things wear out and run down, but is it obvious that the universe is running down? If you go out and look at the night sky tonight, or tomorrow night or whatever, it's going to look about the same. I don't think it's obvious that the universe ages. And, of course, the universe was indeed thought to be eternal and unchanging until about the time of Tycho [Tycho Brahe, astronomer 1546-1601]. So - But the Bible got it right from the beginning.

See, we now understand from the laws of physics that even if we can't see the slow decay of the universe it must be decaying. The amount of usable energy in the universe is running out. Now, I do want to make a comment on the second law of thermodynamics because there's been some misunderstanding here. It is not a consequence of the fall of man. No, the second law of thermodynamics must have existed from the beginning of creation, because we're designed around that principle.

Ok, life requires the second law of thermodynamics to function. When you digest food, that's the second law of thermodynamics, helping you out. But apparently, originally, this tendency to decay must have been balanced by God's organizing power so that ther was no net decay before sin. And we've seen examples of that in scripture where God's presence is a sustaining presence. Like in the Israelites in the wilderness, their clothes ... didn't even wear out. So apparently at the time of the fall, God removed some of that sustaining power allowing the universe to decay beyond it's original design. And now all creation suffers under that bondage of corruption and one day the universe will be restored. There will still be a second law of thermodynamics, presumably, just that God's presence is a restoring presence.

Now it's interesting because, of course, today, all scientists would agree that the Earth is spherical, and it floats in space, and that there's a conservation of mass and energy and the like, but that hasn't always been believed by secular science. But the Bible got it right you see.

Just out of plain 'ol curiousity, I searched an online Bible for words like stars, moon, heavens and other astronomical terms, just to see what else was in there that Lisle didn't mention. Fortunately for "creationist astronomers", most all of these references appear to be "poetic" enough that they're hardly capable of being disproven, and nothing so blatantly wrong that it can't just be ignored:

• According to Job 22:12 there are a finite number of stars. (Whew! I always wondered.)
  
• According to Nehemiah 9:23 there were at one point as many male Israelites as stars. Furthermore, there should be no fewer humans with Abram as an ancestor than stars: "He took [Abram] outside and said, 'Look up at the heavens and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.' Then he said to him, 'So shall your offspring be.'" - Genesis 15:5. (Er, maybe they meant "visible" stars... yeah, they must have! Otherwise it wouldn't make sense! Right?)
  
• According to Isiah 34 and Jesus himself in Mathew 24, come judgment day "the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken... At that time the sign of the Son of Man will appear in the sky, and all the nations of the earth will mourn..." This asserts that the earth will survive having all of the stars crash into it, unless when they "dissolve" (Isaiah 13) they are reduced enough in mass for this to occur and leave survivors? Either way, it should no doubt be quite a sight for any astronomers still around to see it.
  
• Ecclesiastes 12:2 says "... [B]efore the sun and the light and the moon and the stars grow dark..." and, like Jeremiah 31:35, is the norm in getting light emission from the sun and stars wrong: "This is what the LORD says, he who appoints the sun to shine by day, who decrees the moon and stars to shine by night...".
• In Joshua 10:13 "On the day the LORD gave the Amorites over to Israel, Joshua said to the LORD in the presence of Israel: 'O sun, stand still over Gibeon, O moon, over the Valley of Aijalon.' So the sun stood still, and the moon stopped, till the nation avenged itself on its enemies, as it is written in the Book of Jashar. The sun stopped in the middle of the sky and delayed going down about a full day." Hold on, hold on - so IF they stopped as requested, since these two locales are only about 10 miles apart, shouldn't there have been an eclipse? Furthermore, if the earth suddenly stopped, wouldn't there be horrible earthquakes and crazy weather? Wouldn't it get unusually hot?
  

In the end, Lisle does ask a good question (although I don't think he was aiming for the answer I'd give):

"So have we learned the lessons of history? Have we learned that when the science of the day disagrees with the Bible, it's not the Bible that needs to be modified. Have we learned that lesson?

Indeed we have - perhaps it's not the Bible that needs to be modified, just how we decide to interpret it?

(Oh, by the way, if you enjoy this kind of irony, wait and see how long it takes Jason Lisle to tell us about all the logical fallacies creationists make in talks like this!)

Does therapy change sexual orientation?

Surprise, surprise - it most likely doesn't. At least according to a review of dozens of studies investigating such "therapies", conducted over the past 45+ years.

The group's Task Force on Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation reached its conclusion after its review of 87 studies conducted between 1960 and 2007 and finding "serious methodological problems" in the vast majority of them.

Those few studies that did have "high-quality" evidence "show that enduring change to an individual's sexual orientation is uncommon," it said.

In addition, the report cited evidence that efforts to switch a person's sexual orientation through aversive treatments might cause harm, including loss of sexual feeling, suicidality, depression and anxiety.

The full report can be read here at the American Psychological Association website.

This comes as no big surprise, really - you might have seen this documentary on the sad story of David Reimer: The boy who lived as a girl, or read the book version of his story: As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised As A Girl.

Born as Bruce Reimer, he received gender reassignment surgery after a botched circumcision. Psychologist John Money coached "Brenda's" parents to try and raise "her" as a girl, and later used Brenda's case to support his pet hypothesis of Gender Neutrality... the notion that nurture could trump nature when it came to sexuality and gender identity. The result? Nature never gave way to nurture for Bruce/Brenda/David, and he suffered because of it. He died via self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was 38 years old.

How do you sequence a genome?

Have you ever wondered how genes or whole genomes are sequenced, or how DNA sequencing plays into our understanding of how life has evolved here on Earth??

Without getting in to all the details, here's some great video footage that provides a glimpse into this world. Additionally, the video includes discussion (towards the end) of the role science plays in society and what that implies for the future of our species, and life on earth. At any rate - I think it's well worth watching despite the length of the video!

Here, Richard Dawkins is interviewing Craig Venter while getting a tour of his sequencing facilities - an impressive example of "industrial biology" driving the cutting edge of science. Even in the first 15 minutes or so, you get a feel for how much heavily these sequencing technologies rely on contributions from many scientific fields, including mathematics, statistics, computer science, chemistry and engineering.



If you pay attention, you can also glean some other interesting tidbits of information... For example, individual humans seem to differ not by the tenths of a percent we've been told, but probably more like 1% or 2%. Humans and chimps?? Well, we differ by more than the 1.2% so often quoted on such public forums as youtube -- apparently the difference is "more like 5-6%" (not to mention our differing number of chromosomes, etc.).

But, getting back to the original question: How do you sequence a genome?

To get a feel how this sort of sequencing works, let's first consider the 23 chromosome pairs in a single cell, all together holding a little over 6 billion DNA base pairs, which we could imagine lining up end-to-end as one single sequence - for example a book with 46 chapters each corresponding to an individual chromosome.

Next, imagine taking millions and millions of random snapshots of that DNA, each snapshot capturing only a very short sequence (e.g. a few hundred base pairs or maybe spanning a page or two if we stick to our "genome-as-a-book" analogy). Taken together, these tiny "snapshot" sequences (actually called "reads") cover the whole genome, with some of those reads overlapping one another. After taking enough snapshots, we know these reads contain all the information in the original genome sequence, but how can we put it all back together?

The answer hinges on the fact that these reads are in many places, overlapping. By using various mathematical and computational methods, all of the pieces can be matched up, eventually yielding the full genome sequence.

You can find more details here and here.