debunkers.org

I give this a boggle:

Why not …, since Al Gore et al are blaming everything from hurricane strength to the heartbreak of psoriasis on it. The linked article is citing someone named “Tom Chalko Msc PhD” as claiming that increased seismic activity is the result of global warming.

The mind boggles at the silliness of this.

The research proves that destructive ability of earthquakes on Earth increases alarmingly fast and that this trend is set to continue, unless the problem of “global warming” is comprehensively and urgently addressed.

…

“Unless the problem of global warming (the problem of persistent thermal imbalance of Earth) is addressed urgently and comprehensively – the rapid increase in global seismic, volcanic and tectonic activity is certain. Consequences of inaction can only be catastrophic. There is no time for half-measures.”

Cites to a paper purportedly published by “Nujournal.net” - which seems to be nothing but a vanity webpage for Chalko. The linked “paper” basis for claiming that the “energy imbalance” is causing more earthquakes? Absolutely none. Chalko proves absolutely nothing in this two page joke of a “paper”. It is a joke to even call this junk science as there is no scientific content at all. The wire services will publish any horse manure so long as it is disguised as a press release on global warming at all - and so long as it is not skeptical.

( Discuss this in our Discussion Forum folder on Global Warming - reached by the link on the right )

Where is stands, I am not sure.

I know dlittlew posted the images in this thread on the discussion board, here’s a you tube vid of it

As a certified pyromaniac, even I am not quite so, uhm, careless.

Some may disagree, but this is hysterical:

Put the smackdown on stupid pundit could be the title, too.

Here is (thanks to Chaon) proof that ID is correct and all those evilutionists are, uhm, evil.

The rest of the management of this blog wishes to sincerely apologize for the last blog entry. Those responsible have been sacked.

This scarred me, so I must share; I give pain with this:

teh Zerg win

‘loves Kerrigan, yes, I am off.

One of our members, John A, posted in the discussion forum a response to a Richard Black BBC piece. With his permission, I’m copying it here:
=============
Richard,

I note your latest attempt in your continuing campaign to ignore and demean the considerable and growing evidence of natural influences on climate change, and especially on the cosmic ray/solar cycle hypothesis of Svensmark et al.

Last time you raced out of the blocks with an article entitled “No Sun link’ to climate change” about a paper then yet to be published, and couldn’t be bothered beyond leaving a few voicemail messages to contact Dr Svensmark for a response. The paper of course was by Lockwood and Froelich.
Then of course, you didn’t bother reporting that reply from Svensmark because we don’t want the license payers unnecessarily confused with a solid rebuttal, would we Richard? Especially since that paper by Lockwood that you trumpeted was rife with errors.

Here’s the reply from Svensmark.
Here’s another from Ken Gregory and here’s another from Anthony Watts.

Obviously you won’t spend any time reporting on them, because life’s too short isn’t it Richard? After all, what with burning up all of those carbon credits to visit glaciers calving perfectly naturally, and polar bear populations stridently not declining but growing strongly, there’s no time for nuanced scientific reporting is there?

Now we have yet another example of your tawdry one-sided reporting with this one: “No Sun link’ to climate change” (by the way, are you minimizing your carbon footprint by recycling the titles to articles?). This time its a letter to a little known and little read environmental science journal - so we’re a long way from any expertise in statistics or solar science, aren’t we?

This time the two scientists are Sloan and Wolfendale, and would you believe it! They come to the same conclusion as the one you want to hear! I’m not a betting man but if I was, I’d bet they contacted you about their forthcoming letter and you got some nice juicy “colour quotes” to pad it out to justify your BBC salary and the rest is history!

Nobody cares, because nobody checks anything!

Except that even Sloan and Wolfendale don’t show that there is ”‘No Sun link’ to climate change”, they say that even with their limited analysis of 20 some years, the Svensmark process on its own contributed perhaps 25% of the warming. That’s not insignificant.

That’s not “no link”, that’s “some link” Richard. Even this limited analysis showed some connection between the Svensmark process and global climate.

You could have asked them to run the identical analysis looking at the correlation between carbon dioxide rise and temperature over the same time period, but you don’t want to rock the boat by showing that the carbon dioxide link is even more tenuous than the Svensmark process you’re trying to bury! Carbon dioxide has continued to rise, while global temperatures appear to have stopped rising in 1998 having stabilized below the 1998 level and might even now be starting to fall. Even the Met Office admits this - but you don’t report that of course.

But that doesn’t save the day, because in the same article that you failed to quote or even link to (and I think I know why you didn’t link to it) comes this.

“However, Sloan and Wolfendale are not the only physicists to have recently turned their attention to the cosmic ray hypothesis. Vitaliy Rusov of the National Polytechnic University in Odessa, Ukraine and colleagues do not agree with the IPCC’s view that man is to blame for the recent warming. To prove their point, they looked for a direct connection between cosmic ray flux and temperature.”

“The team constructed a model of the Earth’s climate in which the only significant inputs were variations in the Sun’s power output and changes to the galactic cosmic ray flux (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2765). They found that the model’s predicted evolution of the Earth’s surface temperature over the last 700,000 years agrees well with proxy temperature data taken from Antarctic ice cores (arxiv.org/abs/0803.2766).”

“Rusov agrees that Svensmark’s cosmic ray ionization mechanism cannot fully account for the observed correlation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover, as Sloan and Wolfendale have demonstrated. But he believes that a small but direct link between cosmic rays and clouds could itself trigger a mechanism which causes further, and greater, changes in cloud cover.”

So here was another model study over 700,000 years and the link between climate change and the solar/cosmic ray variation was crystal clear.

But you couldn’t be bothered reporting it, could you Richard? It didn’t fit the narrative you’ve constructed.

Between copying and pasting Greenpeace publicity and encouraging reckless damage to the world economy and to the world’s poor in the “Green Room”, there simply isn’t time in your day to even report accurately and fairly on environmental issues.

It doesn’t matter that the BBC Trust says that its not the BBC’s responsibility to save the planet, nor is it responsible journalism to refuse to report on the criticisms of well-qualified skeptics to the whole global warming scare, because with you and your colleagues in the hot seat to set the agenda of continuing alarm, the BBC Trust can go hang and the concerns of many BBC License payers are so much white noise to be filtered out by the next “Alarm over…” or the next “The IPCC says…” story concocted in the BBC tearoom from the latest mailshot from Greenpeace or Fiends of the Earth or the WWF - those billion dollar multi-national corporations of public alarm.

Of course when you or Shukman or the others are travelling to the four corners of the globe to report on why everyone else shouldn’t travel to the four corners of the globe, there isn’t time to stop in small faraway places like New York and report on major scientific conferences attended by hundreds of well-qualified scientists who dispute the IPCC reports and the AGW scare? Who knows? You could have interviewed the President of the Czech Republic after he give his keynote speech? http://www.heartland.org/NewYork08/newyork08.cfm

But no. No reporting because its not what you want to hear. So it wasn’t reported by the BBC. Problem solved.

Your journalistic behaviour has at least been consistent: tawdry, one-sided, lazy, propagandist, alarmist and disgraceful. This isn’t BBC journalism that John Reith espoused, its more like extreme left-wing evangelization for the repeal of market economies by way of a faked vision of environmental apocalypse.

I encourage you to get honest: just join Greenpeace’s publicity department officially and have done with it. You’re doing the job already so you might as well get paid for it.

Yours truly

John A.,

cc: The BBC Trust

Its getting to be that time …

Time for a Peeps celebration!

A heads up. Tomorrow is pi day.

Take pie to work, have pie parties, but most importantly, don’t forget pi.

There is serious pie happening at work tomorrow.

Binary 11.00100100001111110110…
Decimal 3.14159265358979323846…
Duodecimal 3.184809493B91864…
Hexadecimal 3.243F6A8885A308D31319…

or, for the more serious:

3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105
820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982
1480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284811
17450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810
97566593344612847564823378678316527120190914564856692
3460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606
3155881748815209209628292540917153643678925903600113
30530548820466521384146951941511609…

and for the truly psychotic:

Pi to one million digits

Concern trolls will be in heaven.

Link for discussion

using questionable (read that as made up) information to try to ban plastic bags is just as bad.

I bolded the interesting bits. They couldn’t even find a study to misinterpret. Sheesh.

Plastic bags are not killing animals.

Scientists and environmentalists have attacked a global campaign to ban plastic bags which they say is based on flawed science and exaggerated claims.

The widely stated accusation that the bags kill 100,000 animals and a million seabirds every year are false, experts have told The Times. They pose only a minimal threat to most marine species, including seals, whales, dolphins and seabirds.

–snippy–

Campaigners say that plastic bags pollute coastlines and waterways, killing or injuring birds and livestock on land and, in the oceans, destroying vast numbers of seabirds, seals, turtles and whales. However, The Times has established that there is no scientific evidence to show that the bags pose any direct threat to marine mammals.

They “don’t figure” in the majority of cases where animals die from marine debris, said David Laist, the author of a seminal 1997 study on the subject. Most deaths were caused when creatures became caught up in waste produce. “Plastic bags don’t figure in entanglement,” he said. “The main culprits are fishing gear, ropes, lines and strapping bands. Most mammals are too big to get caught up in a plastic bag.”

He added: “The impact of bags on whales, dolphins, porpoises and seals ranges from nil for most species to very minor for perhaps a few species.For birds, plastic bags are not a problem either.”

The central claim of campaigners is that the bags kill more than 100,000 marine mammals and one million seabirds every year. However, this figure is based on a misinterpretation of a 1987 Canadian study in Newfoundland, which found that, between 1981 and 1984, more than 100,000 marine mammals, including birds, were killed by discarded nets. The Canadian study did not mention plastic bags.

Here’s the thread in the discussion area.

You’ve got to love those guys over at Real Climate. Okay, maybe not you but someone surely, at least their mothers, maybe.

On Feb 12 they posted an article that I copied for this blo gentry . Antarctica is Cold? Yeah, We Knew That.

Despite the recent announcement that the discharge from some Antarctic glaciers is accelerating, we often hear people remarking that parts of Antarctica are getting colder, and indeed the ice pack in the Southern Ocean around Antarctica has actually been getting bigger. Doesn’t this contradict the calculations that greenhouse gases are warming the globe? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.

Just to be clear, my interpretation of what “science historian” Spencer Weart is saying here is that parts of Antarctica (most parts actually except for the relatively small Antarctic Peninsula) are getting colder, that is the temperature trend is generally downward. Further this colder trend has been predicted for the past quarter century and presumably reported to all the right people who need to summarize all the relevant information for policy makers.

So let’s see now… 2008 minus 25 equals 1983… so this has been common knowledge in the climate community since 1983. Let’s test this hypothesis.

It is interesting and perhaps surprising that net contribution expected from changes in the Antarctic and Greenland ice-sheets is small. For both ice-sheets there are two competing effects³. In a warmer world, there is more water vapour in the atmosphere which leads to more snowfall. But there is also more ablation (erosion by melting) of the ice around the boudaries of the ice-sheets where melting of the ice and calving of icebergs occurs during the summer months. For Antarctica, the estimates are that the accumulation is greater than the ablation, leading to a small net growth.

The footnoted reference is:

3. See for instance C.J. van der Veen, “State of balance of the cryosphere”, REV. Geophys., 29, 1991, pp. 433-55.

It seems like the author of this quote was unaware that it had been well known that colder Antarctic temperatures were to result from anthropogenic greenhouse emissions. Just in case you missed it, for the Antarctic ice cover to grow faster than it ablates, it has to snow more. For it to snow more there has to be more moisture in the air. For there to be more moisture in the air the air has to be warmer.

Who is this author who was apparently out of the loop? I took the quote from: John Houghton, “Global Warming - The Complete Briefing”, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997, page 109.

I’m pretty sure 1997 was during the last 25 years.

The title page claims this John Houghton person was the “Co-chairman of the Scientific Assessment Working-Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change”. I guess they forgot to tell him.

So why am I posting this here and not over at Real Climate. Mostly because they do not welcome skeptical questioning of their premises.

This is fascinating. It seems that being in a virtual world does not make people any smarter. In Second Life, people fell for a Ponzi scheme.

As reported in this Baltimore Sun story:

The 33-year-old from Chicago, who played the game as a raven-haired vixen called Zania Turner, deposited $140 in Ginko Financial and waited for the money to grow. Instead, it vanished five months ago when Ginko, perhaps the first Ponzi scheme perpetrated by three-dimensional online avatars, left Second Life.

“I was foolish,” Roberts said. So were many others. Ginko took with it about $75,000 in real-money deposits, shaking faith in Second Life’s venerated lawlessness - no cops, no courts, no government - and unnerving Linden Lab, the usually laid-back San Francisco company that created it.

Besides the usual wonderment at people investing in Ponzi schemes even in a game, the really fascinating part is the interaction between Second Life’s owner Linden Labs’ attempt to impose regulation and the subsequent economic effects. If nothing else, Second Life mimics some basic economic principles:

Within moments, there was a meltdown. ATMs didn’t work when players rushed to withdraw their Linden dollars, which can be exchanged for U.S. currency at a rate that hovers about 270-to-1. Stocks plunged and so did real estate prices. Avatars - players’ digital doppelgangers - marched with signs saying. “Give us our banks back NOW!!” and sent melancholy messages: “We’re doomed.”

It was nearly a 3-D insurgency. “People are panicking,” said Margaret, a British mother of two who in Second Life is Ragged Delec, an exotic dancer. Margaret, who asked that her last name not be printed, hasn’t been able to retrieve $400 she had squirreled away.

“This has done some serious damage to the Second Life financial industry,” she said.

We will discuss this further in the Economics folder of the Discussion forum - link found to the upper left.

Makes me tear up.

While his real b-day is 15-January, we get a monday in january off.

RIP, January 15, 1929-April 4, 1968, to a brilliant orator.

this girl has some serious pipes

Go here, YouTube or someone pulled it

Didn’t get a chance to watch the terrifyingly creepy Tom Cruise video yesterday before Scientologists pulled it off YouTube? Well, we’ve managed to get our hands on a copy and now we’d like to invite you to watch in all its technicolor glory.

And people ask me why I mock EVERYONE.

You could not make this up, yet it is real life likeish.

………..

Incoherent stupid is very amusing.

But, sly sarcasm boy

Adds a layer of reality.

Still working on a post because I am lazier than a cat.

Here at Debunkers, we occasionally discuss the Discovery Channel TV show “Mythbusters”. So when I saw this on Icanhazcheesburger I laughed pretty hard.

Here is a link to Icanhascheezburger if you are not already a fan funny pictures

If you don’t get the joke, look at this page.

The NYT reports that the FTC is investigating carbon offset scams.

The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates advertising claims, raised the question Tuesday in its first hearing in a series on green marketing, this one focusing on carbon offsets.

As more companies use offset programs to create an environmental halo over their products, the commission said it was growing increasingly concerned that some green marketing assertions were not substantiated. Environmentalists have a word for such misleading advertising: “greenwashing.”

With the rapid growth of green programs like carbon offsets, “there’s a heightened potential for deception,” said Deborah Platt Majoras, chairwoman of the commission.

The F.T.C. has not updated its environmental advertising guidelines, known as the Green Guides, since 1998. Back then, the agency did not create definitions for phrases that are common now — like renewable energy, carbon offsets and sustainability.

For now, it is soliciting comments on how to update its guidelines and is gathering information about how carbon-offset programs work.

I hurt myself laughing again. I really should not do that, as the physical therapist bills are getting high, but at my age there is not a lot of choice.

What did it this time? Carbon Credit Killers.

This is a hilarious website attacking Al Gore’s carbon offset scam business with some humor. One can buy a “carbon debit package”. And it is a funny set of packages too. The “standard” package includes: “Tree Destroyed in Your Name”, “Email Sent to Al Gore”, “Certificate of Carbon Debit Purchase”, and ”‘I Increased My Carbon Footprint’ t-shirt” – for only $19.95!

Don’t miss the Premier Carbon Debit Vacation Package.

What We Do
Very simply, we provide a way to fight the fallacy of Carbon Credits by selling Carbon Debits. These are not just meaningless words but have actions behind them as we remove a tree for every debit purchased.

After receiving a Carbon Debit purchase we would process it as follows:
1. Carbon Debit Purchase is recorded and Certificate of Purchase is emailed 2. Our Carbon Debit Specialist is notified of the Carbon Debit Purchase 3. The Carbon Debit Specialist executes one tree for every Carbon Debit purchased. 4. The destruction of the tree is relayed back to Carbon Debit head-quarters for final Carbon Debit confirmation.

Although our actions are obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek we take all Carbon Debit orders seriously and will execute a tree and remove the equivalent of one Carbon Credit from those who are trying to be guilt free in their energy gluttony.

We also provide t-shirts and others items so that you may show those around you that you have taken action on the threat of Global Carbon Credits. Encourage everyone you know – buy a Carbon Debit today!

We are discussing this one in the Global Warming topic in the discussion forum. Our discussion forum can be accessed using the link at the upper right.

Great, just we need, more spam

Aaron Weaver has made a discovery the world could probably do without: He’s found a way to spam your printer from the Web.

By using a little-known capability found in most Web browsers, Weaver can make a Web page launch a print job on just about any printer on a victim’s network. The Web site could print annoying ads on the printer and theoretically issue more dangerous commands, like telling the printer to send a fax, format its hard drive or download new firmware.

Jeremy Clarkson recently wrote a column. He wanted to explain to people that the loss by the British government of personal data on seven million Britons in a database was no big deal - that no one could use the information to defraud anyone. So he included in his column his bank account number and routing code.

Bad idea it turns out as someone took that information, and evidently to teach him a lesson, set up a debit from his bank account of 500 pounds ( what is that in real money anyway?) to a charity.

After the scale of his blunder became apparent, a chastened Clarkson wrote: “Contrary to what I said at the time, we must go after the idiots who lost the discs and stick cocktail sticks in their eyes until they beg for mercy.”

Last week it emerged that more than 28,000 people have signed a petition on the Downing Street website calling for Clarkson to be made prime minister.

Ok, I think much of what he is spouting is garbage.

But he can spout and turn a phrase that MLK would be proud of.

And is really a brilliant speech.

AOL announces the end of Netscape

An historic name in software will effectively pass into history in February as AOL discontinues development and active support for the Netscape browser, according to an official blog.

AOL will keep delivering security patches for the current version of Netscape until Feb. 1, 2008, after which it will no longer provide active support for any version of the software, according to a Friday entry on The Netscape Blog by Tom Drapeau, lead developer for Netscape.com. The Netscape.com Web site will remain as a general-purpose portal.

It is kinda sad in a philosophical way. I haven’t used nutscrape for years, I use Firefox and Safari. But I was there watching the IPO and launch of it.

So passes a legend.

Go here for a pretty picture

The last time I was at stonehenge was 1979, the stupid (tagging) faction had not hit the field and I could walk among the stones. Alas, no more. We must view that brilliant architectural .. thing .. from afar now.

However, look at it is… a giant chunk o’ rock that tells the time.

Science Debate 2008

As you watched the scores of U.S. Presidential debates, did you ever wonder why there has been no debate devoted to policy surrounding what may be the most important social issue of our time: Science and Technology?

We did and we want to make sure it happens.

Science Debate 2008 is a grassroots initiative spearheaded by a growing number of scientists and other concerned citizens. The signatories to our “Call for a Presidential Debate on Science & Technology” include Nobel laureates and other leading scientists, presidents of universities, congresspersons of both major political parties, business leaders, religious leaders, former presidential science advisors, the editors of America’s major science journals, writers, and the current and several past presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among many others.

However, I was amused to look under the blogs supporting this proposal and found this item:

David Archer, Michael Mann, Eric Steig, Ray Pierrehumbert
Real Climate

That’s amusing. The Real Climate blog does its best to suppress debate on Climate Change, not foster it.

Further discussion is found in our Polycon folder of the discussion folder. Link at right.

David Harsanyi is a columnist at the Denver Post, but don’t hold that against him. He’s actually a reasonably thoughtful guy. He recently wrote a review for Reason magazine of a book titled The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture by Andrew Keen.

I love reviews that tell me I don’t need to read a book because I spend too much money at the local bookstore and on Amazon.com as it is. ( And it is all Setnakht’s fault too ). Probably the title would have warned me off this one but I had to share the review with you.

From Harsanyi’s review:

Keen refuses to confess that there’s even a smattering of intellectually and culturally worthy user-driven content online. If you do find something decent in the “digital forest of mediocrity,” he attributes it to the infinite monkey theorem: Even simians, if permitted to indiscriminately hit a keyboard for an infinite amount of time, will one day bang out Beowulf or Don Quixote. (Silly me, I was under the impression that monkeys had hatched the idea for VH1’s Scott Baio Is 45…and Single.) Apparently, these monkeys are discharging so much free content into the cyber-strata that they threaten to bury culturally significant work, dilute good craftsmanship, and cost me, a journalist and “cultural gatekeeper,” my job. So I guess I’d better take Keen’s thesis seriously.

Evidently the book is not completely devoid of insight …

Readers of The Cult of the Amateur may be surprised to learn that the barbarians capable of obliterating thousands of years of Western culture in their spare time are a horde of porn-addicted, gambling-happy, ungrateful, musically challenged yokels.

Clicky

MASON CITY, IOWA – Janice Easley’s fury over illegal immigration boiled over Saturday as she confronted Republican presidential hopeful Fred Thompson at the Music Man Square museum.

She said she recalled a film about Mexicans who wanted to take over California and New Mexico. Calling illegal immigrants a taxpayer burden, she wondered whether Americans could march in the streets of Mexico and demand welfare. When Iowans call up the power company, she said, “everything is in Spanish; it’s sickening.”

“You are so, so right,” Thompson responded. English should be the national language, he told the retiree, and immigrants bear some of the blame for the home-loan crisis. “A lot of them couldn’t communicate with the people they were getting the mortgage from,” he said.

Yeah, that’s right. The sub-prime mortgage SNAFU is due to folx who don’t understand english and not the cause of out of control lending to anything that moves. Teh banks took a risk on lending at psychotic stupidity, and it’s the fault of people who don’t speak english as a primary language.

Fred, I never liked you, but you have pretty well demonstrated that you are churning the bottom of the barrel. And it ain’t butter.

Some interesting facts from the great orange satan about winter solstice.

Happy Winter, or Summer, as the case may be! The northern Winter Solstice occurred just a few hours ago (Dec. 22, 1:08 AM EDT). That means today will be about the shortest day of the year, and tonight a long, glorious reign of winter darkness. But it doesn’t mean that the sun rose at the latest time this morning, or that it will set at the earliest later today. And now, if you haven’t heard this odd astronomical tale already, you’re puzzled: How could the shortest day of the year not feature the latest sunrise and/or earliest sunset? The key is they don’t happen on the same day of the year, otherwise, yes, we’d have a problem.

And Kent will probably eat my face for this potentially simplistic link, but…

Link

Ok, whatever.

I am completely ambivalent on the whole global temperature thing. But, science truth by volume really offends me and for that to be the title that Milloy mails out makes me annoyed. Ya, that is the title used in the report, but it is dumb and for him to reiterate it is bad

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

I’m a tolerant person. Ok, I’m not really, but I can pretend until I see stuff coming around the bend like Robert Novak reports

When Mike Huckabee went to Houston on Tuesday to raise funds for his fast-rising, money-starved presidential candidacy, a luncheon for the ordained Baptist minister was arranged by evangelical Christians. On hand was Judge Paul Pressler, a hero to Southern Baptist Convention reformers. But he was a nonpaying guest who supports Fred Thompson for president.

Huckabee greeted Pressler warmly. That contrasted with Huckabee’s anger two months ago when they encountered each other in California. The former governor of Arkansas took issue then with comments by Pressler, a former Texas appeals court judge, that Huckabee had been a slacker in the war against secularists within the Baptist church.

Delving a touch deeper, we find this funess

I’ll let you dredge through the site, it kinda makes me nauseous.

But as a quick sampler:

10. The Bible is true in matters of faith and practice, doctrine and morals, but it is not necessarily true when it speaks on matters of interest to history and science.

Article XII
WE AFFIRM that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.

WE DENY that Biblical infallibility and inerrancy are limited to spiritual, religious, or redemptive themes, exclusive of assertions in the fields of history and sci ence. We further deny that scientific hypotheses about earth history may properly be used to overturn the teaching of Scripture on creation and the flood.

I find this sentiment highly offensive. I know of no rational scientist or science understanding person to even suggest that science is a mechanism to overturn whomever’s belief in a god.

I have stated this many times, if your faith is so shallow that you will shut your mind science and only believe in the writings from a compiled collection of articles from deep history, your faith is failed on a different level. Get it people, faith is faith and has no use in our political system. I do not want to live in a religious theocracy. I don’t even want to hear the bone-heads in DC mentioning religion. Not because I have an issue with their personal god or whatever, but because it is not the way we should run our country.

Rant over. Player whawn.

Well, it’s politics month so….

Tancredo to abandon presidential bid

The five-term Colorado congressman planned to make the announcement at a news conference in Des Moines, Iowa, on Thursday, the person said, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for Tancredo or his campaign.

I could not care less in this presidential race, and as such, I am simply watching the explosions.

Copy of Magna Carta sold for £10m

13th century copy of the Magna Carta manuscript sold for more than £10 million at auction to an American businessman who said it will remain on public display.

David Rubenstein, co-founder of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, paid $21.3 million (£10.6m) when the document went under the hammer at Sotheby’s in New York.

It is the most important document that was ever written. Without it, out constitution could not exist and, in general, we would still be servile to some king under his whim.

QUACKY QUOTES

No comment, just a classic list of hovind’s babblings

e.g.:

In spite of their ferocious look, many people would probably argue the T-Rex was a vegetarian. The ferocious teeth would have been great for, you know, crushing stuffed pumpkins or something, you know. I don’t know if it has ever been proven they were meat eaters. There is plenty of evidence from cracks in the enamel with chlorophyll stains in them indicating they were certainly eating plants.

[Claim originates from Carl Baugh who is not returning emails]
Truth Radio 28 September 2006 @ 10:00 (Tape 1)

From Crittenden pajama media continues to prove that they are also bankrupt:

In war, we know, the ends so often do justify the means, so who’s to quibble about why impeachment proceedings are not going ahead; why alleged U.S. “torture” just became a non-issue; why the Democratic leadership in Congress is ready to fund the U.S. troops fighting terrorism and trying to build a free nation in Iraq; and why, belatedly, said leadership and other critics are acknowledging that the Bush counter-insurgency strategy there is in fact working?

Never does anything justifies its means. Ever.

Get a clue people.

They have glommed on to a Daily Mail comment about climate change from teh pope. And then started ranting while mouth breathing.

Problem is, it don’t say what they think it says.

The problems looming on the horizon are complex and time is short. In order to face this situation effectively, there is a need to act in harmony. One area where there is a particular need to intensify dialogue between nations is that of the stewardship of the earth’s energy resources. The technologically advanced countries are facing two pressing needs in this regard: on the one hand, to reassess the high levels of consumption due to the present model of development, and on the other hand to invest sufficient resources in the search for alternative sources of energy and for greater energy efficiency.

Climate change is still under review - what is happening is relevant to the planet. Making it a political question is just stupid. Let the science will it out, kk.

The brit food agency, the Food Standard Agency, is going stupid, too.

FSA considers regulatory action on trans fats

The UK Food Standards Agency (FSA) will discuss tomorrow whether to maintain a voluntary approach for food manufacturers in limiting harmful trans fatty acids or whether to introduce mandatory restrictions.

Let’s review this concept:

People have been eating trans-fats forever. We have very well developed biochemical pathways to deal with them. My first biochemistry teacher discussed this back in 1986. He was way on the edge of noting the stupid that was just beginning to surface.

All beef related meat stuff has trans fats. Period.

We die. Period.

This is not rocket science people. This whole, remove everything from fun (be it food, drugs, alcohol, etc) that may kill you 3 days earlier, is really getting tiresome.

This particular breakdown is …. amusing:

An industry breakdown showed the average trans fats amounts in different sectors.

Margarine and fat spreads contain less that 1g per 100g.

Biscuits, cakes and pastries contain less than 1g per 100g.

Ice cream contains 0.2g per 100g.

Crisps and savoury snacks contain less that 0.35g per 100g.

Chips and processed potatoes contain less than 2g per 100g.

Confectionery products contain no more than 1g per 100g.

Recall back to the days when butter was declared evil and margarine was ‘good’?

Note that meat is not on that list. It can contain up to 10% of the fat as trans-fats. Depends on diet and breed.

And before any of you out there start accusing me of being anti-meat, please read carefully.

and insult to soooo many others

Clicky

Recognizing the importance of Christmas and the Christian faith.

Whereas Christmas, a holiday of great significance to Americans and many other cultures and nationalities, is celebrated annually by Christians throughout the United States and the world;

Whereas there are approximately 225,000,000 Christians in the United States, making Christianity the religion of over three-fourths of the American population;

Whereas there are approximately 2,000,000,000 Christians throughout the world, making Christianity the largest religion in the world and the religion of about one-third of the world population;

Whereas Christians identify themselves as those who believe in the salvation from sin offered to them through the sacrifice of their savior, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and who, out of gratitude for the gift of salvation, commit themselves to living their lives in accordance with the teachings of the Holy Bible;

Really, does the stupid never end in congress???

Not all christian faiths buy dec 25th as the birthday of jesus. In fact, anyone with a brain recognizes that the catholic church took over a pagan festival for their own gain.

Resolved, That the House of Representatives–

(1) recognizes the Christian faith as one of the great religions of the world;

(2) expresses continued support for Christians in the United States and worldwide;

(3) acknowledges the international religious and historical importance of Christmas and the Christian faith;

(4) acknowledges and supports the role played by Christians and Christianity in the founding of the United States and in the formation of the western civilization;

(5) rejects bigotry and persecution directed against Christians, both in the United States and worldwide; and

(6) expresses its deepest respect to American Christians and Christians throughout the world.

GAH - I don’t really know where to go with these resolution. Though I think the main direction is NO DUH.

This is not what our congresskritters need to be doing. As I have said an infinite number of times, this is not an anti-religion rant, this is a simple do your business rant.

I don’t know, like maybe actually pass a budget?

This latest bit about the CIA destroying tapes showing agents torturing people has proven that this administration has devolved to the utter point of contempt.

No one needs to parse the law to the point where it is necessary to explicitly make illegal what we have consistently deemed to be illegal. It makes a joke of our law. And takes us down to level of the subhuman regimes that ‘we’ criticize.

The ends never justify the means. Ever. The argument that torturing someone to save blah number of lives does not justify that it is utterly immoral.

clicky

FDA has completed a comprehensive, scientific review of known safety data for both drugs, which are used to treat the symptoms of gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) and other conditions caused by excess stomach acid. While long-term studies reported to the agency on May 29, 2007, collected safety data, the study protocols did not specify how heart problems, such as heart attacks, were defined or verified. As a result, evaluating the information that was gathered about the safety of both drugs in these studies was challenging.

for some AMAZING picking on a gorgeous guitar

Hmmmm, a bit on tattoo safety comes out.

Personally, I have a dislike of tattoos that borders on an irrational phobia.

There is the bit about epidurals and, must not snark about lower back tattoos on women… the Mayo Clinic suggests that only fresh tattoos are a counter-indication.

to add to a WaPo article on (D) Kucinch may be a nut, but he is running hand-in-hand with the rest of the presidential candidates. and he acknowledges that he is an outrider, but the wife is scary good at public speakage and totally hot.

You show up as a red-head and you win.

And, yeah, she ain’t Irish, but the red hair green eyes will back to there.

The republicans (or some of them) latest response to the NIE response to the non-threat from Iran is revolting to me.

I am not an intelligence person (as well noted , I am a biochemist); however, I many very close ties to the folx that are the hard, hard core intel people. And I find it highly offensive that the ‘tards in congress are accusing the latest report from the NIE because they wish to perpetuate ’shrubs desire to bomb the ME. This administration is really pissing me off.

Politic month continues.

just a thought…

A statistical blip or something more real?

The nation’s teenage birth rate rose for the first time in 15 years, surprising government health officials who had no immediate explanation.

But several experts said that they have been expecting an increase. They attribute the rise to increased federal financing for abstinence-only health-education programs that do not teach teenagers how to use contraceptives.

And, yes, I know that not all kids go down that line, but not all are particularly forward thinking and removing eduction is stupid.

Some key sexually transmitted disease rates have also been rising, including syphilis, gonorrhea and chlamydia. The rising teenage pregnancy rate is part of the same phenomenon, said Dr. Carol Hogue, a professor of maternal and child health at Emory University

Nice. Let’s hope that it is a blip. ‘cause the suggestion that kids are going to let some religious moral code override their hormones, is ludicrous. The additional health complications from STDs makes the progenitors of these programs as an only option, criminal.

And, yes, I know that not all kids are going to go out a have sex, but limiting educational options is bad.

Who cares?

And those that do, need to get a grip on what is relevant in the real world

Clicky

Republican U.S. presidential hopeful Mitt Romney offered his views on religion and faith in the United States Thursday, but not an explanation of his faith.

“If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion,” Romney, a Mormon, said in remarks prepared for delivery in College Station, Texas. “A president must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States.”

Guess what, I just could not care less less if you practiced demonology on your back porch. Give some real reason that you are not another rube running for the prez. KK. Not that complicated.

Really, anything religion related is meaningless.

Yeah, I see he is attempting to do that and the ‘tards that keep bringing his faith into the discussion are, uhm, ‘tards. But we’ve done this before. The easy one is Kennedy as a catholic.

Not tot repeat myself (but I will), GET OVER PEOPLES RELIGION

As I said, this is politic month.

NPR had an Iowa caucus debate that was very scripted and to whatever point they have (though I kinda liked the minimal questions)

If, and you probably did not hear this conversation proves to me that the dems are just as stoopid as the repubs.

Please let me off at the next intergalactic bus stop

Robin admonished me, so I’ll try to be goodish, sorta, maybe

But the links are passive and I have word from people behind the firewalls from hell that that isn’t the problem, but I’ll still try to be good, but I do live my life visually.

so says a barbaric justice system.

Clicky

THE British teacher held for naming a teddy bear Mohammed has been found guilty of insulting religion and has been sentenced to 15 days in prison, her lawyer said.
She will also face deportation.

Looking tired and distressed, Gillian Gibbons, 54, earlier appeared in a Khartoum courtroom for the start of her trial charged with insulting religion and inciting hatred.

heh

Blame bruiser for this one

Clicky

Yesterday, I hinted that I was considering a visit to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY. This decision was not without its dilemmas. First, there is principle. How could a God-fearing scientist such as myself justify the blasphemy of setting foot in a temple of wrongness?

Get Steve here. I am too lazy to think about this.

WaPo article. Another point where this administration has decided that science is irrelevant, and politics will take take precedence.

After concluding that a Bush administration appointee “may have improperly influenced” several rulings on whether to protect imperiled species under the Endangered Species Act, the Fish and Wildlife Service has revised seven decisions on protecting species across the country.

The policy reversal, sparked by inquiries by the Interior Department’s inspector general and by the House Natural Resources Committee, underscores the extent to which the administration is still dealing with the fallout from the tenure of Julie MacDonald, the deputy assistant secretary for fish, wildlife and parks who repeatedly overruled agency scientists’ recommendations on endangered-species decisions. MacDonald resigned from the department in May after she was criticized in a report by the inspector general and as she was facing congressional scrutiny.

I could not care less about the endangered species act. I like to watch wild critters, but am ambivalent about specifics ‘cause DNA will win and diversity will. But the effrontery of a political appointee ignoring her science kritters annoys me.

I have issues with the brits and Ireland and this song kinda represents it, along with:

It is sad that folx mock his drunkenness, which has zero to do with his brilliance as a song writer. And as a performer.

Click me

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) – If you’re planning to vote in Virginia’s February Republican presidential primary, be prepared to sign an oath swearing your Republican loyalty.

If you could comment, there is a preemptive Godwin’s law invoked

Ok, we are just over 420 days to our next dear leader.

I’ll go political, regardless of a previous post that says I’ll say apolitical.

Clicky for kid defending teacher

KHARTOUM (Reuters) - A 7-year-old Sudanese student on Tuesday defended the British teacher accused of insulting Islam saying he had chosen to call a teddy bear Mohammad because it was his own name.

Guesses on time to lashes and imprisonment for the kid?

This is odd at best

Or former atheists, or anyone who has an answer they like. Every so often I like to see how far one of my fundamental beliefs can be stretched by intelligent opposition. Today I want you to try to convince me there is no God, WITHOUT referencing “the problem of evil.” (In Islam God’s ultimate goodness stems from the mercy of creation [the idea being it’s better to exist than not exist], which contains both good and evil, so the existence of evil isn’t the same problem it is in Christianity.)

You believe in doG, great, why does your faith need some kinda proof? Do you actually understand what faith is?

Posted because of the proving a negative that seems to have seeped from the creationists to the existence of doG.

The latest StarCraft II trailer is making me wonder. Do I continue my hatred of Terrans and stick with playing ‘toss and Zerg?

I may give them a second chance. Maybe.

But, the blades of Auir will probably win.

The engine that they have developed it drooley. IK and a hardcore physics engine, drooooolllll,

But this is really pissing me off.

A British schoolteacher has been arrested in Sudan accused of insulting Islam’s Prophet, after she allowed her pupils to name a teddy bear Muhammad.

…

Ms Gibbons was arrested after several parents made complaints.

The BBC has learned the charge could lead to six months in jail, 40 lashes or a fine.

On top of the woman who was sentenced to 200 lashes for the effrontery of being raped, I kinda want to kill.

Following her appeal, a Saudi Court has increased the sentance of a gang rape victim to 200 lashes and six months jail, punishment for travelling alone in a car with a non-relative male prior to the attack. Her seven attackers sentences now range from two to nine years.

Go here for discussion on the board.

Will the wingnuts fight this one?

Scientists have managed to reprogram human skin cells directly into cells that look and act like embryonic stem (ES) cells. The technique makes it possible to generate patient-specific stem cells to study or treat disease without using embryos or oocytes–and therefore could bypass the ethical debates that have plagued the field. “This is like an earthquake for both the science and politics of stem cell research,” says Jesse Reynolds, policy analyst for the Center for Genetics and Society in Oakland, California.

…

Once the kinks are worked out, “the whole field is going to completely change,” says stem cell researcher Jose Cibelli of Michigan State University in East Lansing. “People working on ethics will have to find something new to worry about.”

The article will publish in the 22-November issue of Science

This is too good

Creationism could be scientific if God wanted it to be, in the same way that pi could equal 7 if that’s what God felt like doing. God hasn’t made creationism a science yet, but he might be keeping his options open.

He gets many free drinks the next time he’s back in the states

Discussion link

Clicky clicky

November 16, 2007 – New York, NY. Scientists associated with the American Council on Science and Health analyzed the natural foods that make up a traditional holiday dinner – and have found that they are loaded with “carcinogens”: chemicals that in large doses cause cancer in laboratory animals. None of these chemicals are made by man or added to the foods. Indeed, all of these “carcinogens” occur naturally in foods. But ACSH scientists have good news: these natural carcinogens pose no hazard to human health.

so, this is just apropos

Combines Weird Al Yankovic and WoW

Classic, at least to me.

And, looking a little deeper, it is a really well done production. I sure as hell couldn’t get my guild that organized.

And I play WAY too much online.

HT to Boomer who did this, not me.

click me

Q: What is the purpose of the Fiscal Wake-Up Tour?

A: The Fiscal Wake-Up Tour is designed to educate Americans about our nation’s true financial condition and large and growing fiscal imbalance. By stating the facts and speaking the truth to people outside Washington’s Beltway, we hope to accomplish several key objectives: First, to encourage more Americans, especially younger Americans, to become more informed about and involved in this and other major public policy issues. Second, to slow our fiscal bleeding as soon as possible. And finally, to help make sure that fiscal responsibility will be addressed by Presidential and other candidates during the 2008 elections.

Will it help?

Me hopes so.

Pulls add - not here, biotch

but you have to love his hair - never moves

Does it hate America?

/snark.

I just d/l’ded The Age Of Plastic. I was still on vinyl with the Buggles and other stuff that I was just too cheap to get to digital.

What’s my point?

This is mid 70’s moosic. Listen on earbuds and they did stuff I don’t think they even thought they were doing. Some geeks with a Moog synth, and…

I hate MTV and everything that it is, however

fixed

was their launching video and is remains, also, amazing.

And, with age, they remain, brilliant:

10 pts to anyone who knows what ‘VTR’ means.

Only because my brain works this way, here’s a tie back to this thread

And that huge ass non-bass guitar is so cool.

I saw the Femmes at the 9:30 club last year sometime, and they are still hawt. Have only been following them since about 1982, so I don’t like to label ‘em - pseudo punk? Buh, no care.

Drakens gets the blame for this post on the death of santa (primary link here)

a recruitment firm warned him not to use “ho ho ho” because it could frighten children and was too close to “ho”, a US slang term for prostitute.

I can’t snark this idiocy.

Answers in Genesis has a gold mine at their Creation Museum.

PETERSBURG, KY. – Northern Kentucky’s Creation Museum is evolving into a larger facility.

The museum will add 663 parking spaces, outdoor canopies and a maintenance building and will move its main entrance as part of a $500,000 upgrade.

Though they probably don’t like that evolving bit.

HT - Balloon Juice

And I found this while reading fark…

Here’s John Scalzi (and it is brilliant and hysterical) on his tour of the museum, and I use that term very loosely.

Let me say this much: I have to admit admiration for the pure balls-out, high-octane creationism that’s on offer here. Not for the Creation Museum that mamby-pamby weak sauce known as “Intelligent Design,” which tries to slip God by as some random designer, who just sort of got the ball rolling by accident. Screw that, pal: The Creation Museum’s God is hands on! He made every one of those animals from the damn mud and he did it no earlier than 4004 BC, or thereabouts.

Here’s the thread on the discussion board.

HT to our resident tool guy in Taiwan.

This is really cool.

This calculator finds the geographic midpoint (geographic center) for two or more places. For example, The point that lies halfway between Chicago and Los Angeles is located at latitude 38°58′N and longitude 103°52′W, which is a point that lies about 22 miles (35 km) southwest of Limon, Colorado. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the calculator is that after you calculate the coordinates of the midpoint you can view a Google map with a marker pointing at the exact location of the midpoint.

Karl noted that it made him realize that the earth is a sphere.

Those great circle things (and here’s a great circle mapper) will always mess up your spatial sense. Pilots probably don’t have to think too much about them, but the rest of us don’t use them daily.

This is just a simple post about hate - my sad butt is being dragged into a hearing (energy and commerce) because Dingall and Stupak can.

I really don’t do well in confrontational situations, adding in the congressional bit has me on edge.

I’ll re-iterate HATE

Expect more senseless rants.

Still waiting on irradiated cockroaches.

But, mythbusters needs to deliver an answer that is different than mine from the 23rd-October-2007 post

Teh mail addy is mine in the contact list, so, please, go for it.

Responses remain off here because the lazy factor and the board is borked atm for comments. Go to the discussion page, please

Does cat blogging include your cat trying to type? Hershey has a, habit, of using my keyboard while I am doing anything.

And then she chews on me for the effrontery of moving her. Go down to my post on not feeding cats, it’s funny because it’s real.

I was thinking about rambling about torture and various thoughts that are percolating about. Blah isn’t torture because of some legal manipulations; or, blah is torture, but it’s ok because americans won’t abuse it, only use it to get info out of ‘bad’ guys; or, yeah, it’s torture and it’s bad. There are other sub-variants, but that pretty well sums up the position of most, I think.

Then I realized that the discussion is bankrupt from the beginning. If you, as a purported moral human, can countenance the abuse of another person simply because you can, no matter what you will get out of it, you are not.

See what the interrogators did in WWII

For six decades, they held their silence.

The group of World War II veterans kept a military code and the decorum of their generation, telling virtually no one of their top-secret work interrogating Nazi prisoners of war at Fort Hunt.

When about two dozen veterans got together yesterday for the first time since the 1940s, many of the proud men lamented the chasm between the way they conducted interrogations during the war and the harsh measures used today in questioning terrorism suspects.

Back then, they and their commanders wrestled with the morality of bugging prisoners’ cells with listening devices. They felt bad about censoring letters. They took prisoners out for steak dinners to soften them up. They played games with them.

“We got more information out of a German general with a game of chess or Ping-Pong than they do today, with their torture,” said Henry Kolm, 90, an MIT physicist who had been assigned to play chess in Germany with Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess.

Ok, I did talk about it. But only to show my disgust.

On a more positive note, the youth of america are not lazy, and are being recognized by Business Week in the Best U.S. Entrepreneurs Under 25. Go meet them.

HT to Marketplace

SCOTT JAGOW: Business Week magazine is tallying votes this week for its list of the best young entrepreneurs in the country. They have to be 25 or under. We thought it’d fun to meet one of these people.

Bryan Sims is CEO of Brass Media, based in Oregon. Bryan publishes a magazine about money targeted to young people. When he was 19, he dropped out of college – and gave up a full scholarship – to pursue this business. Bryan, was the magazine successful at that time?

BRYAN SIMS: Um, haha . . . no, no. It was definitely not successful, and there was a lot of people that were pretty skeptical and saying, “Oh, why are you leaving school? You’re not gonna get another shot with scholarships like this . . .” and so. I mean, it was the middle of 2003, and we were trying to raise money for a company starting a lifestyle magazine out of Corvalis, Ore. So, not exactly a lot of people were investing in the idea at the time.

And, what I find quite amusing, is that the very skreed that some people complain about the attention span of the under 30’s has turned into a viable market model.

But, then again Blizzard has already managed to prove that by managing to pull in the paltry sum of $1.2 billion’ish a month (just on subscriptions) for a game. No, I did not mistype that.

Blah, blah, about costs, who’s doing better, a game company, or GM?

From here I end up with this:

The 80’s techno freaks (whom I love) took the Enola Gay and why she was what the writers spoke of who she was … was and generated this:

comments are open

Update: comments closed due to spam.

I took the two small vermin-things for their booster Hep-A shots.

There were more wonderful flyers outside the office building discussing the hazards of mercury (thiomersal) and aborted babies (cell lines from the 60’s) and why you should not vaccinate.

A good education for the vermin on why stupid should be painful.

so I’ll post a cheesy anime version of Andrew W K’s Ready to Die

Which is better than me killing after when happened to me yesterday

Or is it skando-pop?

I don’t do well when I am being spotlight-lighted – so my best reaction is to go into overdrive and spaz out.

The Dallas News has a fun article featuring a number various equator myths.

The author starts out with (note to whackoids, while I have linked the full article, I have cut some (well, most of it) stuff out)

QUITO, Ecuador ? This may seem confusing, but there are two equators in Ecuador: the fake equator with the real monument and the real equator with the fake science.

So, we go to

five minutes away, down a dirt road that borders La Mitad del Mundo, is the real equator as measured by the Global Positioning System, or so they say at the rustic, open-air Inti Nan Museum. There, a guide takes visitors through several experiments, ostensibly to demonstrate the Coriolis effect and to answer the big question: Does the toilet really flush in the opposite direction in the other hemisphere?

Uhmmm, yeah. In a multi billion cubic metre pool far away from the equator it can be detected (pardon passive voice)

Then teh author goes onto describe 3 speriments:

Experiment 1: Water swirl

Experiment 2: Egg balancing

Experiment 3: Vise grip

She had fun, I am assuming this was 100% tounge-in-cheek.

Not the love bit, but eated by the fires of hell.

Hmm - borkened at about 50%

Not as fun a version, but, it works, but it does have some nasty static.

My BIL just sent me this mess Read the whole post; Ah skrew it, here’s most of it so the whack jobs out there don’t accuse me of using ellipsis to edit the original.

I can’t tell which is funnier, this long-hated cheesebag-anthem turned into a much more interesting, atonal mess in front of thousands of paying customers or the hilarious soldiering on of the Van Halens as they look at each other from inside the trainwreck. Eddie tries to transpose on the fly and match the wildly fucked up keyboards but the great thing there is the difference in pitch is non-musical - about 1.5 semitones sharp. So there’s no frets he can choose to fix the problem!

So what happens when you’re Van Halen, the last song in your set list is the million-seller ‘Jump’ with its synthesizer-keyboard opening?and the recording you’re using to play back the synth is accidentally run at 48K instead of 44.1K?

Technical stuff about what happened.

and I’ll add, she is awesome live.

teh link to admin e-mail address should be correct now, the one I see and may repsond to.

other changes are irrelevant at this level.

Comments remain off — go here here to discuss any thoughts or reactions.

I am leary of allowing comment. But I can turn them back on if there is a decent reason. Spam and I do not mix.

This is a general skreed against what I consider self-righteous and self-serving, for lack of a better word, people.

There seems to be a group of folx (which seems somewhat prevalent among the exteme conservative right wing) who have decided that the use of ‘eating my bandwidth’ has some relevance. From what I have read, the context normally goes along the lines of ‘I paid for this, and if you use it against my wishes, you’re stealing’ It also seems to go-hand-in-hand with the idea that ‘my web slot is sacrosanct and I can scream theft/abuse’ if you use ‘my bandwidth’

I started noticiing this just after (it may have been occuring before, don’t know) the kid who was ’stealing’ a libraries WiFi had his laptop confiscated by our intrepid defenders of justice. I guess you could argue that he was trespassing, sort of, in the street.

Back to my point. If I actually have one. Bandwidth is not a commodity per se. You can get upset if someone is using your WiFi without permission, though I fail to see a problem unless the person using it is downloading kiddie pr0n, or such. But, whatever. What annoys me is the folx on various high traffic blog/websites that claim that you’re stealing from them writing text and, ’stealing’ bandwidth.

You entered a contract for x Mbit/s with a max total of x Mbit/month (or whatever time frame). Even a 10k-word skreed aint gonna affect squat on your max. This is virtual property, you have every right (it’s your site) to kick someone off, but please, you have not been ’stolen’ from.

I have an odd bad like thing.

Euro pop - and alizee is, uhm, HAWT and she has has a big red fish on her her butt.

Unfortunatly, she and I are married, but not not to each other // pout

And she’s the model for the female NE dance - or she copied it…

My sister sent me this link that is teh trooth

Those of you that are owned by the feline beasts will see many truths

Do we need to add a ‘lane is posting annoying/stupid stuff’ catagory?

Picked up from Peter Bowditch’s Ratbags.com HT

An excellent debunkery of quack medicine for which Bowditch is so well known.

I am going to expand a little up here on a response to a post I made here

My knowledge base is food irradiation and how ionizing radiation does what it does to various things that are on and in food. So I am slightly biased.

But. I said:

100 rad == 1 Gray (Gy) (I have to do the conversion so I can translate it to something that I work with constantly and understand the biological consequences)

Energy definition: One gray is the absorption of one joule of radiation energy by one kilogram of matter.

1000 rad == 10 gray - won’t event sterilize a fruit fly
10,000 rad ==100Gy - sterilize nothing, kill nothing
100,000 rad == 1 kGy will sterilze fruit flies, med fly and other insects in food. Will do minor extension of shelf life, will dameage very little in the bacterial world.

Sterilizing doses for food are 30-40 kGy - a 12 log reduction of any food borne pathogen.

1000 rad == very dead human quite quickly

Their experiment if flawed from the start.

In response to the Mythbusters idea of irradiating cockroaches to see who will survive a nuclear war.

Now, why did I say that the experiment was flawed? Simple. 1000 rad will kill 100% of humans 100% of the time. 1000 rad will not do anything to insects or bacteria (of any import, no studies look at much beyond sterility or death). I am not going to link studies, but they are innumerable and the research is still going on for a variety of reasons (say, look at recent dead people from E. coli contaminated meat or spinach, etc)

Anyway, back to flawed experiments. Why is this flawed. What are they trying to demonstrate? Dead bugs vs. dead humans? We lose. Period. The literature, which is VERY extensive, on the effects of radiation exposure to insects and bacteria show that the doses that they are going to use are irrelevant. 400-750 Gy (40,000 - 75,000 rad) are used to sterilize (not kill) insects on inported fruit to make sure that the US is not afflicted with various pests that plague other areas. (ref, APHIS), yet, I am guessing that Mythbusters is looking at an acute death rate, not a generational study.

1 kGy (100,000 rad) may or may not kill cockroaches, I am guessing a minor death toll. And those that live would (if allowed) probably not reproduce. But the whole premise is flawed because radiation exposure is a time dependant dose. Mr cockroach is not sitting at ground zero waiting to get the requisite dose, he’s running around doing his cockroach thing of finding food. Mr. human is dead at 3-4 orders of magnitude before Mr. cockroach has even noticed anything is going on.

These experiments have already been done. Adding cockroach to all the other insects and bacteria is good TV, it is not remotely useful scientific information.

Trying to find the response song he wrote later at the 1993 concert at Craweley titled Mgb-Gt - a brit version of the american car song. But I can’t find it. So, go buy the record I linked.

Here’s some info about the Black Vincent. There are not a whole bunch ‘em. Period. Many fakes, few real.

And the key thing is what is called a metaphor. The Black Vinvent did not have key ignition. And there are people that get upset about that line in the song.

I am not feeling like pontificating.

So

click me for a thought

The cat and I are stting here thinking about about how to deal with the wave of self-righteous grammarians (I’ve seen way too many in teh last couple of days) that have deveoped recently. In the sense of recntly that is within the last two to three years because they now have venue to vent.

I have read a person who will not read a writer if he does not use the ‘correct’ version of past tense of ‘to shine’ (regrdless of the fact that the various variatiotions are all, uhm, well, correct) (no link - I’m banned there)

Language is constantly evolving (bad word,I know) and the people that wish to keep it constant are quite clueless.

The french and germans played war on england and we ended up with engrish and it continues to change - get over it.

If you really hate change that much revert to greek. It’s the pure language, even above latin.

Bah

make a thread in our discussion board if you wish to comment

Our EBoy points out an interesting trend in this thread Drug-Resistant Bacterium Spreading in the bad definition of interesting.

Not to point out the obvious, but the worst place for a sick person to be is in a hospital.

Staphylococcus aureus is a very adaptable bug (well, all bacterium are) that will learn rapdily how to survive. But, it also has long term toxins that are, uhm, bad. HIV is bad, but some folx have lost sight of the fact that bacterium, such as S. aureus, have about 3 billion years of evolutionatiary ‘info’ over us hoomans or a virus such as HIV.

Take home message. A long term ear infection - check it out with an ENT. A long term infection in general, don’t say, it’s just a pustule, I’ll wait.

Go here to talk about it

He comments on cat blogging to fill space

So, because I am too lazy to comment on anything relevant at the moment, I’ll throw some video in the mix (and, uhm, yeah I know, many others do it too) However, Black 47 is worth listening to if you enjoy innovative fusion music. Larry Kirwan is also an amusing writer.

Though I am thinking that many may think his views as are rather socialistic. Weave the music before you judge.

Enjoy, or not:

Oh, and he came to New York as a dirty filthy illegal.

This one may be considered somewhat science based.

Why do people feel the need to blather on with 20k lines of (non) prose to attempt to explain their POV on the web?

And, then, why do we read it?

Not good, in general.

Science is our primary focus, and this space is not political, but I feel a need to comment on political stuff.

A post from Bill Quick is somewhat amusing, in the discontinuity sense of the word.

Call it what you will, William Jefferson Clinton is running for re-election as president. For the second time. For a third term. Unconstitutionally.

Just like bushy2….

I don’t need to point it out, if you’re here, you’re smart enough to figure it out.

My last post was about language, this is one is music.

Richarch Thompson’s 1000 years of popular music.

Listen to brilliance.

No junk science here. I have a grammar issue that is annoying me. It is not a new one.

“I could care less.”

“I could not care less”

Do people understand the difference? I could not care less what the vernacular is, it is meaningless to use the first version. Or, just stupid.

This is a scam I had not heard of before. From St Louis Post Dispatch:

LAKE SAINT LOUIS • Ray Lambert admits he’s a skeptic, so maybe that’s why he didn’t believe the man claiming to be a Cook County sheriff’s deputy on the other end of the line this morning.

Lake Saint Louis police say if Lambert had done what the caller had asked, he would have been the latest victim of a scam that could have racked up hundreds of dollars in long distance telephone bills.

The caller told Lambert that he was Sgt. Smith, badge number 2384, with the Cook County, Ill., Sheriff’s Department. He said a woman who was involved in an accident that morning was in critical condition and had Lambert’s number saved in her cell phone.

“He said they were trying to reach the next of kin, but I told him I don’t live in Cook County, and I don’t know anybody there either,” Lambert, 62, said.

Another red flag went up when Lambert looked at his caller ID, and the screen said “prison.”

Lambert, 62, hung up. The man called back, and Lambert hung up again. Then the man called a third time.

“He was very persistent and wanted me to call this number that began with star (*) -7-2,” Lambert said. “He said it was the number of the hospital where the lady supposedly was.”

Instead Lambert asked the caller to give him his phone number at the sheriff’s department so he could verify who he was. The caller hung up – and didn’t call back.

According to an alert sent out by AT&T, *-7-2 is a custom feature for call forwarding. When the customer dials *-7-2 followed by a telephone number, it activates the call forwarding feature on their phone. All incoming calls then ring at the other number.

At the end of the other line, the original caller’s partner in crime is able to accept all collect and third-party calls, while telling callers to the victim that they have the wrong number. The victim gets billed for all calls because they are forwarded through their number. The call forwarding may go on for several days before the victim is aware of it.

Lake Saint Louis Police Chief Michael Force said his department had gotten about 10 complaints about the scam recently. Several of the calls had originated from the Cook County Jail.

Fake Loan Fraud and Phishing

An amazingly large number of people fall for variations of the Fake Loan Fraud. For some reason, most but not all of these scams seem to be based out of Canada. The scammers spam out email or even go to the trouble of setting up websites that advertise “loans” to people with poor or nonexistant credit. A frequent clue to these being fraudulent websites is that they do not have any telephone numbers on them, just email addresses. Sometimes the mailing address will be fake ( once I found one that the office address resolved on Mapquest to the middle of a bridge on the Mississippi river ). Often they will assume trade names that are the same or similar to real legitimate financial institutions. They offer loans with interest rates that are at or even below prime rate.

You would think that that alone would be enough of a clue to people that it is a scam but evidently not. The victim is told that the “loan” is “secured” by prepayment of the first few installments … up front. Another clue.

The victims usually need money enough that they wire several hundred dollars to the scammer believing that the scammer will send the thousands promised in return. Sometimes, promissory notes are even provided to the victim to sign and return to add to the seeming authenticity of the scam.

Simply put, no loan is really “secured” by prepayment of installments. No one who is willing to loan you money is actually going to require you to send funds to them first. And as always, never, never send money by Western Union to anyone you don’t know. You will not see the money and you will not see your funds again.

Phishing

There is a reason that you get a lot of spam that purports to be from banks you never heard of. Scammers are trying to get customers of that bank to use their faked websites to log into their bank accounts and give the scammers their user identification and passwords to that bank. Its a simple scam, once they get those they will use the victims’ accounts to transfer money out of the accounts and also to use the victims’ accounts as brief destinations for other victims’ monies.

Don’t ever use the link in an email to access any online bank or investment websites. Also, never access your own online accounts from any public computer. And never let your laptop browser retain passwords to any websites that have value in your account. I suggest never allowing anyone to access your bank accounts electronically for any excuse. Frankly, I don’t allow employers to do automatic deposit into my bank accounts.

Never let your browser retain your credit card number in its cache either. There is probably more fraud in face to face credit card transactions than online, but that ratio will shift soon. Don’t give criminals the tools they need to steal from you.

A non-recognized tribe will sell “membership” papers to illegal immigrants for $50.

A bicycle accident last week laid me up for a few days, and I spent the time with more daytime television than I would have liked. I watched an episode of Oprah that covered various scams.

I was not really happy with the coverage of scams that Oprah had, I felt it missed a lot of common scams and didn’t give very complete advice. Not to mention that Oprah gave an Ebay spokesman a chance to spin Ebay scams away from Ebay’s incompetence, in my opinion. So I thought I start a series here that would discuss some of the scams I’ve seen in my practice.

Common Forged Check Scams

There are a lot of scams out there obviously, but some are variations of common ones. There are a lot of variations of forged check scams. Most of these take advantage of something that most people seem unaware of. Over the last decade or so, the Federal Reserve system has implemented several new regulations that are designed to speed up check processing. Unfortunately, these changes make life easier for scammers. Banks are required to make funds “available” to depositors within a couple of days. Checks are also processed in a different system that makes good checks move quicker through the system, but bad checks are still slow to process. The result is that people deposit checks and believe that because the bank let them use the money that they have gotten a good check. This may not be true. If the check subsequently bounces, then the bank will expect the funds back and is entitled to it.

Combine this with what in my experience is actually a less experienced, less competent banking system, and a lot of people are getting scammed. Don’t think that just because a bank teller or manager tells you that a check is good that they have any idea what they are talking about. If the check subsequently is returned, they will not be responsible for their bad advice.

The forged check scams often operate using forged “certified” or “cashiers’ checks” or money orders. There are several ways that these get into their victims. There is of course the times that people who are selling items on Ebay or Craigslist are offered forged checks for payment for the goods. But that is actually a dangerous practice for the scammer, because there is a delivery address or serial numbered good that is traceable to the criminal. Often, the scammer will talk the seller into accepting a forged cashiers’ check that is in excess of the amount of the transaction, and ask the seller to wire back to the scammer the difference. By this method, the scammer gets the victim to deposit the forged instrument, turn it into cash at the victim’s bank and wire good untraceable funds back to the scammer. The check is later returned as a forgery and the victim must replace the funds that the bank paid on the instrument.

Don’t fool yourself, the bank is almost never going to be responsible under current banking law.

To avoid being victimized, do not accept checks for more money than someone owes you. Do not ever wire money to someone you do not personally know for any reason. Period.

Most of the lottery scams work in a similar way. The scammer will send a letter or email to the victim telling them that they are winners in some lottery that they never heard of. The explanation is that the victim will receive the money after they pay some form of tax, administration fee, customs duty or other costs. And the lottery will even send them the money first, in the form of a check that the victim will cash, and send back in whole or in part, before receiving the remaining money.

The check will be forged, and the money will be wired back to the scammer. Again, do not wire money to someone you do not know. But more importantly, you can’t win a lottery you did not enter; international lotteries are illegal under US law and finally, why would someone that has millions to pay you require you to cash a check and send it back? I’m always surprised how many people fall for this scam.

“Financial Agent” Scams

Another common variation of the forged check scams is the “financial agent” scam. The victim, often unemployed and posting his resume on a job website like Monster.com, is sent a “job offer” that goes like this: the company claims to be an offshore company that sells goods to people in the United States. They claim to have “trouble” getting their money out of the United States back to their country. They claim that the victim will get checks from their customers, keep a portion, and forward the rest to the company via Western Union. Often a long complicated “employment contract” or application is sent to the victim that is often gibberish. Almost always a customer check is sent then or soon thereafter. The victim then deposits the check, and wires the funds to the scammer. When the checks start bouncing, the victim is required to return the funds to the bank - funds he does not have.

I have not only personally seen a lot of people lose a lot of money in this scam, often unemployed people who can’t afford the losses, but in at least one case I’ve seen the supposed victim prosecuted for forgery, fraud and money laundering charges. To a bank out thousands of dollars to someone who is sending money out of the country from forged checks, the supposed victim looks a lot like a criminal themselves.

No real company has trouble “getting money out of the country”. There are plenty of legitimate banks that will transfer funds out of the country. Again, do not use Western Union to wire funds to someone you do not personally know.

Next:

• Part II - Fake Loan Fraud and Phishing.
• Part III - Mortgage Credit Fraud and Real Estate “Investment”
• Part IV - The Spanish Prisoner Con and Nigerian Scams

UPDATE: Since I mentioned Monster.com above, I though I would point out this article about other fraud on Monster.com. It involved hackers getting access to resumes supposedly only available to recruiting companies and using it to craft personalized phishing emails.

Just a reminder to our readers that this front page blog is not updated as often as our Discussion Forum where all are welcome to see our ongoing discussion of Debunking topics and related discussions.

Stephen Bainbridge has this op ed piece on the Examiner website refering to some survey research on the costs and effects of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill regulating public corporations. Hard to decide how effectively one can measure the cited effects, but I’m most concerned about the cited effect of more ventures staying private versus public offerings of shares.

With his kind permission, below is a book review of the book “Shadowplay” authored by Clare Asquith , review written by our own Setnahkt.

Subtitled “The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare”. “Secret language” theories are popular right now, and this would not be the strangest I’ve ever read (that would have to be a tie between the suggestion that Alice in Wonderland is actually the secret sex diary of Queen Victoria and the proposal that the Gospels were actually written in Polynesian.) The basic premise in this book is that William Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic, and that the plays, sonnets, and other poems contain all sorts of hidden references to Catholicism that would have been understood and appreciated by contemporaries. To elaborate, author Clare Asquith proposes the following:

1. Henry VIII’s dissolution of the Church was entirely from above; the bulk of the English populace remained at least internally Catholic. This caused a “spiritual crisis” among the English people, who longed to return to their familiar religious rituals.

2. The Cecil family set up what was essentially a police state during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I, with a highly efficient security apparatus designed to suppress Catholicism. Elizabeth and James were more or less figureheads in a government run by the Cecils.

3. Shakespeare’s “coded” language was originally addressed to a small group of Catholic nobles. As time went on, the plays were addressed to Elizabeth, then to James, and finally to Prince Henry, the heir apparent, as pleas for more tolerance for Catholics. The language was deliberately obscure to evade censorship.

I confess I only have an amateur’s interest in both Shakespeare and English history. This book has rave jacket reviews from some respected sources - the Washington Post, Commonweal, The Spectator - and Ms. Asquith has done some pretty serious scholarship. I could be wrong, but I don’t find any of the arguments very convincing.

For point one, I don’t see a lot of evidence for the Dissolution being unpopular with the general populace. Asquith seems to play fairly loose with her terminology here, repeatedly referring to the Dissolution as “The Reformation” and to the English non-Catholics as “Lutherans” and/or “Puritans”. I’m not sure any of these usages are correct for the time under discussion. As for popular resistance, there were some uprisings against Elizabeth, but there had been various disturbances of one sort or another throughout previous English history. Most of them seem to be more political than religious. As for there being a “spiritual crisis” - a phrase used repeatedly in this book - everything else I’ve read seems to show the English people were no less happy with their spiritual life during late Tudor and early Stuart time than at other times in history.

For point two, I’ve never heard anybody seriously suggest that Elizabeth I was not in charge of her own government. Maybe I’m wrong; perhaps the Cecil’s highly efficient propaganda apparatus was able to make it look this way and nobody else has figured it out before. Asquith suggest that later historians destroyed, forged or stole documents that support her theory. Well, I suppose that’s possible, but it seems a little convenient.

For point three, Asquith describes a lot of the “code words” and concepts that Shakespeare supposedly uses. For example, characters that are “tall” and “fair” are supposed to represent Catholicism, while those that are short and dark are Protestant. Thus , Bianca in Taming of the Shrew, Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona and Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent Catholicism while Kate, Sylvia and Hermia are Protestant. (Note that “representing” Catholicism or Protestantism is not meant to imply that the character is Protestant or Catholic). Comments on time (“The time is out of joint”) are supposed to mean the difference between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Puns on “moor” or “more” are supposed to refer to the Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, and puns on “right” are supposed to be about church “rites”. Like any good conspiracy theory, there are quotes here that make you want to headslap yourself and say “Of course! How could I not have seen that!”. But, like any conspiracy theory, it’s almost all tautology; there’s such a volume of work by Shakespeare that once you assume coded messages, it’s pretty easy to find them.

I did find this an interesting read; I certainly want to learn more about Tudor politics. There are some spooky coincidences - for example, shortly before the first performance of Twelfth Night, which features Duke Orsino of Illyria, Don Orsini of Italy visited Elizabeth’s court. A clever appeal for Italian support to English Catholics, or just not enough character names to go around? I find it perfectly reasonable that there are topical references in Shakespeare - some of them depending on the appearance and actions of the players, which are now probably lost forever. When Shakespeare does include explicitly Catholic characters in the plays - Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet, for example - they’re usually shown with some sympathy. However, I find it telling that none of Shakespeare’s contemporaries or near-contemporaries seem to have figured out all this “coded language” enough to comment on it - and this would include English Catholic exiles on the Continent, out of reach of the supposed Cecil police state, and various rival playwrights, who would presumably want Shakespeare out of the way. Overall, the lady doth protest too much, methinks.

Thanks to Setnahkt for his permission to post his review as a blog post - SPQR

(Further discussion in our discussion forum)

Yesterday, Gavin Scmidt and Michael Mann (S&M) added an article on the recent CRU paper (discussed here), which extends the southern Greenland temperature record, at their RealClimate web site: Historical climatology in Greenland.

Extending the instrumental record of climate beyond the late 19th Century when many of the national weather centers were first started is an important, difficult and undervalued task.
[snip]
Why bother? Well, it is unfortunate, though probably not coincidental, that the modern record starts at the same time that significant modifications of atmopsheric composition (greenhouse gases, aerosols etc.) were occuring on a global scale. Thus this period is not ideal for assessing the magnitude of natural changes (both intrinsic and forced by natural processes like solar variability or volcanic eruptions) since there is likely a contamination from human-related causes. So extending instrumental records back as far as possible is an important approach to providing a context for modern changes.

Let’s say prior to 1850 the atmospheric CO2 concentration was 280±10 ppm. In 1900 the CO2 concentration was ~290 ppm. I think we can agree that this was not significant. In 2000 the concentration was ~350 ppm. I think we can agree that this was significant. In 1950 it was ~300 ppm. Is this significantly different?

If you are talking about CO2 emissions from industrial societies then this graph suggests emission rates take off ~1947.

Of course they’re not just talking about CO2, they mean “greenhouse gases, aerosols etc.”. In this graph of Greenhouse gas emission scenarios, the World Resource Institute uses 1950 as its baseline year.

So what is my point? It seems to me that S&M are saying that extending the temperature record back as far as possible is important to provide “a context for modern changes” and therefore by inference the temperature record between 1900 and 1950 was subject to “contamination from human-related causes”. This may be a deviation from the IPCC conclusion that the global warming recorded prior to 1950 was “natural”. It is certainly a deviation from my understanding of the IPCC conclusion.

S&M point out that a longer instrumental record would be useful for calibration proxy records though as far as I know, the only proxy records from Greenland are ice cores and these are well calibrated compared to tree ring proxy records from other locations, which may be problematic in that they respond well to early 20th century warming but not to late 20th century warming.

They then go on to castigate Pat Michaels for his recent World Climate Report article Cooling the Debate: A Longer Record of Greenland Air temperature. Whatever.

S&M however appear to be ignoring the elephant in the room. In southern Greenland, the warmest period on record is not during the last 15 years and 1998 was not the warmest year. This appears to run counter to the conclusions derived from MBH99 and well publicized around the world by the IPCC et al.

BTW, I notice that the link to the S&M article is

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2006/11/strawmen-on-greenland/]Historical climatology in Greenland
[my emphasis}

Recently, Jim Hansen published a couple of articles entitled “The Planet in Peril”; Parts I & II. For those who don’t know:

Jim Hansen is director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and adjunct professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University’s Earth Institute.

In 1988 he made a speech to the U.S. Congress that is considered to be the start of the whole global warming and/or climate change scare. At times he has presented compelling information but of late he is beginning to sound more shrill and less convincing. What is he saying now?

In Sweden and Norway, the treeline is marching northward and uphill as the snowline recedes. (1) In the Arctic, the polar bear finds its habitat shrinking.(2) Elsewhere in the northern hemisphere, animals are slowly moving north to escape rising temperatures.(3) Behind the silent movement hides a disturbing story that we had better take note of before it is too late. If the present warming trend continues, rising seawater will claim coastal cities all over the world.(4)

(1) This is true and if the current trend continues perhaps these treelines will eventually get to where they were 1,000± years ago during the Medieval Warm Period.

(2) Is this true? Polar bear populations are generally growing (no really, they are). How is this possible if their habitat is shrinking?

(3) To suggest wild animals are “moving north to escape rising temperatures” is just silly. It anthropomorphizes the animals and suggests they have knowledge of climate conditions in other locations and in the future. Animals (and plants) expand their ranges whenever and wherever they can. While it has been recorded that some Northern Hemisphere animals have expanded their ranges northward it has not been recorded that the southern extent of their ranges have also moved north. It has not been recorded that animals in the Southern Hemisphere have expanded their ranges southward, though some penguins have been seen further north. I have seen reports of grasses growing on the Antarctic Peninsula, but these are hardy varieties imported by humans.

(4) If the present warming trend stopped, and average annual temperatures stayed exactly where they are now or even were 50 years ago, rising seawater would still claim coastal cities all over the world.

I received an e-mail from a man in northeast Arkansas about his observations of the armadillo: “I had not seen one of these animals my entire life, until the last ten years. I drive the same 40-mile trip on the same road every day and have slowly watched these critters advance further north every year and they are not stopping. Every year they move several miles.”

The mobility of armadillos suggests that they have a good chance to keep up with the movement of their climate zone, to be one of the surviving species.

Here is a different take on armadillos expanding their ranges. This was from the first (or second) item to pop up after a Google search.

The nine-banded armadillo has expanded its range northward into the United States over the last 150 years. Prior to about 1850, the nine-banded armadillo was not found north of the Rio Grande river. The sudden and extremely rapid armadillo colonization of the southern United States has puzzled quite a few biologists. The degree of range expansion per year is nearly ten times faster than the average rate expected for a mammal.

Nowhere do you find a suggestion the southern extent of these armadillos is also moving north. Hansen is either being very niave or deliberately skewing information to suit his thesis that global warming is already having grave environmental impacts.

The concern here is that the information he is skewing is so easily checked and shown to be inappropriate that it renders this particular point mute and casts doubt upon any other “facts” he presents in the rest of his essay.

Hansen continues this theme for several paragraphs concluding with;

If we continue on this path, a large fraction of the species on Earth, as many as 50 percent or more, may become extinct.

He does not present a reference for this conclusion. Are we to assume this is his conclusion? He certainly endorses this conclusion and yet his speciality is recording global climate and modelling future global climate conditions. This conclusion about biodiversity cannot fall out of his analyses so he must be repeating some “known fact” that we are expected to accept without question.

He has obviously been convinced of this inevitability and yet remains remarkably unable to convince me of his argument despite his intelligence and articulation.

Where is the evidence? Where is the smoking gun? Where is the bullet? Where is the body?

Yes, the world has obviously warmed “over the last 150 years”. Yes some of it might be attributable to anthropogenic warming of the atmosphere through greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond that there is precious little that shows this has been bad or will get bad for the Earth and all its flora and fauna. What are the specific climatic changes that have resulted in a mass die off of vast numbers of species? What are the extinct species?

In the absence of evidence Hansen has resorted to preaching. This is not good for him as a scientist or the people who rely upon his scientific findings.

Perhaps he is no longer a scientist but an advocate. If so then perhaps he should no longer be presented as a scientist, as the “director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies”. How has his advocacy skewed the science he is presenting now or in the past? I am concerned.

Hansen finishes with:

The Earth’s creatures, save for one species, do not have thermostats in their living rooms(*) that they can adjust for an optimum environment. But people - those with thermostats - must take notice, and turn down the world’s thermostat before it is too late.

Turn down the world’s thermostat!? Just what we don’t need, global cooling. Anyone who believes global cooling would be good is simply wrong. Anyone familiar with history knows cooling trends are bad for human cultures and their environment. An advocate in a position of influence who believes global cooling is good is dangerous.

Perhaps the growing shrillness I noted earlier is just a reflection of Hansen losing his influence. It is something to hope for. Is it censorship when people stop listening?

(*) An afterthought… the Earth’s creatures don’t have thermostats but they do have living rooms? Bizarre.

Earlier this week in Potpourri in the Discussion Forum ( and we do have daily discussions there by the way - be sure to visit ), I posted an item about Paul Harvey who does daily radio news and “commentary”. Harvey had earlier this week reported on his news segment that old long-debunked myth about the Arizona State Patrol finding a ‘67 Impala that someone had attached a JATO rocket to and crashed into a cliff.

Complete hoax. And not merely a hoax but not a recent hoax. This hoax is probably decades old.

I’m puzzled why Harvey decided to add this silly hoax to his news this week, but I’m suspicious that he or his writer is pulling nonsense off their spammed email and copying it into the script without any checking at all. Snopes would have quickly informed Harvey or his staff of just how silly they look.

Today, he had a news item alerting his listeners at airports to watch out for a new pistol that was indetectable, only 2 1/2 inches long but fired real bullets called a “Colt Python”. This is obviously another fraud as Colt’s Python pistol is not indetectable, not 2 1/2 inches long and among the least concealable pistols made. In fact, a Colt Python is a large, heavy, all-metal, pistol usually chambered in .357 Magnum that looks like exactly what it is - a large heavy double-action revolver. Its not a new item having been manufactured for half a century.

What is going on with Paul Harvey?

One of the more annoying things about Dembski is that he knows that science has a perfectly valid tool for detecting design, the Bayesian method. We saw it in this post on where we looked at Dembski’s bizzare claims about priors. An example was used that Dembski has often used: the case of Nicholas Caputo. A quick review of this example is that Caputo designed the ballots for elections, and it was known that being at the top of the ballot was to a candidates advantage. The law held that the person designing the ballots must use a method that assigns the top spot to candidates randomly (presumably using with uniform probability). During Caputo’s tenure the Democrats got the top slot 40 out of 41 elections. This example is used again by Dembski as he continues to try and discredit the Bayesian approach. Further, it was shown in the last post that the Bayesian method could lead to a probability of Caputo cheating that is very close to 1. Cheating in this example was Dembski’s version of “Design” whereas the randomized outcome was Dembski’s version of “Random” (nevermind that both scenarios are in actuality designed).

Now Dembski claims the following about the Bayesian methods,

If Democrats and Republicans were equally likely to have come up (as Caputo claimed), this event has probability approximately 1 in 2 trillion. Improbable, yes, but by itself not enough to implicate Caputo in cheating. Highly improbable events after all happen by chance all the time—indeed, any sequence of forty-one Democrats and Republicans whatsoever would be just as unlikely. What, then, additionally do we need to confirm cheating (and thereby design)? To implicate Caputo in cheating it’s not enough merely to note a preponderance of Democrats over Republicans in some sequence of ballot line selections. Rather, one must also note that a preponderance as extreme as this is highly unlikely. In other words, it wasn’t the event E (Caputo’s actual ballot line selections) whose improbability the Bayesian needed to compute but the composite event E* consisting of all possible ballot line selections that exhibit at least as many Democrats as Caputo selected. This event—E*—consists of 42 possible ballot line selections and has improbability 1 in 50 billion. It’s this event and this improbability on which the New Jersey Supreme Court rightly focused when it deliberated whether Caputo had in fact cheated. Moreover, it’s this event that the Bayesian needs to identify and whose probability the Bayesian needs to compute to perform a Bayesian analysis.

What does this really say? It says that the Bayesian has to look at both evidence that occured and evidence that might have occured, but didn’t. Not only must we look at the sequence,

But all of the sequences that have 40 D’s and 1 R. There is only one teensy-itsy-bitsy problem here for Dembski: This notion is positively non-Bayesian. One thing to remember about Bayesian methods is that they generally depend on and only on the data that was observed. Data that was not observed, but was at least theoretically possible is something most Bayesians don’t even consider. The basic idea here stems from a principle of statistics known as the Likelihood Principle, and for a Bayesian it is not that controversial a concept.¹

The problem with the Likelihood Principle generally comes from those who espouse the Frequentist veiw of statistics. In Frequentist statistics hypothesis testing epitomizes the notion of taking into consideration data that could have been observed but wasn’t.

From this point, the rest of this point contention that Dembski levels against Bayesians is simply false for the very reason that is rests on a false premise. And when Dembski writes,

The bottom line is this: The Bayesian approach to statistical rationality is parasitic on the Fisherian approach and can properly adjudicate only among hypotheses that the Fisherian approach has thus far failed to eliminate.

One has to wonder is Dembski a complete charlatan? The Likelihood Principle leads to a complete rejection of the Fisherian/Frequentist view of statistics. To then claim that the Bayesian method (which fits very nicely with the Likelihood Principle) is parasitic on a rejected view of statistics is simply astounding. Mark Chu-Carroll has claimed that Dembski isn’t even a competent mathematician, but is instead an complete fraud and huckster. Statements like the above definitely serve only to buttress Chu-Carroll’s claims.
_____
¹To be sure, there are Bayesians who are dissenters when it comes to this notion.

This is another post looking at Dembski’s arguments on how to detect design and his counter arguments to using the comparative approach (e.g. Bayesian or likelihood). The first post in this series looked at Dembski’s false claim of “backpedaling priors”. I argued that it isn’t backpedalling priors, but the introduction of a new hypothesis due to the unsatisfactory performance of the current hypotheses. Further, that this is precisely how science works and should work. When the existing hypotheses no longer seem sufficient in explaining some phenomenon, looking for a new hypothesis is not “backpedaling” it is actually quite reasonable.

The second post looked at Dembski’s arguments that on how his approach was “rational” and non-ad-hoc. Here we saw Dembski throw around some jargon that he created that when combined implied nothing or appeared to be contradictory, irrelevant and so forth. Basically, Dembski’s arguments were at best incoherent gibberish of his own creation that is simply designed to mislead not help the reader.

Now I want to take on Dembski’s argument claim that the comparative approach needs prior probabilities [page 7 of the above link]. Dembski writes,

(1) Need for prior probabilities. As we’ve already seen, for the Bayesian approach to work requires prior probabilities. Yet prior probabilities are often impossible to justify. Unlike the example of the urn and two coins discussed earlier, in which drawing a ball from an urn neatly determines the prior probabilities regarding which coin will be tossed, for most design inferences, especially the interesting ones like whether there is design in biological systems, we have no handle on the prior probability of a design hypothesis, or that prior probability is fiercely disputed (theists, for instance, might regard the prior probability as high whereas atheists would regard it as low).

First off, if one is using the likelihood approach then this claim is simply false. The likelihood approach to evaluating hypotheses relies on the likelihoods for observing the data given each hypothesis under consideration. Thus, there are no priors at all. Another comparative approach put forward by Brandon Fitelson also does not rely on prior probabilities either (well technically the priors have to be positive).

So this leaves just the Bayesian approach. Are the priors a problem for Bayesian inference? Yes. Elicitation of priors is one of the more controversial parts of Bayesian inference. However, I contend that for many this problem is vastly overstated. Consider one of Dembski’s favorite examples, the case of Nicholas Caputo an election official in charge of designing ballots. The placement of a candidate on the ballot is seen as having a strategic value in terms of votes, hence the person designing the ballots is to use a method of figuring who goes on top that is random and assigns equal probability to the top slot. In the Caputo case Democrats had the top spot 40 out of 41 elections. Suppose the actual sequence goes like,

Now, we want to use Bayesian methods to evaluate the hypotheses, Pr(Cheat|E) and Pr(No Cheat|E). Further, suppose we were to let Dembski pick any prior he wanted so long as it isn’t zero. Suppose that Dembski picks a prior probability for Cheat as,

This is a pretty small number and indicates we strongly think that Caputo is not cheating. By our assumption that we are considering only Cheat and No Cheat as hypotheses we have the following for No Cheat,

Now we need to specify the likelihood of observing the data under each hypothesis. Suppose the following:

Now, after crunching through Bayes Theorem to update our priors 41 times what is our final answer in terms of Caputo and cheating?

In other words, even by selecting a wildly ridiculous prior we still end up, after looking at all the data, with the conclusion that Caputo was probably a cheating SOB when it came to planning the layout of ballots.

We could also entertain other hypotheses such as the Stupid & Lazy hypothesis. That is, suppose the Caputo is in fact rather dim and also lazy. So he tends to re-use previous ballot layouts simply so he can go home early to watch television and eat his HungryMan Dinner. The likelihood function here is a bit more complicated, but we’d likely arrive at the same conclusion: Caputo was not using a valid method for determining the top slot on ballots. Whether one wants to call this design or not is another question.

However, the point should be pretty clear here. Even really inappropriate priors (i.e. the person selecting the priors has a very heavy bias in favor of one of the hypotheses) will eventually be swamped by the data. That, is the data will eventually move a very biased Bayesian away from his initial prior probability assesments. Further, there is nothing that says we have to pick one, and only one prior. We could pick several different priors and look at the results under the different priors. For example, suppose we have the priors, 0.001, .05, and 0.999 that Caputo is a cheater. What are the results?

Thus, under a variety of prior probabilities we find that the results are still pretty consistent, Caputo was cheating. Even if Dembski selects a prior like 1/ 10,000,000,000 we still end up with a final posterior probability of 0.5856 that Caputo cheated.

As for Dembski’s claim that “we have no handle on the prior probability of a design hypothesis”, this too is quite amusing. Why don’t we have any kind of handle on such a prior? How about because Design proponents like Dembski absolutely refuse to spell out how design actually happens.

As for your example, I’m not going to take the bait. You’re asking me to play a game: “Provide as much detail in terms of possible causal mechanisms for your ID position as I do for my Darwinian position.” ID is not a mechanistic theory, and it’s not ID’s task to match your pathetic level of detail in telling mechanistic stories. If ID is correct and an intelligence is responsible and indispensable for certain structures, then it makes no sense to try to ape your method of connecting the dots. True, there may be dots to be connected. But there may also be fundamental discontinuities, and with IC systems that is what ID is discovering.

In short, it is like saying, “I have a really great idea, it could revolutionize travel! What are the chances it will work?” Since we know nothing of this idea attaching a probability to its success is impossible. When asked to provide further information about the design hypothesis Dembski et. al. demur. This also shows the scientific vacuousness of ID. When we look at design by humans we specify the process and from there look at what the data says about the hypothesis. But for some reason, the (supernatural) design hypothesis is exempt from this.

So we see once again that Dembski is misleading and/or ignorant of the topic he is supposedly an expert in. Further, we see that Dembski thinks that ID is exempt from much of the requirements any other science faces…but that somehow ID is still scientific. Is it any wonder that so many consider Dembski to be so dishonest?

Time again to take a look at William Dembski’s psudeo-mathematical arguments for Intelligent Design (ID). Often times Dembski will make up his own concepts and then claim that these concepts have certain implications. For example, in the chapter from his book, the Design Revolution, that looks at the detecting design by either elimination versus comparison Dembski once again makes up a slew of terms and then uses them to make various claims.

Early on in the chapter Dembski wants to establish that his method, which he calls the Fisherian approach, is valid. To do this Dembski comes up several concepts. The first is what Dembski calls replicational resources. What is this concept?

Consider again our example of tossing a coin ten times and getting ten heads in a row. The rejection region, which matches this sequence of coin tosses, therefore sets a significance level of .001. If we tossed ten heads in a row, we might therefore regard this as evidence against the coin being fair. But what if we didn’t just toss the coin ten times on one occasion but tossed it ten times on multiple occasions? If most of the time we tossed the coin its behavior was entirely what one would expect from a fair coin, then on those few occasions when we observed ten heads in a row, we would have no reason to suspect that the coin was biased since fair coins, if tossed sufficiently often, will produce any sequence of coin tosses, including ten heads in a row. The strength of the evidence against a chance hypothesis when a sample falls within a rejection region therefore depends on how many samples are taken or might have been taken. These samples constitute what I call replicational resources. The more such samples, the greater the replicational resources.–italics in the original

Frankly I am at a loss as to why Dembski has come up with this term. I don’t see how it is much difference from the sigma algebra of set theory which undergirds probability theory. After all, what are sample but subsets of the sample space, especially in the discrete case (examples that rely on coin tosses, urns and balls, dice, etc.). But Dembski has been known to come up new names for old ideas.

Dembski then goes on to talk about specificational resources which he never really goes on to define.

Significance levels therefore need to factor in replicational resources if samples that match these levels are to count as evidence against a chance hypothesis. But that’s not enough. In addition to factoring in replicational resources, significance levels also need to factor in what I call specificational resources. The rejection region on which we’ve been focusing specified ten heads in a row. But surely if samples that fall within this rejection region could count as evidence against the coin being fair, then samples that fall within other rejection regions must likewise count as evidence against the coin being fair. For instance, consider the rejection region that specifies ten tails in a row. By symmetry, samples that fall within this rejection region must count as evidence against the coin being fair just as much as samples falling within the rejection region that specifies ten heads in a row.–italics in the original

It appears that Dembski sees the rejection region as determine the extent to which something is specified. I actually don’t have too much trouble with this as a general idea. After all, Dembski says that 10 heads in a row are specified as is 10 tails. Okay, sounds reasonably to me, and these two events also convey a probability of .002 on observing either of these two outcomes. So, by selecting a rejection region of .002 (in a two tailed test) we also determine what specifcation we are looking for.

The only problem I see is that the rejection region so far is subjective. I could pick a rejection region that has either {10 heads, 10 tails, (9 heads,1 tails), (9 tails, 1 heads)}. Few would consider a coin that fell in this rejection region to be unbiased, or at least they’d consider the coin more likely to be biased than not. But this problem has plagued Fisherian (or using the more common name Frequentist) statistics since its inception: how to select a rejection region. Is 0.05 good enough, what about 0.01? The standard, as Dembski notes, in most social sciences has been 0.05. Why, I don’t know.

Debmski then tries to get around this problem by invoking complexity,

But rejection regions are also patterns and as such have an associated complexity that measures the degree of complication of the patterns, or what I call its specificational complexity. Typically this form of complexity corresponds to a Kolmogorov compressibility measure or minimum description length (the shorter the description, the lower the specificational complexity—see http://www.mdl-research.org).

Here we can see Dembski making up a term for something for which a term already exist. After all, if his specificational complexity corresponds to Kolmogorov compressibility why not use the latter.

But now this is where things get really fun. After all this Dembski writes the following,

Replicational and specificational resources together constitute what I call probabilistic resources. Probabilistic resources resolve the first two worries raised above concerning Fisher’s approach to statistical reasoning. Specifically, probabilistic resources enable us to set rationally justified significance levels, and they constrain the number of specifications, thereby preventing chance hypotheses from getting eliminated willy-nilly. Probabilistic resources therefore provide a rational foundation for the Fisherian approach to statistical reasoning. What’s more, by estimating the probabilistic resources available in the known physical universe, we can set a significance level that’s justified irrespective of the probabilistic resources in any given circumstance. Such a context-independent significance level is thus universally applicable and definitively answers what it means for a significance level to be “sufficiently small” regardless of circumstance. For a conservative estimate of this significance level, known as a universal probability bound, see chapter 10. For the details about placing Fisher’s approach to statistical reasoning on a firm rational foundation, see chapter 2 of No Free Lunch.

This part I had to re-read several times, because I sat there thinking, “Uhhh?” That is, how the heck does replicational and specificational resources imply a rational way to select the rejection region? After all, isn’t the rejection region what defines the specification? Or is specification such that there are varying degrees of it, and only when we meet some sufficiency condition does it qualify as the rejection region. And what the heck happened to specificational complexity/Kolmogorov compressibility? It seems we could have deleted the entire paragraph that talks about complexity and lost nothing.

In short Dembski comes up with three knew concepts,

1. Replicational resources
2. Specificational resources
3. Probabilistic resources (which are just the previous two concepts taken together).

Comes up with a conclusion he likes and does nothing to show how his concepts imply the conclusion. It is just a bunch of made up gibberish that tells us, literally, nothing about how to get out of the problem of selecting a rejection region that allows us to conclude design. And this failure is fatal to Dembski argrument for this chapter as well. You see, his contention is that we can use the eliminative/Fisherian approach over the Bayesian/comparative approach and that the eliminative/Fisherian approach is better since it doesn’t have any of this ad-hocness/subjectivity in regards to the selection of a rejection region. But there is nothing that indicating a clear cut way to choose the rejection region.

I think Dembski knows this, which is why he falls back on his universal probability bound. This number/concept also doesn’t help Dembski as it seems to underscore the incoherent nature of his arguments here. Basically, the universal probability bound is some sort of uber-rejection region. That is, irrespective the circumstances, this rejection region always implies design. Hence all the preceding discussion of specificational resrouces, replicational resources, etc. are un-necessary so long as we select our rejection region to coincide with the universal probability bound.

But here is the problem with this. The universal probability bound that Dembski selects is so small that even a reasonable person cannot conclude that a coin flipped 100 times coming up heads is biased. Most of us would conclude that such a coin is biased. Why? Because we use additional information to inform our assessment of the biasedness of the coin. For example, most people are aware of the existence of two sided coins, con-artists who use gimicks to fleece people of their money, etc. So, we use this information in conjunction with the 100 heads (or tails) and conclude that something other than flipping a fair coin is going on. But Dembski on the other hand would still be betting money provided the payoffs are in his favor if the coin were fair.

Of course, Dembski could say that this is actually a feature of his filter. With such a high bar for detecting design the filter wont pick up false positives. Or will it? Granted the numbers in the link are as small as the universal probability bound, but the point to consider is that information about the phenomenon can change the probabilities of a given hypothesis being true as well. Consider the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) case. If we use the population numbers of 0.5 deaths per 1,000 live births, the probability of seeing three such deaths is 1.25E-10 which is a very small number. However, this ignores individual specific information (i.e. is there a genetic component to SIDS), which when factored in the probability might become much, much higher. This can apply even to cases where the initial probability assessment is below the universal probability bound. Suppose we have a phenomenon and the actual probability of it happening by chance is 10^-151. But then upon further investigation we find that there were circumstances the made the event 100 times more likely bringing the probability to 10^-149. As I’ve argued in this post, it is also possible that futher investigation could change some probabilities by over 121 orders of magnitude. In this case, the initial probability would drop from 10^-151 to 10^-30. In both cases, there is no design inference according to Dembski, but because Dembski’s filter doesn’t consider this kind of “side information” it wouldn’t catch this and conclude design when in fact such an inference would be incorrect by Dembski’s own standards. The Bayesian method on the other hand does allow for this kind of information. Using the SIDS case in the above link the likelihoods for the observed deaths would be transformed to

Note that the presence of the genetic information as part of the information we are conditioning on changes the direction of the inequalities. There is no such mechanism with Dembski’s Explanatory Filter for including this information, at least not formally.

So we get a bunch of made up words for concepts that don’t support the claims Dembski makes. Further, he trotts out the universal probability bound…again, and even that isn’t a sufficient guard against false positives. The typical stuff one comes to expect from Dembski, lots of fancy sound jargon that doesn’t mean a damned thing.

Speaking of dinosaurs here are two interesting articles. The first is about a study that claims the larger dinosaurs were warm blooded.

Research suggests the largest of the prehistoric dinosaurs had body temperatures even higher than the heat wave levels now wilting Washington.

A new study says the seven-ton, 40-foot-long, meat-eating Tyrannosaurus rex had a cruising temperature of just above 91 degrees, and the Sauroposeidon – a 90-foot-long vegetarian that weighed up to 70 tons – probably averaged a body temperature of 118 degrees.

[snip]

“These findings suggest that maximum dinosaur size may have ultimately been limited by body temperature,” said lead author James F. Gillooly of the University of Florida’s zoology department.

The body temperature of dinosaurs has long been a subject of debate in biology.

For many years, scientists thought dinosaurs were coldblooded – or ectotherms – with a slow metabolism rate that required the sun’s heat to regulate their temperature.

But starting in the late 1960s, some began promoting the idea that the beasts may have been endotherms – warmblooded creatures, much like mammals and birds – with relatively constant high body temperatures that were internally regulated.

I believe one of the first to suggest that some dinosaurs were warm blooded was Bob Bakker.

Bakker has been a major proponent of the theory that dinosaurs were “warm-blooded,” smart, fast, and adaptable. He published his first paper on dinosaur endothermy in 1968. He revealed the first evidence of parental care at nesting sites for Allosaurus.

And here is something I didn’t know about Dr. Bakker,

In addition to being a scientist, Bakker is also a Pentecostal preacher who is a strong proponent of theistic evolution.

The second article is about the life span of the Tyrannosaurid Albertosaurus.

One species of tyrannosaur lived to be about 30 years old, a life span that more closely resembles a large present-day mammal than a reptile, researchers said.

The researchers studied the metatarsals, or foot bones, of 22 Albertosauruses, a species of the feared carnivore, excavated from a single site in Alberta, Canada, one of the world’s largest sources of dinosaur remains. The authors were able to use the bones to determine the life span of the dinosaurs, the researchers said.

“There is a lot of potential for this kind of research to understand these animals, not just as representatives of their species, but as parts of populations,'’ said Gregory Erickson, professor of biology at Florida State University and coauthor of the study in tomorrow’s edition of the journal Science.

The researchers found that mortality rates for Albertosaurus were high in the first two years of life, possibly due to predation, and then decreased until the teenage years, according to the researchers.

After age 13, the mortality rates jumped to 23 percent, researchers found. Dinosaurs lived roughly 30 years, about the same length of time as bears. Some reptiles can live 50 to 100 years or more.

Spiffy.

Kent Hovind, aka Dr. Dino, was arrested Thursday. Hovind is well known in Evo-Creo circles as a proponent of Creationism and a bad one at that. Hovind is a young Earth Creationist who holds the belief that Noah also had dinosaurs like Deinonychus antirhoppus (a 10 foot long dinosaur, and those upraised talons on the foot were deadly slashing implements) and Charcharodontosaurus-saharicus (this therapod is believed to have been up 45 feet long, weighing 8 tons and having a 6 foot long head with teeth 8 inches long…better be a big ark). Nevermind what things like this ate or what Noah did with all that dino dung.

Any how it looks like Hovind has bigger worries than the current depredations of Evilutionists. Hovind faces 58 charges which include income tax evasion, making threats against investigators, and filing false complaints against Internal Revenue Service agents. Hovinds wife Jo Hovind was also indicted on 44 counts. Oh well, so much for Hovind’s notions that he doesn’t have to pay income taxes.

In a chapter of his book, The Design Revolution, William Dembski tries to show how the Bayesian approach to evaluating the design hypothesis is flawed. One of Dembski’s objections is what he calls “backpedaling priors”.

The idea of a prior is probably a bit arcane. In Bayesian statisitics the researcher might have prior information and or beliefs about a given hypothesis, H, which is denoted Pr(H). This can be either subjective or objective. This probability is then updated using Bayes theorem,

This is interpreted as the probability of the hypothesis in question given the evidence is equal to the likelihood of the evidence given the hypothesis in question normalized by the unconditional probability of the evidence.

When there are two hypotheses the above notation is modified slightly to be,

The interpretations are still the same basically.

But Dembski wants to discard all of this. The reason is that to calculate the above probabilities we have to determine

But that is the last thing any proponent of Intelligent Design wants to do. To do this would require actually exploring the design hypothesis in terms of what process did the designer use. For example, if the designer simply designed the universe to be fine tuned, then it is questionable that the designer also designed the E. coli flagellum. Similarly if the situation is reversed; why should the designer of the E. coli flagellum be capable of designing the entire universe. Of course one could just posit a designer that can do anything from designing the E. coli flagellum to the entire universe…but then why develop any theory for anything including gravity, meteorology, and so forth? This quickly leads to questions that would be very unfortunate for the Intelligent Designs socio-political goals of removing methodological naturalism from science and reinstituting a more religious centered from of learning in public schools.

So what does Dembski say specifically about the use of prior probabilities in Bayesian inference? That Bayesians will use backpedaling priors.

(5) Backpedaling priors. As a variant of the last point, return to the earlier example of an urn with a million balls, one black and the rest white. As before, imagine that a fair coin is to be tossed if a white ball is randomly sampled from the urn but that a biased coin with probability .9 of landing heads is to be tossed otherwise. This time, however, imagine that the coin is tossed not ten times but ten thousand times and that each time it lands heads. The probability of getting ten thousand heads in a row with the fair coin is approximately 1 in 10³⁰¹⁰ and with the biased coin approximately 1 in 10⁴⁵⁸ (with ten thousand tosses, heads are bound to turn up for either coin). A Bayesian analysis then shows that the probability that a white ball was selected is approximately 1 in 10²⁵⁴⁶ and the probability that the lone black ball was selected is 1 minus that minuscule
probability.

Should we therefore, as good Bayesians, conclude that the black ball was indeed selected and that the biased coin was indeed flipped (the selection of the black ball being vastly more probable, given ten thousand heads in a row, than the selection of a white ball)? Clearly this is absurd. The probability of getting ten thousand heads in a row with either coin is vastly improbable, and it doesn’t matter which urn was selected. The only sensible conclusion is that neither coin was randomly tossed ten thousand times. A Bayesian may therefore want to change the prior probability to introduce some doubt about whether the urn and subsequently one of the two coins were random sampled. But as in the previous point, we need to ask what induces us to change or reevaluate our prior probabilities. Not strictly Bayesian considerations but rather considerations of small probability based on chance hypotheses that, as first posed, admit no alternatives. The alternatives need then to be introduced subsequently because Fisherian, not Bayesian, considerations prompt them.

There are two problems here. The first is suppose that we are in a situation that there are only two possible hypotheses. If that is the case, then one or the other must be true. What Dembski is saying above is that neither of the hypotheses is true. Thus Dembski’s Fisherian approach is of literally no use at all since it leaves us with precisely nothing at all in terms of an answer due to the unfortunate circumstance of getting a very unlikely sample.

The second problem is some what derivative of the problem above. We have postulated only two hypotheses. Upon observing the data and the sheer improbability of either hypothesis being true we could postulate another hypothesis such as maybe there was a mistake an the urn one million black balls and one white ball or that both coins come up heads with probability 1, etc. These aren’t “backpedaling priors” this is precisely how science is done. When a given hypothesis is found to be lacking a search for a new hypothesis starts. But Dembski doesn’t want to do that. In this case, he wants to conclude magic. Simply put that isn’t science it is absolutely junk science.

One of the things that gets me when reading just about anything by William Dembski is his continual use of probability calculations to try to support his claims about evolution. For example, in this paper by Dembski on his “displacement problem” we get the following,

Take the search for a very modest protein, one that is, say, 100 amino acids in length (most proteins are at least 250 to 300 amino acids in length). The space of all possible protein sequences that are 100 amino acids in length has size 20¹⁰⁰, or approximately 1.27×10¹³⁰. Exhaustively searching a space this size to find a target this small is utterly beyond not only present computational capacities but also the computational capacities of the universe as we know it.

[snip]

When it comes to locating small targets in large spaces, random sampling and random walks are equally ineffective.

There are two problems here. The first is Dembski’s assumption that there is a target that has to be found. This implies the very thing that Dembski is trying to prove–i.e. teleology. That is there is a purpose or goal that is being worked towards. The problem Dembski has with evolutionary theory is that there is supposedly no goal. In short, Dembski is smuggling in (and not very well) the conclusion he wants.

The second problem is this notion of a target also implicitly assumes that there is a highly imporbably outcome when in fact that needn’t be the case at all. For example, evolutionary theory, despite Dembski’s caricature of it, does not work towards a target but merely what workds. That is, to use Dembski’s language suppose there are two ideal targets for his protien of length 100, and call these two targets T_a and T_b. Further, suppose that for each of these two targets that there is a neighborhood about the targets where the proteins in that neighborhood would be sufficient for whatever organism needs this protein to go on living, that is suppose we have B(T_a) and B(T_b). Depending on how large these neighborhoods are around our ideal targets the probability of getting inside one of these two neighborhoods might be much, much lower than Dembski’s calculations imply. Then factor in that you might have say 1 million organisms where each one is trying a different path in terms of getting into one of these neighborhoods. Suddenly what appears to be highly unlikely might be much more likely. And finally, suppose that instead of looking for a complete protein of lenght 100 amino acids we need to go from 98 amino acids to 100.

Dembski’s calculations for his caricature is that a sample of 10¹³⁰ is needed. Indeed a very, very large number. However, what is the number when we take into consideration all of the above extensions to Dembski’s basic caricature? What if the number is brought down to something like 10¹⁰. Still a very large number, but there is also another assumption thrown in by Dembski. He thinks that the probability of success has to be about 0.63 for some reason. Why? The only thing that Dembski writes about that number is that the probability of hitting his target in m independent trials is 1 - (1 - p)^m which approachs 0.63 as m approaches 1/p. But why should this be the default cutoff for finding our way into the target neighborhoods? What if we make it 0.25 or 0.10 instead. After all, evolutionary theory is perfectlyfine with organisms going extinct. If the target isn’t found, oh well too bad for whatever it is that is looking for these proteins. Including this change then the sample size required drops down to 1,338,079,092. Again still a very large number, but note that this is about 121 orders of magnitude larger smaller than Dembski’s number for sample size.

In short, Dembski’s conclusions are highly dependent on his assumptions and his assumptions as have been shown (and pointed out to Dembski) many times are quite false. This is why many consider Dembski to be a dishonest hack when it comes to his writings on evolution and Intelligent Design. I tend to agree and think that he dresses up his discussions with mathematics to hide this from his average reader.

Besides the reasons that Intelligent Design (ID) is scientifically vacuous, that we already have a method of detecting design (in general), and that ID often is the Trojan horse for sneaking creationism back into publicly funded schools, there is yet another reason why ID is just bad.

This is the reason. Here we have a psychic-reiki master-therapist-teacher-author-researcher-lecturer-broadcaster whose work could be the “Designer”. No joke. Lets take a look at some of the ways IDists think of ID. First up is Michael Behe,

Q The whole positive argument for intelligent design as you ve described it, Professor Behe, is look at this system, look at these parts, they appear designed correct?

A Well, I think I filled that out a little bit more. I said that intelligent design is perceived as the purposeful arrangement of parts, yes. So when we not only see different parts, but we also see that they are ordered to perform some function, yes, that is how we perceived design.–Page 44 of Behe’s cross examination on Day 11 of the Kitzmiller trial.

And then there is Dembski,

“even though in practice inferring design is the first step in identifying an intelligent agent, taken by itself design does not require that such an agent be posited. The notion of design that emerges from the design inference must not be confused with intelligent agency” (TDI, 227, my emphasis).

Basically, Intelligent Design does not have to imply an intelligence. That is, the design might be the product of something else…what beats the heck out of me because as I noted before IDists refuse to flesh out their hypothesis.

So, it is entirely possible that the design that we see is due to psychic energies, crystals, the orbit of planets (see this link also), and other completely nonsensical woo-woo crap. The problem stems once again from the blatant refusal of all IDists to detail the design hypothesis. Notice that there is a detailed mechanisms for evolutionary theory. For example there is random mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, endosymbiosis, and natural selection. We see nothing at all like this from the ID crowd.

The basic problem is that Intelligent Design is not clearly defined and as such anybody who has an agenda can climb on the bandwagon such as the Raelians. This isn’t science but simply junk science taken to a level previously not seen.

Once again it is time to bash the soft-headed thinking of Joe G. over at the misnamed Intelligent Reasoning. Joe G. has a post that “explains the explanatory filter”. The idea being that if the rest of us scientific nazi’s just understood the brilliant points that Joe G. and his ilk are making we’d accept this kind of wrong-headed methodology.

The Design Explanatory Filter has been getting bad press. However it is obvious the bad press is due to either misunderstanding or misrepresentation. Some anti-IDists argue that it is an eliminative filter. Well, yeah! All filters eliminate. The EF eliminates via consideration. Would they prefer we started at the design inference and stay there until it is falsified?

This completely misses the point. The problem with the Explanatory Filter (hereafter EF) isn’t that it eliminates, but how it does so. Normally scienctific theories are evaluated in a contrastive manner. That is we look at how each theory fares given the evidence. To make this somewhat more concrete we can posit the following.

1. We have two theories: T1 and T2.
2. For these theories we have E, which is the observed evidence.
3. We also have our initial assesments of each theory, call these Pr(T1) and Pr(T2).
4. Further, Pr(T1) + Pr(T2) = 1, and Pr(Ti) > 0 for i = 1,2.

The first two items in our list are pretty much self-explanatory. Notion number 3 captures the researchers beliefs about the theories prior to learning about the data (hence the name of these probabilities: prior probabilities or priors for short). These beliefs can be subjective or not. This is perhaps the most controversial aspect of the Bayesian manner of comparing theories, but as I’ll argue latter this controversy is somewhat overblown. The fourth part of our list is pretty much straight forward since we are using probability theory to summarize our beliefs. Clearly, if we had Pr(Ti) = 0 for any i, that theory would be completely defunct. That is no amount of evidence could increase its probability of being true. This is why one should be careful in assigning a probability of 0 to any theory or hypothesis.

Now based on all of the above, we can construct the following two probability statements,

If we have the case where Pr(T1) = Pr(T2) then the only crucial elements are, Pr(E|T1) and Pr(E|T2). These are the likelihoods for E given each of our theories. If it is the case that Pr(E|T1) > Pr(E|T2) then we should favor T1 over T2.

Now if Pr(T1) and Pr(T2) are not equal, then where does that leave us? Well, if all we had was one bit of evidence or only a few bits of evidence we might be reluctant to cast off T2 in favor of T1 since our priors could be the reason that we favor T1 over T2. However, the above procedure is also iterative. That is suppose we have not just E, but E1, E2,…En. That is a sequence of evidence. What then? We could reconstruct the probabilities above as,

In other words, for each observable incident of evidence we could do the probability calculation and use the ensuing probability as the new prior the next time we observe some evidence related to the theories under consideration. Generally, the impact of the initial prior will be short lived in that the data will swamp that prior pulling it towards whatever value the data implies.

But what does all this mean when it comes to Dembski’s Explanatory Filter? The EF doesn’t do any of the above save a highly dubious calculation of,

Dembski argues that if the above likelihood is small enough then we should reject T1 without knowing anything at all about Pr(E|T2). If it turns out that in reality the case is Pr(E|T1) >> Pr(E|T2) then there is good reason not reject T1 even it Pr(E|T1) is really really small.

Joe G. asks,

Can anyone propose a better way to look at evidence/ phenomenon? How about a better way to make a design inference?

The answer is unequivocally, “Yes!” We want to see how likely the evidence is given each of our two theories, at the very least. Only by comparing the two theories can we make an intelligent choice as to which is the better of the two. But ID and the EF do not do this, and when pressed to do this Dembski and other Design advocated not only demur, they state quite baldly that they will never do it. This isn’t science, it is an attempt to pass off personal world views as scientific concepts and it is quite simply junk science.

Joe G. has been a busy, busy guy lately. Probably because I’ve been having some fun going after some of his stranger notions of what science is. I’ll try to tackle several of the goofy issues he has raised in some of his pots and comments.

The first one is his post at the top of the blog on Junk DNA. In comments to another post I noted that Intelligent Design Creationists (IDCists hereafter) have made the claims that IDC leads to the hypothesis that there would be less Junk DNA than evolutionary theory would predict. That is, that much of what is considered “Junk DNA” isn’t actually junk. (Side note: the term Junk DNA is somewhat misleading and a better term could be non-coding DNA or DNA for which no function has yet to be found).

I argued that IDC cannot make this claim as we don’t know anything about the designer. The problem comes from the following probability,

I noted that we can’t evaluate the likelihood on the right hand side, namely Pr(Less Junk DNA|IDC) since we know nothing of the desiging intelligence. For example, the argument of Less Junk DNA rests implicitly on the notion that the designer is a “good code writer” and that extraneous bits of code would not be left over. However, if the designer is a like the designer speculated by people like Guillermo Gonzalez (The Privileged Planet) where the designer simply makes a life friendly universe there is no reason to suspect that the designer is a “good code writer” and that there should be less Junk DNA. In fact, any attempt to make any concrete statements, guess, speculation about the designer is met with extreme resistence on the part of all IDCists. They argue that questions about the designer are irrelevent, not necessary, and so forth. But that is precisely the problem. Until something is said about the designer the likelihood,

remains a completely unknown and as such we cannot evaluate the probability, Pr(IDC|E). This is why many supporters of evolutionary theory claim that IDC is vaccuous. There is no way to judge the efficacy of IDC relative to alternative explanations such as evolutionary theory.

This problem was noted by Paul Nelson,

Easily the biggest challenge facing the ID community is to develop a full-fledged theory of biological design. We don’t have such a theory now, and that’s a real problem. Without a theory it’s very hard to know where to direct your research focus. Right now we’ve got a bag of powerful intuitions, and a handful of notions such as “irreducible complexity” and “specified complexity” - but as yet no general theory of biological design.

My argument is untill the IDCists are ready to start talking about the designer then the above problem will never be resolved.

But what does Joe G. think of all this? Nothing. You see, if it turns out that there is less junk DNA that initially believed, no problem for IDC. If junk DNA really turns out to be “junk” then no problem for IDC. In short, IDC is immune whatever the data is observed. Rendering one’s pet theory immune to the data is not science, it is the epitome of junk science.

The next bit of nonsense that we get from Joe G. is this post. The problem with this nonsense is that it implies that there is some sort of special evidence that would convince all of us skeptics if we could just see it. The problem is that once again this isn’t how science works. That is suppose we have three hypotheses, H₁, H₂, H₃ and that we have evidence E. Then we would construct the following,

However, it is entirely possible the the probability of H₁ and H₂ both increase at the expense of H₃ and that Pr( H₁|E) is larger than Pr(H₂|E). Thus, even “good evidence for H₂ could be even better evidence for H₁. Hence the question itself is just not helpful.

Next is this really silly post on the Explanatory Filter (EF). The post uses an old IDCist dodge when discussing the EF: conflating human design with rarified design.

Look at it this way: How do forensic scientists approach a crime scene? Do they run in guns blazing, kicking stuff around? No. They pick the place clean looking for clues- macro and micro. The clues lead them to an accidental or natural death or a homicide. Somewhere along the line there may be a key indicator of agent activity, IOW something that was determined couldn’t have occurred by chance.

Where to being? How about that from past experience (i.e. evidence or data) forensic scientists know that there is likely going to be lots of evidence on or around the body that will answer the question of natural, accident, or homicide. Further, there is lots of evidence that indicates that if a person is murdered it was another human doing it (i.e. supernatural murder just doesn’t happen). That is the forensic scientist can use the following probabilities:

That is, based on the evidence the forensic scientist will revise his intial probability assesments. And guess what, forensic science makes use of Bayes Theorem. Shockingly, not one forensic scientist use the EF. And why should they, there is no set method of how to use it. Even Dembski only uses it with the uniform probability distribution which is probably not a good idea with forensic science involving a dead body. After all, most dead bodies are probably the result of natural causes. The next most likely are accidental, and finally murder brings up the rear being the least likely explanation (a priori) as to why the person is dead. Basically, we don’t need the EF at all.

These are all standard arguments used by IDCists and none of them really hold any water. They rely on people not understanding how science works, how to reason inductively via proability statements and general ignorance. This is no different than any other form of junk science save perhaps that it has been elevated to a very high level.

In the post below, I argued that one should always check a Creationist’s sources. While this is true, the other thing about the quote by Feduccia below highlights another disingenuous aspect of Creationism, especially the Intelligent Design variety: the lack of controversy.

Right there we see a controversy in biology/paleontology: where did birds come from. Right now the dominant theory is that birds evolved from Theropoda while Feduccia argues that the precursor for birds is Thecodontia. A real life controversy that none of the Intelligent Design Creationists want to talk about. Instead, they obsess about their faux controversy surrounding this bogus notion of design for bioglogical structures.

This is always a good piece of advice when dealing with Creationists. Case in point, this article, pointed out to us by Joe G. at Intelligent Reasoning. In that article in a footnote related to Archaeopteryx we get the following quote,

Leading ornithologist Dr. Alan Feduccia wrote “Paleontologists have tried to turn Archaeopteryx into an earth-bound feathered dinosaur. It is a bird, a perching bird. And no amount of “paleobabble” is going to change that”. Cited in J. Sarfati, Refuting Evolution, p 58, from Science, 259(5096), p 764-65.

Sarfati is one of the lesser known IDCists, but still check out these supposed damning quotes. So a quick google search turned up this. The context is that there is a big debate over whether or not birds evolved from a member of Thecodontia or Saurischia. In other words, the above quote isn’t to dispute the evolution of the bird, but exactly how birds evolved. Prime example of quote mining.

I was aware of the fact that many think Archaeopteryx was a transitional fossil, but not an ancestor of birds. Hence the whole comment about Archaeopteryx in the original article is highly misleading. Par for the course for Creationists (and one that approvingly quotes Duane Gish no less).

One of the big problems with Creationists is that they don’t seem to understand how science works, or sometimes even their own arguments. Case in point, our friend Joe G., at Intelligent Reasoning. First up is this nice little quote by me, and Joe G.’s response,

As for the use of the fossil record as evidence in favor of evolutionary theory and against ID one only has to look to Dembski’s new law of thermodynamics. That is the Law of Conservation of Information. Basically, this law asserts that new information (e.g. speciation) cannot come about purely by natural means.

Seeing that both intelligence and design are natural, I would say you don’t understand the debate.

Joe G. is apparently unfamiliar with Dembski’s argument. Dembski’s argument is that natural processes like those in evolutionary theory, are insufficient to produce the new information that is embodied in things like the E. coli flagellum. Hence if natural processes are insufficient, then Dembski must see the intelligence that he infers that is behind the supposed design is supernatural.

Incidentally, I’ve never argued that intelligence and design are not natural. Humans have intelligence and design lots of things, but humans are also part of nature. Hence it is indeed the case that intelligence and design, in general, are part of nature–i.e. are natural. So Joe G. really has to take this up with the Intelligent Design crowd as they are the one’s that are positing a viewpoint that is strongly in accord with the supernatural.

The other problem, not knowing how science works, is found in just about every single post on that website. As I noted in my pervious post, judging a theory should only be done by comparing theories and there probability of being true given the evidence. But Joe G., as is all too typical of Creationists, argues that evolutionary theory is simply wrong as if by succeeding here, Creationism or ID (but I repeat mysefl) must be true by default. The problem with this is that even if some of the problems that Creationists/IDists bring up are valid it doesn’t automatically convey greater probability of being true on Creationism/ID.

For once, it would be nice to see a Creationists/IDists try to utilize the above approach. Of course, they wont because to do so would mean that they have to talk about the designer. They’d have to look at the designers motives, the processes he uses (hint: currently ID has literally nothing for a process as to how this design took place), and so forth. As soon as they do this, the curtain is pulled back and ID is revealed to be nothing more than Creationism and another attempt to try and get God into school curriculums via the side door.

Over at the misnamed, Intelligent Reasoning, we have a prime example of how to construct a misleading argument.

Evolutionists commonly use the fossil record and evidnence for their “theory”. However fossils canNOT tell us anything about a mechanism. Therefore in any debate pertaining to a mechanism, such as ID vs. evolutionism, the fossil record is totally useless.

Lets break it down. The claim, or premise of the argument is that the fossil record is used to support the theory of evolution. The support for this claim though is supposedly refutes a much more precise claim: the fossil record cannot be used in a discussion of the mechanism of ID vs. evolution. While the latter might be true (I’ll argue later that it isn’t depending on which aspect of ID you are talking about), that does not mean that the fossil record doesn’t support evolutionary theory.

The fossil record is used primarily as a source of evidence for speciation. This is done by looking at bones found in the right section of rock, and the look to see if the bones are similar to other bones found previously. Scientists can then track changes in the dinosaurs and make inferences as to which sets of bones are related to other sets of bones.

The argument that there isn’t a clear pattern of speciation amongst marine invertebrates is also misleading. Simply because the evidence is more clear with vertebrates than it is with invertebrates does not render a theory false. Further, the lack of transitional fossils is not proof that evolution didn’t happen. Consider the following points:

1. There is considerable evidence of transitional fossils amongst vertebrates.
2. There is far less evidence of transitional fossils amongst invertebrates.

So, does this mean that evolution didn’t happen? Point number 1 supports the hypothesis evolution happened, point number 2 on the other hand neither supports nor undermines the hypothesis that evolution happened. Further, there is evidence of transitional fossils for invertebrates. So, basically this argument is not only factually wrong, it is logically wrong as well.

To see the latter recall from the previous post about Bayes Theorem. Bayes theorem can be written as:

That is probability of theory i given evidence k, depends on the probability of evidence k assuming theory i multiplied by our prior probability (i.e. our hunch that theory i is correct) normalized by the probability of evidence k. Now, what if there is no evidence, i.e. the evidence is the empty set. But the Pr(the empty set|T_i) = 1. Thus, the above equation reduces to,

That is, the lack of evidence neither confirms nor disconfirms a theory. This is a good thing in that even though a theory may predict something like transitional fossils, there is no guarantee that transitional fossils have to exist. Fossilization is not a foregone conclusion given that just the right type of circumstances have to occur for a fossil to form. Hence it is quite likely that many transitional species never leave any fossils behind. Would we really want this sort of “bad luck” to disconfirm a theory that in reality might be true? No.

So both factually and logially the argument based on the scant transitional fossils of marine invertebrates is not necessarily evidence against evolutionary theory. The only way for this to be evidence against evolutionary theory is if evolutionary theory predicted a large number of such fossils, and to the best of my knowledge evolutionary theory says little about the frequency of fossils, which is more the purview of geology. Finally, not that in the above the denominator is nothing more than a fancy version of the law of total probability. We could re-write it simply as Pr(E_k). Thus, the more unlikely E_k is the better this is for the theory in question. For example, the fact that the sidewalk is wet is strong evidence that it is raining. Not because when it rains the probability that the sidewalk is wet is high, but because usually the sidewalk is dry. That is the evidence that the sidewalk is wet is unusual which prompts me to put a higher weight on the theory/hypothesis that it is raining.

As for the use of the fossil record as evidence in favor of evolutionary theory and against ID one only has to look to Dembski’s new law of thermodynamics. That is the Law of Conservation of Information. Basically, this law asserts that new information (e.g. speciation) cannot come about purely by natural means. Since the fossil record indicates otherwise (i.e., it supports the purely natural theory of evolution) this is evidence against ID.

As for the notion that the fossil record is the only place that we observe evolution that is pure nonsense. Evolution is observed everytime parents reproduce. The combining of two seperate strands of DNA into a new unique DNA is part of the evolutionary mechanism (sexual selection). Mutations are observed in labs all th e time and are part of the mechanism of evolution. This idea that the mechanisms of evolution are not observed anywhere save the fossil record is just flat out wrong. And the source, Pierre-Paul Grasse, has a pretty heterodox view of mutations. So quoting him is definitely a case selectively chosing one’s sources.

Basically this kind of stuff is what Creationists are very good at. Tossing out a completely bogus argument knowing full well that most of their audience wont have either the background knowlege to know it is bogus or the time to verify if the argument is bogus. Add on top of that, the desire to believe these bogus arguments because they fit with the preconcieved views of many in their audience and they can get away with guite a bit of nonsense.

To discuss this post, go to our forums.

Over at Intelligent Reasoning, we have the PRATT List in regards to intelligent design. The first part shows the rather shallow understanding of science and the scientific method on the part of the author, Joe G.

This is just dumb. Lets consider the following: what created the E. coli flagellum? Most scientists would say, “Evolutionary theory”, and by this they’d mean mutation, gene flow, genetic drift, natural selection, etc. In short, we’d have an explanation for the causal agent/force. Would this prohibit us from making an inference? Nope. This is how the inference would work (if you are a Bayesian):

That is we’d look at the probability of observing the data that was observed given the hypothesis that evolution is responsible for the flagellum. We also, have the probability that evolution is “true” and this basically represents our personal view as to the validity of evolution being true. And last is the probability of observing the Data given any and all theories–i.e. the unconditional probability of a specific type of data.

Some make a big deal about P(Evo) arguing that one could stack the deck by setting this probability very high or even to 1. If this (prior) probability is set to 1, then you know right off the bat that the person is dogmatic and no amount of evidence will get him to change his mind. If the probability is set very high–i.e. close to 1, but not quite 1, then what this implies is that you’ll need quite a bit of data to swamp that prior, but it can be done. That is, a high prior isn’t necessarily a bad thing or that the person holding such a prior is unreasonable.

But the idea that we can’t make an inference given that we know the process, agent, or force involved is just utter nonsense.

Knowing who designed something adds nothing to the understanding of the design unless the designer conveyed all that information to you.

On the contrary, it allows us to refine our inference above. For example, suppose we want to know how X (some event happened)? The probability,

Tells us very little. However,

Allows us to use the machinery of Bayes theorem to learn about the validity of X. However, Intelligent Design Creationists (IDCists) refuse to discuss the designer. This is why Dembski came up with his Explanatory Filter. Scientists have used Bayesian methods to evaluate not only scientific thoeries, but also the possibility of an intelligence agency being at work for some time now (mainly due to the improvements in computing power). For example, we can use the Bayesian methods to determine the probability that Nichola Caputo, one of Dembski’s examples, cheated (i.e. intelligently designed) the ballot positions during elections. We don’t need the Explanatory Filter for this, we can just use a mathematical result that has been around for over 200 years (and Ironically was discovered by a believer in God).

We can use known examples of designed objects to show that we don’t need to know the designer in order to understand the design.

Uhhhmmm no. We look at a fork, or belt buckle found at an archeological dig and conclude design in large part because we know people were present and that people design things. This kind of extrapolation from natural design (i.e. humans designing and making things) to rarified design (design by a supernatural being that IDCists refuse to discuss) are not equivalent and it is a logical fallacy to assume that the reasoning processes are the same.

Obviously knowing who designed something the detection process can be skipped.

Again, no. When we do any kind of inference, especially using the Bayesian method, we want to condition on all the relevant information. Not conditioning on all the relevant information can lead to apparent paradoxes (note that there isn’t really a paradox, simply what appears to be a paradox due to an error in conditioning). The above is like saying, “We know that X is an important part of phenomenon Y, but we are going to ignore it in all our inferences.” Most people would find this specious…and it is.

In any investigation of a dead body, first you would attempt to determine the cause of death and attempt to identify the body. If homicide is inferred then you use the evidence to run an investigation to determine the killer(s). If they knew the killer before the investigation, what an easy job they would have.

This is misleading. Note that the author has shifted from knowing that there is “a killer” to “knowing the killer”. These two things are not the same. A forensic scientist might know that a person was murdered, and hence that there is a killer, but he may not know who the killer is.

Who designed the designer?

Who designed the designers of Stonehenge? We can only study what we can observe.

This is also misleading. The idea behind ID is that certain biological structures could not have arisen purely by natural means. Given this, it seems reasonable to ask if the designer is as or even more complex than that which is designed. If the answer is yes, then the question of where did the designer come from becomes pertinent. The problem is that it leads to either infinite regress (the designer has a designer, who in turn had a designer, who also in turn had a designer, and on and on forever) or we have to posit a supernatural designer. Once you go supernatural, this runs right into certain Constitutional restrictions on what can and can’t be taught. In short, bringing up this question threatens the non-scientific goal of the ID movement which is to get a form of Creationism back into the classroom.

How was it designed?/ How was the design implemented?

Without direct observation or input from the designer, although interesting questions answering them is not necessary to achieve the objectives of ID- that is the detection and understanding of the design.

This is contradictory. We can’t understand design if we can’t answer how it was designed and why. Note that evolutionary theory proposes a mechanism that explains how it happened and why. Granted, it isn’t detailed in that a mutation-by-mutation explanation, but it gives a mechanism which is far, far more than ID. Further, this mechanism is what gives rise to testable hypotheses. Without a mechanism there really is no way to test ID save to say, “Well we think it was designed, but we can’t say for sure.” So ID can’t even out do the “We don’t know” position. Pretty pathetic form of understanding.

ID is another way of saying “I give up looking.”

Nothing could be further from reality. In reality whenever design is detected the work is just getting started, just ask any archaeologist or SETI researcher. To say my car was designed affords absolutely no knowledge about the car. To gain that knowledge research must be conducted.

Well here we see the problem with ignoring the designer. Sure saying, the car is designed doesn’t tell us much. But this is precisely a criticism of ID. Most people would say, the car is designed by other people. That additional bit of information would tell us a great deal about the design. It would indicate that the car is designed to accomodate people, that it serves some need people have, etc. However, with ID there is nothing else. We can’t ask, “How was it designed?” as the author has already stated that this question is not relevant and IDCists refuse to speculate about the designer. We can’t ask, “Why was it designed?” either. This would also need a designer and the goals and motivations of the designer to brought up. Note that an archaeologist would ask both of these questions. The would look at how some artifact was designed and what purpose did it serve. From this, the archaeologist could then go on to make inferences about the goals and motivations of the designer.

The design is a poor design. Why would a good designer allow so many extinctions and so many obviously cobbled-together systems?

I would love to see the critics who use this line of attack do a better job. However I digress. No one says that the design had to be perfect or that even if it started out “perfect” that it had to remain that way.

Right, this is the hallmark of ID: Stupid, therefore designed.

The net result of all of these “Points Refuted A Thousand Times” is that Intelligent Design is scientificially empty. It leads to no interesting questions, hypotheses, or results. In fact, given things like Dembski’s Explanatory Filter, which supposed will produce no false positives and “sweeps the field clean” in terms of naturalistic explanations, there is no more need to look for natural causes of whatever is deemed to be designed. In short, Intelligent Design is anti-science at its core.

To discuss this post, go to our forums.

If you have not been following Steve McIntyre’s blog, then you have been missing some truly yeoman work by McIntyre on the junk science of the Hockey Stick team.

The “Hockey Stick” refers to the graph used by the IPCC reports based on the paper MBH ‘98 which purported to show that recent global warming is historically unprecedented. The paper purported to “prove” by statistical analysis of what are termed “proxies”; ie., measurements that infer historical temperatures. McIntyre and McKitrick published a paper that showed some pervasive and at times suspicious errors and omissions in the MBH paper. A key finding of their’s that has never been refuted by Mann et al is that their result is actually dependant solely upon the inclusion of one proxy - that of the tree ring widths of bristlecone pines - that dominate the shape of the graph. And McIntyre has shown several references from experts on the bristlecone pine that shows its tree ring widths are influenced most not by temperature but by moisture.

McIntyre’s blog has since documented his experiences in trying to get the Hockey Stick team to live up to their obligations as scientists to publish their data and methodologies to enable others to verify their paper. It has shown that the global warming advocates intentionally violate peer-reviewed journal processes and procedures to defend their work.

Some recent work by Steve:
Politics in the hockey stick science
McIntyre has been having fun responding to purported rebuttals of his work.
Review of Osborn and Briffa - a recent supposed confirmation of the Hockey Stick

Here at Debunkers, we obviously keep a close eye on those Johnny Come-Lately “Mythbusters” on Discovery Channel. Here are some outtakes from their program. Enjoy.

Glenn Reynolds has a list of links to ways you can donate to relief efforts in the aftermath of Katrina. I will be making a donation to the Salvation Army.

Michelle Malkin, conservative blogger and pundit has written a post about the supposed dangers of RU-486, the “morning after” abortion pill. And what a complete load of utter nonsense it is. There isn’t much to add after Bill Ardolino delivers a brutal smack down on Malkin’s complete nonsense. Bill notes that the risk posed by RU-486 is extremely low and compares it to such things as penicillin.

Yeah, so can penicillin, at a greater mortality rate than RU-486:

The risk of penicillin fatal allergy is about 1 in 75,000.

Further, note this snide comment by Malkin,

Interesting that the usual crowd of pharmaceutical-bashers, who undoubtedly would have lobbied for any other drug with such health outcomes to be pulled, have nothing to say about these deaths.

Seems quite apparent that Malkin has a certain degree of disdain for those she call “the usual crowd of pharmaceutical-bashers”, but at the same time we see Malkin doing precisely the same kind of thing on the flimsiest of evidence. Perhaps the true motivation for Malkin’s post is not the safety of RU-486, but that she is exploiting these recent deaths for her own anti-abortion agenda?

Part of today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Posted with permission

Frist Offers Hope for Embryonic Stem Cell Research (UPDATED: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?)

By Aubrey Noelle Stimola

In a surprising move pitting him against President Bush and religious conservatives, Senate majority leader Bill Frist announced last week his support for a bill to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Michael Castle (R-DE), passed in the House but has stalled in the Senate, where several alternative stem cell bills are vying for consideration.

Amidst the applause for Frist, though, it may be forgotten that he has not necessarily changed his views much at all. Expanding stem cell research only to leftover embryos from in vitro fertilization (IVF) procedures that would have otherwise have been discarded does not necessarily mean Frist has stopped seeing those embryos as human beings – in which case, his small step in favor of expanded research could easily be followed by his support for, say, a ban on all somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), that is, the creation of new embryos specifically for research purposes. That means the man lauded for advancing stem cell research today could easily prove to be one of its most restrictive opponents at the same time, and without any changes in his underlying position throughout.

Current policy restricts use of federal funding to research on the seventy-eight embryonic stem cell lines created before August 2001, only twenty-two of which have proved viable for study. These limitations, many researchers argue, have held back U.S. progress in the burgeoning field of regenerative medicine. Countries such as the UK and South Korea have made far more headway in this arena.

The new bill would allow federal funding on stem cell lines extracted from frozen embryos left over from in vitro fertilization procedures, embryos that would otherwise be discarded. If the bill passes in the Senate, President Bush has threatened to stop the measure with the first veto of his presidency.

Embryonic stem cells have long been the hypothesized key to understanding, treating, and perhaps one day curing numerous diseases and conditions suffered by millions of Americans. Their use, however, is controversial, as the extraction of these cells, which have the potential to develop into all of types of human tissue, necessarily destroys the five-day-old embryos from which they are removed. To those who believe these thirty- to 150-celled embryos are morally equivalent to human beings, embryonic stem cell research is tantamount to murder.

Frist’s announcement is surprising given his statement just last month that he did not back expansion of the current policy “at this juncture.” Frist’s new stance that “the president’s policy should be modified” on grounds that the current limitations will “slow our ability to bring potential new treatments for certain diseases” may give undecided Senate republicans political license to back the legislation, likely to be voted on in September. As the Senate’s only physician, Frist is often looked to by his colleagues for advice on medical matters.

Second Thoughts on Frist Thoughts

While Senator Frist’s announcement seems a boon to embryonic stem cell research, it has raised some understandable suspicions and led many to speculate that this apparent reversal of opinion might be a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Frist maintains that his moral convictions have not changed. He continues to view embryos as nascent human life, the argument relied upon by opponents of policy expansion, but says he now views this matter as one of science as well as faith. “I am pro-life. I believe human life begins at conception,” Frist claims on one hand. He also states, however, “Cure today may be just a theory…but the promise is powerful enough that I believe this research deserves our increased energy and focus. Embryonic stem cell research must be supported. It’s time for a modified policy.”

Translated, Frist believes an embryo is human life, but he also believes that there are cases in which it is justifiable to destroy human life. Such a tension can only be resolved if the Senator qualifies his position by saying that he only condones the use of frozen embryos in research because they will otherwise be discarded and these already existing embryos can and should be put to use to save other lives. Given Frist’s unchanged views on the status of the human embryo, it stands to reason that this is the stance he is now taking, though he has not explicitly said as much.

As a result, scientists wary of this unprecedented shift fear that the expansion of federal funding to leftover embryos might come with a tremendous caveat. There have been murmurs of legislation that, while granting researchers access to surplus embryos, would bar any and all use of a stem cell-producing technique called “somatic cell nuclear transfer” (SCNT) – on the grounds that the new availability of surplus embryos would negate any need for SCNT. To many stem cell experts, including Bernard Siegel of the Genetics Policy Institute, this is anti-science at its absolute worst.

SCNT involves the insertion of the genetic material from an “adult” (non-embryonic) cell into an egg from which the nucleus has been removed. This new cell, with the appropriate stimulus, will behave like a fertilized egg and will be allowed to develop for three to five days, at which point embryonic stem cells would be extracted. These individual cells would be an exact genetic match to the adult cell donor and, ideally, could be used for various disease treatments in that individual. This procedure would bypass the risk of immune rejection typically posed by transplantation procedures; instead, a patient could receive perfectly matched cells – genetically, his own.

This technique, called therapeutic cloning, has too frequently been lumped together with the more ominous sounding “reproductive cloning,” considered abhorrent by most researchers. The only difference is that a therapeutically cloned embryo only develops to the thirty-to-150-cell stage, whereas reproductive cloning involves the implantation of the cloned embryo into a uterus with the intent of live birth. The latter is the technique first employed by Dr. Ian Wilmut in the creation of Dolly the sheep and most recently used by Dr. Woo-Suk Hwang in the creation of the world’s first cloned dog.

Many researchers feel that access to federal funding for research using surplus IVF embryos should not come at the cost of SCNT, given its potential to overcome tissue rejection and other immunity-related problems. Those in favor of SCNT-restricting legislation often fear that the use of SCNT for therapeutic purposes will necessarily lead us down a slippery slope to human reproductive cloning.

The Frist decision might impact the efforts of American researchers who have been lagging behind countries like South Korea, the UK, and Singapore in the field of stem cell research. Be warned, it is possible that there might be serious drawbacks to what seems like progress toward expanded research. Advocates of embryonic stem cell research are advised to pay close attention to the fine print of any proposed stem cell legislation, particularly as we approach a possible Senate vote in September.

Aubrey Stimola is an assistant director of public health at the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH.org, HealthFactsAndFears.com).

Omega-3 Fatty acids in milk

A “SUPERMILK” containing Omega 3 fatty acids derived from oily fish is to go on sale this week.

It is produced by cows which are given a special fish oil blend along with their normal feed. A 250ml serving contains ten times more of the Omega 3 acids known as DHA and EPA than regular milk but is said to taste the same.

This is more of an FYI. Omega-3’s are pretty well established as being “good” for you, but this one doesn’t pass my sniff test for ickiness.

Fish and milk don’t mix, even if you can’t taste or smell the mix.

Well I guess I should be happy that they at least admit that they take the writings, comments, and speechs of biologists out of context and abuse them for their own purposes.

Who’s to blame for this mess? Maybe biologists themselves, at least in part, suggests Rudy Raff. Raff, long a leader and mentor in the field of evo-devo, periodically writes editorials warning about the growth of ID and skepticism concerning naturalistic evolution. His most recent, “Stand up for evolution” (Evolution and Development 7 [July 2005]:273-275), advises biologists to police their own language when describing biological systems. As Raff writes:

…let us not play into the hands of ID propagandists. For instance, be careful about using teleological words to describe biological entities in our teaching and writing. Calling cells “machines that do X,” or describing biological structures as “well designed to do Y” will be duly cited in ID propaganda as one more biologist-supporting design.

This is precisely correct in that the Intelligent Design proponents grab onto anything that remotely hints at design and abuses it. Case in point: William Dembski blaming Peter Ward for Dembski’s misuse of something Ward wrote.

Paul Nelson is making it like the biologists are in the wrong, but when you have your writings constantly taken out of context and twisted to support a position 180 degrees counter to what you actually believe who is really acting in a despicable manner?

Part of today’s Beltway Traffic Jam.

Now it is Jonathan Witt that is whining about the perceptions surrounding The Privileged Planet. Before diving into the issue, let me first say I have not read the book The Privileged Planet, nor have I seen the documentary. I have considered reading the book, but since my time is limited I’m not sure I’m ever going to actually get it let alone read it. My problem is that the very concept of the book defies logic.

Part of the hypothesis in the book is that the universe is fine tuned for life. This, along with the other observations, the authors argue, suggests design of the universe, the solar system and our planet (hence the title). The problem is that the fine tuning argument actually does not suggest design. The argument that a fine tuned universe implies design is fatally flawed and can be seen pretty simply. From an abstract point which is the stronger argument for design:

1. Prob(Life|Fine Tuned)
2. Prob(Life|Not Fine Tuned)?

The first one might very well be very, very low, but the second one according to the IDers who are sympathetic to Cosmological Intelligent Design (CID) is impossible–i.e. the probability is zero. In other words, the fact that we live in a fine tuned universe is evidence against design. That is, the only way to have life in a non-fine tuned universe is for a supernatural entity to generate that life and some how sustain it.

Now that last part, the supernatural designer, is one that some might object to, but lets not kid ourselves we are talking about a being that designed the cosmos so that our planet would have life on it. Is this being really the result of a natural process? If so, then the rest of ID (Biological Intelligent Design) goes right out the window. If natural processes are sufficient to lead to a being that can create the entire cosmos then natural processes are more than sufficient to create a flagellum in e. coli.

When people cannot accept the above logic with regards to the fine tuning argument, I am reluctant to invest both time and money to see what the rest of their arguments are. This and the fact that Gonzalez and Richards can’t seem to bring themselves to discuss this designer leaves me thinking this is just the same old crap we get from the Intelligent Design community.

Jay Richards over at ID the Future is complaining about how others are using the term intelligent design. He cites two examples.

The first was a written document he recieved from somebody who claimed to have information channled from extraterrestrials where the author had whited out the name for his theory and put in its place the words, “intelligent design”. The other was about a story I noted here about a mechanism for Intelligent Design (ID). Both are laughable stupid. But I think at least part of the problem is due to the ID proponents (the real ones, not these whacky Johnny-come-latelies).

The problem is that ID proponents have not layed out exactly what theory underlies ID. You don’t see this kind of problem with actual scientific theories such as particle physics theory, quantum theory, etc. Why? Because these areas of physics have well developed theories, they have people doing things that ID proponents never do, such as experiments. When you leave something almost completely undefined you run the risk of having other people come in and try and define it for you. IDers can’t say, ”Oh, no this idea that intelligent design is connected to astrology is wrong,” because ID is completely undefined. We can’t look at ID and say, “Nope astrology is not allowed,” because there is nothing inherent in the concept of ID that prevents such a connection. ID merely says that evolutionary theory and natural law is not sufficient to account for the diversity of life we currently observe. Beyond that nothing more is said as to why this has to be true. Could be aliens…could be astrology, some sort of divine being, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

So it is with much amusement that I watch the IDers out there actually have to spend (waste?) time responding to these kinds of crank concepts. Also, it is with amusement that I watch the supposedly “Big ID Tent” get smaller as one group of IDers try to toss other groups out. It is also with amusement that I watch IDers use non-ID science to do this,

The conclusion simply doesn’t follow. I could just as easily point out how none of us (not to mention the universe) wouldn’t exist without gravity, and point out how gravity has some unusual properties, and use similar logic to argue that gravity is the mechanism of intelligent design.

Yes, one could do precisely this and there is absolutely nothing in ID that would prevent one from making such a statement. I tell you, you can’t make up stuff like this.

Do the cost savings associated with hybrid cars translate into savings? The answer appears to be no.

The auto researcher Edmunds.com did a recent study comparing hybrids to non-hybrid vehicles. Their conclusion, the cost savings on gas may not offset the higher price tag on hybrids.

For example, the study compared the Toyota Prius to the Toyota Corolla and found you’d have to drive the Prius 66,500 miles a year just to break even. Why? A hybrid can cost as much as $5,200 more than its non-hybrid counterpart.

I think this is somewhat significant since there is the possibility that tax payer money will be used to subsidize hybrid cars. If the cars are not going to result in a net savings unless one drives quite a bit, then the policy of subsidizing the cars may be mis-guided.

The Jacksonville Transportation Authority owns nine hybrids, all of them, the Prius. According to the JTA’s Director of Transportation Tom Jury, the average mileage on the agency’s hybrids is far less than 66,500 annually - it’s more like 12,000 to 15,000 miles per year.

On the face of it, that looks like bad news for the taxpayers who funded the new cars. But Jury points out, the JTA paid slightly less than sticker price for its hybrids, shelling out $18,370 for each one.

And he says there are other factors to consider, telling First Coast News, “It’s not just the economy or the fuel mileage on the vehicle it’s also the reduced emissions as well.”

While it is true that things like reduced emissions are a benefit and one that is not easily measured, it is still questionable that it fully offsets the costs associated with hybrid cars. This is one of the problems with many environmental issues. The problems are externalities (i.e. external to the market) and hence there is little way of getting a good idea on the monetary impact of these externalities.

You know, this seems so fitting.

It takes one brain cell to recognise a Hollywood celebrity, according to a study into how the mind recalls a familiar face. Faces of stars such as Jennifer Aniston, Halle Berry and Brad Pitt each stimulate a nerve cell in the brain that seems to recognise that face alone.

Considering how dippy so many celebrities are, it seems quite fitting that only one brain cell is need to recognize them.

The research that the above is based on also sounds interesting,

The findings suggest that individual brain cells, rather than being mere electronic relays for signals, are miniature computers in their own right.

Instead of brain cells acting as a network of individual units, scientists may revitalise an older theory suggesting a separate cell is responsible for recognising a familiar face.

This is a bit off the beaten path for junk science, but I think it is somewhat relevant. Bob Geldof has recently come out in favor of stamping out poverty. A noble goal, but is it realistic? After all, Bob Geldof organized the first Live Aid concert to help a famine stricken Ethiopia. And what do we see today? An Ethiopia still struggling with famine.

So what is the problem? Is it a lack of generosity on the part of the West/Developed world? No. My guess is that the real problem is a lack of institutions that promote economic growth and improvement. Property rights, representative government, and a market economy. Of course these are actually bad things to people like Geldof and other celebrities. The market economy is seen as the source of famine, poverty and other things like global climate change, chemical pollutants, and so forth.

One of the things about science is that you look at the evidence and based on that evidence evaluate the validity of various hypotheses. Here is a hypothesis for people like Geldof to consider: That one reason the West/Developed world are so well off is precisely because of the market economy, property rights and a representative government.

Not my words, rather a quote froim an article by Mustafa Akyol in Tech Central Sation

In a nutshell, Intelligent Design is the theory that argues life on Earth is the product of natural laws, chance and intelligence. Darwinism, on the other hand, accepts only the first two causes, because, according to materialist philosophy, intelligence does not exist unless it evolves over time from mindless matter.

Materialist philosophy. Huh?

Go read it

Many critics of ID wrongly assume that we infer that intelligence from the Bible or the Koran, but in fact we infer it solely from nature. As Mount Rushmore compels an observer to conclude that an intelligent cause was at work there, the “specified complexity” of life points to an intelligent designer.

Wow. Just wow. I don’t know where to start on that analogy. Mt Rushmore – ID – therefore evolutionary theory is bogus. Yeah, I’m convinced, now, bring me some snakes that I can play with.

Another argument by Mr. McHenry against ID is that it is not “testable.” Well, neither is Darwinism. Both theories talk about phenomena many millions, or even billions, of years old and never yet to have been observed occurring. That’s why they constitute a specific area of science called “origin science.” Also included in this realm is the Big Bang theory, which explains the origin of the universe. We definitely can’t observe, test and repeat the Big Bang. We just infer it from the evidence. The same holds for ID, too.

Can you say strawman, yeah, I’m sure you can. We don’t need to go through this again, though.

Another problem in Mr. McHenry’s piece is that he attaches to us some arguments that we don’t make. We don’t say, for example, “We don’t know this yet; therefore, it is unknowable.” As biochemist Mike Behe, the leading theorist of ID, repeatedly emphasizes, ID is not based on what we do not know. Rather, it is based on what we have learned in the recent decades.

Again, huh? What have we learned in the recent decades that move rational thinkers toward ID?

Crickets chirping.

Looking at DNA evidence (my training is in enzyme mechanics and relationships between structure/function, which involved significant amount of sequence comparison, so I’m most comfortable here) along with the archaeological evidence and the fact that evolution is observable, I think the evidence of ID is just about zilch. Add in the argument from ignorance/god of the gaps specious garbage that the IDers use, let me rephrase that, it is zilch.

This is my favorite bit, though.

Perhaps, just perhaps, one day Mr. McHenry can come to the same conclusion, too. The only thing needed is to follow the evidence where it leads. That is what we “IDers” do.

Blink.

Blink.

Blink.

The school board in Dover PA recently has enacted a policy to teach ID in the public shools. The issue is going to trial, but there has recently be a rather surprising incident for the Creationist side. Several of the Discovery Institutes experts, William Dembksi, Stephen Meyer, and John Campbell, were removed as expert witnesses by the Thomas More Law Center (via Panda’s Thumb).

This is definitely good news for those who oppose Creationism in our schools. Dembski is a very big name in the ID community loaded with more degrees than most people have shoes. Meyer is also quite eloquent and would have been a good witness. Definitely a blow to those who were hoping this would be the big case that put ID in public school classrooms.

It looks like the problem is that the Thomas More Law Center (TMLC) had taken a position that really put the Discovery Institute (DI) into a bind, as Ed Brayton at the Panda’s Thumb notes,

The DI has been in a bind from the moment this case started. For the past few years, both sides in this dispute have been waiting for the case - the legal test case that would determine once and for all whether ID can be taught in public school science classrooms or whether the previous precedents against teaching “creation science” will be applied to ID in a similar manner. That’s what all of the activity in this area for the last decade has been building toward. Everything that ID advocates have done during that time has been designed (yes, intelligently) to put legal distance between ID and the type of creation science that was banned from public school science classrooms in the Edwards decision. It’s not by accident that the Wedge strategy was worked out by an attorney, Phillip Johnson. Johnson knew that the courts would not allow an explicitly religious idea be taught in public schools, so it was necessary to distance ID as much as possible from religion and make it appear to be religion-neutral.

This is why you hear constantly from ID proponents that the designer is not necessarily God, it could also be, for instance, aliens (never mind that this is flatly contradicted by the fact that the DI’s official definition of Intelligent Design includes the claim that “certain features of the universe” are “best explained by an intelligent cause” - the makeup of the universe itself is well outside the reach of “aliens”, because aliens, like humans, are part of the universe itself. No, their definition requires that the designer be outside the universe itself and hence “supernatural” because their definition combines cosmological and biological design). This is also why the DI was so upset by the discovery and release of the Wedge Document, because that document makes explicit the fact that the entire ID movement and strategy was designed as part of a larger campaign of Christian cultural renewal (which is also why the DI changed the name of its ID component from the Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture to merely the Center for Science and Culture). The DI is nothing if not politically savvy and they know that these little rhetorical details make a big difference. They also know that the success or failure of a court case to determine whether ID meets constitutional muster for public school science classrooms depends largely on how well they separate ID from religion.

Of course, even putting Dembski and Meyer on the stand would have been problematic. These two both believe that the designer isn God, and nothing else. They have paper trails that pretty much confirm this and as such ID would have a very tough uphill battle in court. I imagine that in the next few months we’ll be reading about the rather pathetic demise of the Dover case.

One of the biggest stumbling blocks for Intelligent Design (ID), aside from the methodological nightmare it presents, is that it has no mechanism for how it works. For example, evolutionary theory has such mechanisms as genetic drift and natural selection. ID has never had a mechanism until now. Dr. Kelly Hollowell has recieved an e-mail university professor who wishes to remain anonymous that describes the fundamental mechanism behind intelligent design. The fundamental mechanism is amazing,

For example, the changes from one life form to another may require only slight alterations and/or additions to the overall structure of the DNA molecule. These small structural changes would not occur by mutation as the theory of evolution suggests, but rather by EMF causing and creating ever-increasing complex relationships between the nucleotides along the DNA strand. The combined effects of these small structural changes to the DNA molecule would be sufficient to create progressively complex physical life. This explains how a human has only double the number of genes as a fruit fly. The amount of DNA didn’t need to proportionately increase with human complexity; rather complexity of the relationships among existing nucleotides needed to increase.

Yes, it is that simple. EMF is the driver of evolution. Of course, in following Dr. Hollowell’s link we find a bit more on how this mechanism works,

Now we can begin to understand the ‘mechanism’ behind the final stages of increasing material complexity as God transforms simple biological life forms into all the more complex plants and animals we see in the world today. Beginning with the first simple forms of biological life which God had already created He now only has to send messages by Light from the non-physical (spiritual) existence to the physical world commanding that His Will be carried out and that all the necessary more complex forms of plant and animal life must come to be. These changes from one stage to another, from the simple to the more complex, require only slight alterations in the overall structure of the DNA molecule. These small structural changes in the DNA molecule are determined by information transmitted by photons (Light energy) to the atomic structures making up the DNA molecule, instructing them to move into slightly different arrangements in one or more small areas of the long and complex structure of the overall DNA molecule. The combined effect of these small structural changes to the DNA molecule are sufficient to bring about any desired changes in the next progressively complex physical form to be expressed (all of the various plants and animals) which are required by God to facilitate the continued unfolding of the physical creation according to His Plan.

Now, if I read this right what it is saying is that God sits in his spiritual abode and using a flashlight sends out signals of light that contain information on when a cat is to change into a dog, and a giraffe into a goat.

Via Panda’s Thumb.

Well it is nice to know that my home state isn’t filled only with complete dunces. The Gull Lake school board voted unanimously not to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design (ID) in the public schools (link). Also, the book Of Pandas and People can no longer be used in the classroom either. This is good news for the 7th graders at the Gull Lake schools.

Ed Brayton’s points are totally correct.

Specifically, I quoted Bruce Gordon’s statement that ID had been “prematurely drawn into discussions of public science education where it has no business making an appearance without broad recognition from the scientific community that it is making a worthwhile contribution to our understanding of the natural world.”

Absolutely right. ID has produced nothing in the way of a testable hypothesis let alone actually constructing experiments, gathering data, or anything else that is normally associated with science. To date, ID has been little more than an amalgam of arguments that claim evolution can’t be right, or the only process at work. The implication is that if evolutionary theory is somehow wrong, ID is correct by default.

So a set back for the proponents of ID and a victory for sound science education.

Remember how we’ve been told how going out in the sun is going to be the end of our healthy, skin-cancer free, life? And that we should always wear sunscreen!!!

Well, it seems those that were advocating that idea may have been a bit, uh, premature. Or, to state it a little more forcefully, that suggestion, if followed to the letter, may have actually been increasing the overall cancer rate.

Insufficient exposure to ultraviolet radiation may be an important risk factor for cancer in western Europe and North America, according to the author of a new study that directly contradicts official advice about sunlight.

The research, published this week in the journal Cancer (2002;94:1867-75), examined cancer mortality in the United States. Deaths from a range of cancers of the reproductive and digestive systems were approximately twice as high in New England as in the south west, despite a diet that varies little between regions

Sunlight prevents cancer, study says

It seems that 4+ articles have come out very recently that all point to this juicy little tid-bit of information. The authors and I don’t advocate going out and frying yourself, but some sun exposure without sunscreen isn’t a bad thing. In fact, it is probably a good thing.

Go see what Pat Hayes at Red State Rabble dug up:

A group of 14-year-old hackers – each sporting numerous tattoos and body piercings – at a Red State Rabble safe house extracted this document from a secret online archive at the Discovery Institute’s “Evolution News and Views” blog.

A flow-chart to beat all flow-charts.

by Aubrey Noelle Stimola

Here are the responses at ACSH

Talk about it here on our board

Government conspiracies and industry cover-ups make gripping plots for books and movies, never mind arresting media headlines. That may be what motivated journalist David Kirby to write Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic: A Medical Controversy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005). Undoubtedly, the story will sell many copies. I heard there is even a movie deal in the works. But I fear it will cause parents to balk at vaccinating their children against a host of preventable diseases for fear of autism.

Indeed, the rise in diagnoses of autism spectrum disorders – the causes of which are not known – is striking and worthy of investigation, with some incidence estimates at one in 166 children. However, the large majority of reputable scientists and physicians agree that available data do not support a causal relationship between the ethylmercury-based vaccine preservative thimerosal and neurodevelopmental disorder. As a result, Kirby’s Brockovich-esque page-turner, featuring a group of parents of autistic children as David and big pharma/big government bureaucrats as Goliath, must be taken for what it is, a story of parental love and determination – and not for what it isn’t, an instructional and unbiased medical text.

Early suspicions of a link between vaccines and autism were based on observations that symptoms of autism generally manifest around the age at which children receive many routine vaccinations. The 80s saw a failed attempt to link autism with the diphtheria-pertussis vaccine. In 1998, a study published in The Lancet, which was later renounced and retracted, hypothesized that autism was brought on by an atypical response to the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine. Now there are stirrings of a scare blaming aluminum.

Meanwhile, motivated by a study about similarities between symptoms of autism and symptoms of mercury poisoning, a group of distraught parents began investigating thimerosal. Used since the 1930s, when safety studies were not required for new pharmaceutical products, thimerosal never underwent the current rigorous drug approval process and was essentially grandfathered into use. Anxiety understandably worsened in
1999 when the Academy of Pediatrics suddenly recommended that thimerosal be phased out of pediatric vaccines. This move was based on the realization that changes to the pediatric immunization schedule had caused children to receive bolus doses of ethylmercury in excess of the established safety doses for its more toxic cousin, methylmercury. Thus, the battlefield was set.

Evidence chronicles the journey of the parents who began the crusade to prove a causal relationship between thimerosal and autism. On their quest they encounter countless beasts and obstacles, all of which serve to heighten their suspicion of conspiracy: unfazed pediatricians, deaf politicians, defensive drug makers, even a rider added surreptitiously
to the Homeland Security Bill that would provide indemnity to pharmaceutical companies and the FDA against vaccine-related suits. In light of those factors alone, who wouldn’t worry there was something to hide?

But despite the unsavory, self-protective actions of the above parties, at the end of the day, the best scientist will only rely on objective, hard, and replicable scientific data, which Kirby, as a journalist, simply does not. Alas, though even the most heartless readers might find themselves hoping these families will find unequivocal proof that
thimerosal caused the current “autism epidemic,” even Kirby himself admits that there is at best evidence of harm, and that ultimately, temporal correlation does not equal causation.

In my effort to confirm the consensus arrived at by most reputable members of the medical community, that thimerosal does not cause autism, I have attempted to analyze whatever currently available, objective, and scientifically-sound studies I can get my hands on. In April, in an attempt to keep up-to-date on the current research, I attended a Vanderbilt University event, “Living with Autism: Rates, Causes and Treatment.” The position held by each and every one of the prestigious presenters – all renowned in the fields of genetics, epidemiology, pediatrics, toxicology, neuroscience, psychology, cognitive development, or statistics – was the same: there is no proof that thimerosal, or even mercury in general, plays a causal role in autism’s development.

I was not surprised, as readers of Kirby’s book might be, that little time was spent at the conference examining the vaccines/autism link, other than one lecture on the lack of evidence to support it. Additionally, ten parents of autistic children from around the country attended the four-day seminar, nine of whom gave short shrift to the thimerosal theory, merely using it as an example of a distraction from finding real treatments and interventions. (Even activists who remain convinced of thimerosal’s culpability should be pleased to know thimerosal was removed from all pediatric vaccines in 2001, with the exception of some influenza vaccines; the last lots of thimerosal-containing vaccines should have expired by 2003.)

While Kirby’s page-turner reads like a Clancy novel, conjuring fear that something is rotten in Denmark – particularly within the insensitive medical and federal establishments encountered by the parents Kirby describes – readers should be reminded that Evidence is not a medical text or a resource for scientific information about autism. Unfortunately, it may be construed as such by desperate parents, the population most vulnerable to buying into conspiracy theories and media hype.

Regrettably, a book written instead on the data presented at Vanderbilt by CDC pediatrician and epidemiologist Marshalyn Yeargin-Allsopp (whose study of autism prevalence trends indicates that the “epidemic” may be attributable to better and broader diagnostic criteria) would probably sit on bookstore shelves gathering dust. As we all know, cries of “the sky is falling!” turn far more heads than “all’s well!”

Like many others, I almost find myself wishing that thimerosal was to blame, providing us with a clear-cut perpetrator to hold accountable and forever banish. As yet, there is no such culprit we can point to, but there has been progress, more of which will be made as attention shifts from thimerosal to other avenues of inquiry. For example, a recent UCLA study indicated that a region of DNA on chromosome 17 may be involved in autism. Interestingly, the gene mostly affects boys, which may help explain autism’s low incidence in girls.

Generally speaking, most experts agree that autism is likely due to numerous and complex genetic factors, many of which may be acted upon by environmental influences. Perhaps it will even be determined one day that some of these genetic factors predispose some autistics to particular sensitivities, maybe even to heavy metals, casein, gluten,
loud noises, bright lights, infectious diseases, or any of the countless other environmental influence that have been associated with autism. And perhaps awareness of these sensitivities, all of which should be researched, will be the basis for the alleviation of symptoms. But the fact will remain that these factors are not causative in and of themselves.

Those who have fought against the demonizing of thimerosal have to put up with absurd accusations of being industry shills. In actuality, many of those who are fighting against the fear – some of them parents of autistic children themselves – strive to make clear the value of vaccinations. Ironically, while the incidence of vaccine-preventable illness goes down, as a direct result of the vaccination program, so too does faith that vaccines are necessary. Suddenly, they are accused of doing more harm than good. But one need only look at the increases in pertussis cases in the U.S. and the spread of polio in Africa to realize that we need vaccines still. False and misleading attribution of harm, regardless of intent, only impairs our ability to improve public health. This must be kept in mind as Evidence is read.

Aubrey Noelle Stimola is Assistant Director of Public Health at the American Council on Science and Health. Her letter in the New York Times about Kirby’s book appeared on May 15, 2005.

Talk about it here

Wow, this site is simply amazing. A site dedicated to ferreting out the signs of design in scientific journal articles and newspapers everywhere. For example, here is a fun entry right at the top.

The Metasequoia genus has been effectively unchanged for 100 million years. And this tree is not alone in this regard, as there are many creatures that have exhibited stasis over a long period of time.

For some reason this implies design. I don’t know why? Maybe it implies a superlative design hence the tree is so old and hasn’t died out…I guess. I love it when the Creationists trot out this argument. As far as I know there is nothing that says an organism has to evolve (i.e. one species giving rise to another). In fact, I’d say many life forms have not evolved (most are now extinct–e.g. Tyrannosaurus rex).

This one is also fun in that is suggests a complete lack of understanding of the notion of complexity in Intelligent Design. Mr. Miller appears to think that the word complex in any article is important in that it suggests design. The problem is that complexity in ID is fairly well defined. For example, Dembski’s definition of complexity amounts basically to having a really low probability of random assembly (of course random assembly is rather meaningless in evolutionary theory, but hey it isn’t like these guys really care to be accurate). Behe’s version of complex is only meaningful in the sense of irreducible complexity. That is, Behe isn’t looking at any and all complex structures, but those that are only irreducibly complex. Thus, the fact that something is complex does not indicate design (neither does irreducible complexity, but hey lets not be too harsh). The other highlighted parts refer to the optimality of the biological system. Now, it is often said that evolution is not about optimality. I suppose Mr. Miller might be seeing biological systems that are optimal as indicating design. After all, designers often care about optimality right? But we don’t have to get optimality strictly via design. For example, the maximum of a six sided die is six. I can roll it and randomly achieve the maximum. If for some reason 6 is the best outcome then rolling the die and getting a 6 is an optimal outcome. Was this outcome directed? No. In other words, optimal outcomes can occur via chance.

I find it rather fascinating how a person has to look so hard to justify their religious views of the world. That the fingerprints of God must be so readily apparent in the natural world. This seems to contradict the notion of faith.

Science magazine has long been descending into the depths of political hackdom. That the descent is complete is shown in this exchange of correspondence by Benny Peiser regarding his attempt to replicate the bogus “research” by Oreskes regarding the “consensus” in global climate change.

There is room for argument about the merits of the global warming hypothesis. Which makes it all the more telling that the science establishment fears nothing more than the reasoned debate that is itself science. They’ve forfeited all deference with this behavior.

Hattip to John at Climate Audit.

The other day I wrote a post at Outside the Beltway about the latest gimmick from the Creationists. The gimmick are ten questions that students can “challenge” their biology teachers on in regards to evolution. Overall the questions are the standard mish-mash of Creationist tripe that has been recycled for decades. The first is the conflation of abiogenesis with evolution. As seen here, this is a favorite Creationist tactic.

This [my claim that abiogenesis is seperate from the Theory of Evolution] is the old definition switch Evolutionists are so fond of. If you point out the flaws in astronomical measuring techniques, they claim that has nothing to do with Evolution, then turn right around and use those same flawed techniques as an argument for Evolution.

What? What the heck does astronomical measuring techniques have to do with abiogenesis? Abiogenesis is related to evolution as the Big Bang is related to various theories in physics. Still, if we learned that the Big Bang were false or that it was actually God does that mean the speed of light is now 15 MPH or that the sun really does revolve around the earth? I don’t think so. The Theory of Evolution is a theory about how the diversity of life came about. As such the Theory of Evolution accepts as given that life is present. Now abiogenesis is part of biology and if true is related to the Theory of Evolution in that it provides an explanation for what the Theory of Evolution takes as a given. Still if the current theories/hypotheses of abiogenesis turn out to be false it does little to nothing to the Theory of Evolution.

This next part is priceless.

Berkley’s Museum of Paleontology (A hornets nest of Christian Fundamentalism if there ever was one, right) explains the Cambrian Explosion this way:

This event is sometimes called the “Cambrian Explosion”, because of the relatively short time over which this diversity of forms appears.

The International Subcommission on Cambrian Stratigraphy in Würzburg, Germany says this:

So because some call it the Cambrian Explosion and there is a relatively short time (hint: a relatively short time in geological terms is millions of years) it must be true that the Cambrian Explosion violates the evolutionary model. Of course, what this also entails is a bunch of people being completely deluded. It sure would be nice if Mr. Lewis could provide a clear and concise explanation as to exactly how this refutes the evolutionary model. After all, the biologists haven’t done it, so he should be able to since it is all so obvious.

And to cap of the hillarity, there is this,

The archaeopteryx is placed in the Tithonian Age, which is the first Age of the Malm Epoch, which is the first epoch of the Jurassic period. But the dinosaurs it is supposed to have descended from are said to be of the Ladinian Age, which is the first age of the Middle Triassic Epoch. While possessing all of the traits of a modern bird, it is dated millions of years BEFORE the dinosaurs it is supposed to have descended from. Perhaps in addition to flight it had developed the ability to time-travel.–link

Okay, lets go over this.

1. Archaeopteryx shows up in the Tithonian Age of the Jurassic Period.
2. Dinosaurs show up in the Ladinian Age of the Middle Triassic Epoch.
3. The Triassic precedes the the Jurassic.
4. But some how Archaeopteryx precedes the dinosaurs.

I tell ya…you just can’t make stuff like this up. I don’t know what we call this other than a complete misunderstanding of geological time periods. As for the ancesters of Archaeopteryx, most of the theorized ancestors such as the Ornithopoda are no longer considered ancestors of Archaeopteryx. Might there be textbooks suggesting a link? Yeah, probably, but my guess is that these would be older books. The best way to characterize Archaeopteryx is as follows,

Archaeopteryx is a bird because it had feathers. However, it retained many dinosaurian characters which are not found in modern birds, whilst having certain characters found in birds but not in dinosaurs. By virtue of this fact Archaeopteryx represents an example of a group in transition - a representative which, although on the sidelines in the dinosaur to bird transition, an echo of the actual event, still allows a brief glimpse into the possible mechanism which brought about the evolution of the birds and by its very existence shows that such a transition is possible.

If a textbook does not do this, then it is either an early textbook and the mistake is honest, or it is a badly written textbook and should not be used. Still the fact that a textbook might be badly written does not in anyway present a challenge to the evidence supporting evolution. It is delusional to think otherwise.

Again, I have nothing to add:

This post by Steve, over at Deinonychus antirrhopus, just posted a link to some drivel from from our dear friend, William Dembski.

I’m very proud of myself, too. I removed most of the snark.

Neo-Creationist William Dembski seems to have sunk to a new low. After being taken to task for quoting Peter Ward out of context Dembski puts the blame for his intellectual dishonesty on…Peter Ward.

An article in the Washington Post describes Salma Hayek and Jake Gyllenhaal’s trip to Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut (Baffin Island, Canada) to champion the evils of western civilization.

The 38-year-old Hayek is neither a scientist nor a global warming expert, she’s the first to admit. She’s a native of Coatzacoalcos, Mexico, where “a lot of Santa Clauses would pass out in their suits,” the star of “Frida” told Iqaluit residents. “I came here to learn from the ice and the Inuit people, more than to come to preach.”

Well, maybe a little preaching.

At a news conference before heading for the ice, the Oscar nominee delivered a scathing critique of how the Western world’s addiction to burning fossil fuels – which release heat-trapping greenhouse gases linked to climate change – endangers human survival. A recent four-year study by an international coalition encompassing the United States as well as Russia, Iceland and several other countries concluded the Arctic is heating up two to three times faster than the rest of the globe, a harbinger of things to come farther south.

“We are committing, in our civilization, suicide,” Hayek announced. “All we have to do is listen to the land, which is sending us messages on how to survive and how to self-destruct. . . . We are going to have to deal with the consequences of our lifestyle. Go talk to the ice, go talk to the wind, go talk to the ocean. There’s no negotiation here.”

In my previous post, I said I didn’t have much to add. Nor do I here.

There is just so much wrong with this charade that I don’t know where to start.

Comment in this thread in Global Warming

Driving the EviroWhackos™ Nuts. Ok, so that may be impossible since that’s where they started.

An excellent quote from a blog I just found. “It’s a gene, it’s not Soylent Green!”

An excerpt:

“It’s a gene, it’s not Soylent Green!”

That’s what my wife Gretchen had to say about this quote:

Environmentalists say that no one will want to eat the partially human-derived food because it will smack of cannibalism

The quote is from this bit of drivel from the Independent

Scientists have begun putting genes from human beings into food crops in a dramatic extension of genetic modification. The move, which is causing disgust and revulsion among critics, is bound to strengthen accusations that GM technology is creating “Frankenstein foods” and drive the controversy surrounding it to new heights.

Not much to add to Hawks’ wifes comment. Well said.

The sooner people start realizing that a gene product is just a gene product, and not some sacred thing that is somehow associated with its origin, the faster they will lower my blood pressure.

We don’t get a huge amount of traffic here. I like to think it’s quality over quantity. Heh.

But we did finally get our 20 thousandth hit.

The B board is a different matter. I don’t keep track there, but that’s where most of this site is happening.

With a birth date of 10 May, 2004, I’m thinking that’s slightly less than one year.

It is usually a good idea to read an article by Prof. Roy Spencer. This one is no exception.

The arrival of Earth Day each year provides teachers with the opportunity to help educate students about environmental issues. There is no question that the Earth’s inhabitants need to be good stewards of natural resources, and teaching our children about the environment is necessary part of their upbringing.

Unfortunately, too often the lesson stops short of equipping the student with the reasoning skills that will allow him or her to make informed decisions about environmental issues. “Pollution is bad, planting a tree is good” might seem like a reasonable theme, but unless we explore environmental issues more deeply, we will continue to produce environmentalists whose ideals are stopped cold when they bump up against economic and practical realities.

A perfect example, IMO, is the Kyoto Treaty. Even some of its supporter admit the treaty will do little to prevent global warming.¹ But at the same time many think the costs of Kyoto will be quite large. So should we spend say $100 billion on a waste of effort or direct that money at some other endeavor that will yield a far higher return?
_____
¹Thomas Wigley, “The Kyoto Protocol: CO2, CH4, and Climate Implications,” Geophysical Research Letter, Vol. 25, 1998, pp. 2285-88.

I find that this article is particularly bad.

A mercury-laced preservative once widely added to pediatric vaccines exposes infants’ brains to twice the neurotoxin previously suspected, offering evidence that health guidelines may underestimate the risk newborns face, researchers say in a report being published today.

What is the problem? The problem is that while it is well known that exposure to methyl mercury can lead to very serious problems with infants, less is known about ethyl mercury. It is the latter substance that is found in thimerosal. The article in no way makes a distinction between the two compounds.

“We’re talking about a low-level delivery of a toxin given to a baby on the first day of its life,” said mercury expert Boyd Haley, chairman of the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky, who was not involved in the study.

“What’s needed is a total study of the sensibility of the vaccine program. Why would you want to vaccinate a baby on the first day of its life?”

Is this guy joking? Well let me hazard a guess here: to prevent disease. That covers the why for vaccinations. As to the first few days, how about because that is when infants are likely to be in the hospital? Ya’ think? After all, if we wait for a couple of months what would that do to the vaccination rate? My guess is it would only lower it. It sure as heck wouldn’t improve it.

This is largely a past concern for the United States, given the predominance today of thimerosal-free vaccines.

Regarding the autism link, which is pretty much the only reason why thimerosal is a news topic, this suggests a natural experiment. Prior to 2001, thimerosal was used quite a bit. Now it has been phased out. Consequently we’d expect to see some sort of effect in the number of children with autism if there is a thimerosal-autism link.

Which is better a carbon trading scheme where there are a limited number of permits for emitting a set amount of carbon or a tax on carbon emissions themselves? This was my initial thought when reading about the comments by the CEO of Duke Energy (via GreenWatch),

“Duke CEO Paul Anderson has finally shown the true colors of the energy rationing advocates,” said Competitive Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Marlo Lewis. “Rather than trying to hide the costs of carbon suppression behind an allegedly market-based trading mechanism, he’s come out with the more candid option – a massive increase in the tax burden on American consumers.”

The answer is not immediately obvious to me, although I lean towards the trading scheme. Under the tax on carbon emissions there would be an inefficiency due to the deadweight loss associated with taxes.

Of course, a trading scheme would also likely need a bureaucracy to administer it which would likely require a tax as well. Still, despite this, I would prefer the trading scheme as the funding for the bureaucracy that administers the emissions trading scheme could be paid for with general funds vs. a special and specific tax on carbon emissions.

Of course, the position by Paul Anderson might also be a nice example of rent seeking behavior.

Advocates of suppressing carbon dioxide emissions in the name of combating global warming have long argued that their goals could be accomplished cheaply and easily by industry, without imposing significantly higher costs on American consumers. Duke Energy has now admitted that the costs will be significant. However, Duke Energy itself plans to avoid these costs by moving rapidly to nuclear energy.–emphasis added

With a carbon tax, this would make the price of energy that is generated in carbon emitting processes more expensive thus makeing nuclear generated energy relatively more competitive in price.

As for the position of CEI that a cap-and-trade scheme hides the costs of carbon emissions I disagree. It is not uncommon for advocates of a (free) market to point out that the price contains all the information about the costs of the good. If carbon emissions impose an external cost (or benefit) then the price does not contain all the relevant cost information. Hence a cap-and-trade scheme would result in making the costs explicit. Kind of a strange position to take for an organization calling itself the Competitive Enterprise Insititute. Maybe they need refresher course on competitive markets.

Well, looks like it. Steve McIntyre used some tech stocks, used Mann, Bradely and Hughes 1998’s (MBH98) method on the data and got some hockey sticks. Which supports McIntyre and McKitrick’s claim that the MBH98 methodology finds hockey sticks even when there is little likelihood that there is a hockey stick present in the data.

Clearly McIntyre isn’t trying to make the case that higher tech stock prices are causing global warming, but that there are problems with the methodology in MBH98. Further, that while the possibility that the “Hockey stick” (that so many of the global warming claims hang on) may unfounded, it does not “disprove” the global warming hypothesis.

One of the big talking points the IDists are currently using is a well crafted lie about teaching the controversies that are present in current evolutionary theory. The problem with this view is that the controversy that the IDists see are not really controversies in evolutionary theory.

For example, the claim that the blood clotting cascade is irreducibly complex has been shown to be false.

KM:
So it’s not irreducibly complex?

MB:
In the same sense that a rattrap is not, that’s correct.

KM refers to Kenneth Miller and the “it” he is talking about is the blood clotting cascade. MB refers to Michael Behe, the originator of the notion of irreducible complexity. Here we see none other than Michael Behe admitting that was once initially thought to be an irreducibly complex biological system is not irreducibly complex.

The actual controversies in evolutionary biology are about things like sympatric vs. allopatric speciation. I doubt many people know what that is. Teaching something like this in a high school biology course which will touch briefly on evolutionary theory is completely inappropriate. So what the IDists really mean is their version of psuedo science and superstition. The teach the controversies line is pure bunkum. It is a lie to hide the true agenda of the ID movement which is to replace scientific naturalism with religion approved science.

Well a few Michiganders at least. The short version of the story is that a school district in Michigan was caught teaching not only Intelligent Design (ID), but also Young Earth Creationism (YEC). I am always amazed at the YECers. Here are a bunch of people who come up with some of the most amazing and convoluted reasons for disbelieving the Earth is billions of years old.

William Dembski points out, indavertantly, why intelligent design (ID) is bad.

I’m predicting that Bush and Benedict XVI will play much the same role in the distintegration of evolution (i.e., the ateleological materialistic form of it that currently dominates the West) as Reagan and John Paul II did in the disintegration of communism.

This raises two points to me.

1. Do we really want religions and politics determining sound science? I should hope the answer is no. The first group is by definition dogmatic in many of their views. The second group is comprised of opportunistic individuals who’ll use either side of an issue that is most advantageous.

2. Do we really want to destroy scientific materialism? One thing the IDists refuse to do is discuss what scientific materialism would be replaced by? As this Panda’s Thumb post demonstrated intelligent design can even be linked to astrology. Do we really want to replace neo-Darwinism with the belief that people are the way they are because of the position of the planets?

The intelligent design movement is actually anti-science and is actually a movement to enshrine superstition and dogmatism as science.

This is all Steve’s fault. We must be failing somehow.

Update – Hmm, seems adding an evilness link ups our evilness quotient:

If I keep doing this will we get to 100%? So if you click on the link, it may have changed again.

From Gladimir at Vagabondia

Posted with permission: I’m cranky, it’s tax day, the formatting was a PITA.

A recent press release by United Nations rapporteur Jean Ziegler reveals an alarming increase in malnutrition rates among children in Iraq since the invasion. The report claims the number climbed from a 4% acute malnutrition rate just before the U.S. led invasion to a 7.7% acute malnutrition rate after the invasion. Let’s be brutally honest here. That is an appalling rate similar to that of nations like Haiti and Pakistan. However, even more disturbing is the proclivity of many in the blogosphere and the corporate media to attribute this increase to the U.S. military. Jean Ziegler, a Swiss professor of sociology and member of the executive committee of Socialist International, certainly makes it clear that is exactly the reason for the plight of these children. Some othes, like Terry Jones in his article Let Them Eat Bombs, even go so far as to claim Iraqi children were better off under Saddam Hussein.

A report to the UN human rights commission in Geneva has concluded that Iraqi children were actually better off under Saddam Hussein than they are now.

Of course, that is absolutely true if, like Terry Jones and the Guardian UK, you agree those malnourished children would be better off dead! UNICEF’s Iraq Child and Maternal Mortality Surveys of 1999 became a mourning cloth for many opposed to the sanctions against Iraq. The survey reveals that U.N. Oil-For-Food funds provided to Saddam Hussein did nothing to abate the sky-rocketing infant and child mortality rates in Iraq.

Is it possible that the funds made available from the Oil-For-Food program simply were not enough to reverse this humanitarian disaster? There does exist convincing evidence to the contrary. When Oil-For-Food funds were made available to the Kurdistan Regional Government, operating under the protection of U.S. and British warplanes, child and infant mortality rates decreased to levels below that of Saddam Hussein’s utopian Iraq of 1989.

I have a feeling those northern Kurds don’t share Terry Jones’ wistful reminiscing of the good old days under Saddam Hussein. In fact, considering that UNICEF At-A-Glance statistics show improved child and infant mortality rates of 125 and 102, respectively, in 2003, and the United Nations Statistics Division reports further improvement, listing Iraq with an Infant Mortality rate of 83 through January 2005; I would surmise that most Iraqis aren’t pining for the gentle ministrations of the Butcher of Baghdad.

Of course, all of these mortality figures do nothing to refute the 7.7% acute malnutrition rate cited by Jean Ziegler, and I don’t pretend to have the analytical skills to do so even if that were my intention. However, Ziegler’s remarks have not gone undisputed.

The UK’s Department for International Development says the Unicef and Iraqi statistics suggests a decline in child malnutrition from 17.3% in 2000 to 11.7% in 2004. - BBC

The problem here is that Ziegler has singled out acute malnutrition (low weight for height or wasting) from the other measures of malnutrition, which are underweight (low weight for age) and chronic malnutrition (low height for age or stunting). So, I decided to hunt down that report to figure out what happened to those other numbers. The source of that 7.7% number is reported to be a survey performed by Norway’s Institute for Applied International Studies, but I was unable to find the actual report with all the malnutrition data. Again, I can’t overstate the travesty of that malnutrition rate and want to re-emphasize that an average acute malnutrition rate of 7.7% means that some areas must have rates much, much higher.

One of the problems with these numbers from Saddam Hussein’s paradise is that he had huge portions of the population segregated into sprawling slums containing millions of people, such as Sadr City, without access to food, healthcare, or even electricity. These days the people living in these slums are benefitting from a more democratic distribution to all these services, though certainly far from adequate. Contrast that to the treatment these slum-dwellers received under Terry Jones’ bygone days of Saddam Hussein reported in the BBC:

Another mass grave has been discovered in Iraq at Salman Pak, just south of Baghdad, in the grounds of what used to be a sprawling military complex. Most Iraqis at the site are from Baghdad’s Sadr City, a Shia slum formerly known as Saddam City. - BBC

I can’t say whether the more than two million inhabitants of this slum alone were ever included in the U.N. surveys performed under Saddam Hussein’s rule. I have found what appears to be a very comprehensive survey of 28,500 households performed by the World Food Program in the latter half of 2003.

Before the war started in March 2003, aid agencies were saying that 60 percent of the population was dependent on food aid. However, there was no real way of making an accurate assessment during Saddam Hussein’s rule.

“This is the first comprehensive study of its kind in Iraq as the political environment before the war made it impossible to analyse the level of poverty and hunger in the country,” Torben Due, Country Director for WFP’s operations in Iraq, told IRIN. “For the first time, we are getting an accurate picture of people’s access to food. As a result, we are much better able to plan assistance,” he added.

“This survey is unique and one like this has not been done on this level in Iraq before. It provides a foundation for other surveys,” Turner pointed out.
- IRIN

First Post-Saddam Survey

This study seems to refute the 7.7% rate of malnutrition with a 4.4% acute malnutrition (wasting) rate. However, a measure of 27.6% suffering from stunting is a few points higher than the 22% reported in the U.N. At-A-Glance chart of data gathered between 1995 and 2003.

I think the conclusion that could be gathered from all of this is that Iraq still has many problems to sort out. However, to say that things were better under Saddam Hussein is incredibly cynical and incredibly self-serving. The Kurdistan Regional Government found out that Oil-For-Food funds, minus Saddam Hussein and his cronies at the United Nations, can improve the situation. It would not surprise me if people all over Iraq found that proper funding, minus Saddam Hussein and the Oil-For-Food middlemen, also results in improvements. I not only think that Iraq is better of without Saddam Hussein, but also that the world is better off without Saddam Hussein.

Heres’ the thread – talk about it

Another tidbit From JohnA in response to a RealClimate post entitled Water vapour: feedback or forcing?

Congratulations Gavin, on demonstrating the commonest failure of the beliefs of pro-global warmers on this weblog and elsewhere: that climate models and their program inputs are themselves scientific data and can prove or disprove anything at all. They are parameters for a computer program, not experimental data. They prove nothing at all.

The distinction, I know, is lost on you. But for the rest of us, the fact that you claim to simulate a climatic event in a simplistic model of a non-linear system like the Earth’s climate does not lead to the conclusion that the model simulates reality or has diagnostic value. For example we do not know the “publication bias” of exactly how many computer runs, twiddles, tweaks, “flux adjustments”, and other parameterizations were done before you got the “right” answer.

If you’d have actually referred to real experimental data, then I might have been impressed. More impressed if someone else could replicate your work. Really, really impressed if it could so much as predict the next El Nino.

You even start with a classic straw man argument: that “contrarians … will inevitably claim that water vapour is being unjustly neglected by ‘IPCC’ scientists”. If you’d care to actually read the IPCC TAR you’ll see that the IPCC does exactly that. On its listing of forcings and feedbacks it stacks up the tiny contributions of the other greenhouse gases into a scary mountain and does not even bother to quantify either the role of water vapor or any estimate of the uncertainties in those contributions. (see the IPCC SPM fig.3)

The IPCC also ignores in that diagram the greatest climate forcing of all: the variation of the solar flux because of intrinsic variation as well as changes in the orbital geometry of the solar system. The IPCC simply implies that the solar contribution (without a scintilla of scientific justification) is more than three times smaller than that from carbon dioxide alone even though such a parameterization is characterized to be on a “very low” level of scientific understanding. How the IPCC got to this conclusion when the clear imprint of solar variation on climate has been described by multiple teams over many years (dear me, and they were peer-reviewed and published in quality scientific journals as well), is simply beyond me. I think the IPCC should get out more from its deterministic, politicized ghetto and smell the scientific air.

I doubt very much you’ll allow this to be posted, since censorship of opposing views is what realclimate is famous for, but I’m an incorrigable optimist (or just a fool wasting his time).

And the response was:

Response: This kind of tiresome posting is exactly the kind of thing we try to avoid on this site. Mainly because it adds nothing but noise to the debate. However, as an exercise in reasoned discussion, I will take the time to point out the numerous problems with your point of view.
- I have not claimed to ‘prove’ anything. Given a system like the Earth’s climate, the best one can hope for is a reasonable match to observations. Radiation models (such as I used here) have matches to line-by-line observations good to about 10%. All I did was demonstrate in those models the importance of various terms. That the results are similar to those from a completely different model (RC78) written over 20 years ago should indicate that they are reasonably robust.
- Climate models cannot be “used to prove anything at all”. The proof of that is that no-one has ever made a model that cools when greenhouse gases increase.
- Given that you clearly don’t believe a word I say, I don’t know why I’ll bother to point this out, but no tweaks, adjustments, twiddles or other runs were done to get these results. None. Not one. The proof is that the source code for the model and the input data I used are all available on the GISS model website. Anyone is perfectly at liberty to demonstrate for themselves that the answers are what the model gives. Given your penchant for audits, I would have thought that you would have already started…
- A straw man eh? How about this particular gathering only a day after my article? (William Kininmonth paragraph 11). I would also point out that it is bad debating style to claim that an argument is a straw man, and then go ahead and use it.
- This may surprise you, but I have actually read the whole of IPCC WG1, not just the Summary for policy makers. More to the point I actually understand what is being shown in the figure you highlight. These are the estimated forcings on climate - things which change the radiative transfer through the atmosphere, and to which the climate responds. Water vapour, since it responds so fast (as illustrated above) acts as feedback and not a forcing, and so quite sensibly does not appear on the diagram of forcings. Why you think there are no error bars on the figure is a little more mysterious, since they are quite plain in my view. For the well-mixed GHGs the error is the total error for all the gases and it’s small because we actually know quite a lot about GHGs…
- Orbital forcing over the period 1850 to 2000 is neglected in the figure for the obvious reason that it is small, and in particularly in the global mean, very close to zero (and with very little uncertainty).
- Long term solar forcing estimates by contrast are indeed rather uncertain, and so your confidence that they must be must larger than accepted by IPCC is curious. Uncertainty works both ways remember. The numbers used by IPCC come from reasonable extrapolations of the measured values of solar irradiance during the satellite era - and there’s much more than a scintilla of scientific evidence there (Lean et al, 1995, Lean 2000, Foukal 2004 etc.). I have actually written a number of papers on the solar forcing of climate, and your claim that the observations imply a much larger recent solar forcing is simply not supported by evidence. Cooling during the Little Ice Age for instance is completely consistent with the ‘IPCC’ forcing (solar and volcanic), canonical climate sensitivity and the historical temperature data (within the uncertainties of each) (see here). If you have a direct line to someone who has demonstrated otherwise, let me know.
- I cannot comment on your optimism. But I have formed an opinion on your foolishness….
-gavin]

To which our inestimably valuabe KGB (his comments are in itlalics) responds:

Response: This kind of tiresome posting is exactly the kind of thing we try to avoid on this site. Mainly because it adds nothing but noise to the debate.

That tells me all I need to know, as a scholar and scientist, about the site.

no tweaks, adjustments, twiddles or other runs were done to get these results. None. Not one.

Frankly, knowing what I do about computational simulation in general and the uncertainties of climate modelling in particular (especially oceanic inputs and cloud modelling) I find this almost impossible to believe. If it’s true, then the match to data is almost certainly serendipitous.

You be the judge of who is correct: here’s the thread at our discussion board.

We are repeatedly told that the US is the one that isn’t serious about reducing Global Warming. And so I’m amused by this story about wind power in Britain.

The wind turbine near a prison will be turned off during certain periods of the day because the flickering shadows during certain sun alignments annoy the prisoners.

To think Britain once ruled an empire. Explain how to me again?

A contribution from John A. over at Climate Audit

The authors of realclimate.org do have something that’s robust: their
moderation policy. They feel free to make the most ridiculous replies
to comments, in the sure and certain knowledge that if someone calls
them on it, they can just delete the reply rather than publish and be
damned.

So it is with serial climate history denier, Bill Connelley. This was
in response to his posting on Moberg et al, (2005) a new
reconstruction of the last 1000 years of climate history, which
restored amongst other things, the Medieval Warm Period and the Little
Ice Age as global climatic events. In his comment on Moburg, Connelley
wrote:

These results are bound to stir up interest beyond the
scientific community, since the “hockey stick” shape of previous
reconstructions has become so totemic (although just about everyone
agrees that there is no need for this “totemising”.

I replied:

“Of course, the mere fact that the “totemizing” was propagated by the
IPCC, the environmental lobby and especially the authors of this blog
as “the scientific consensus” should cause disinterested viewers to
wonder as to who is trying to fool who.

Isn’t it interesting that now Mann, Connelley et al don’t produce the
“scientific consensus” and “peer-reviewed” rhetorical weaponry any
more? Could it be because those two phrases, which have been used to
bludgeon scientific debate into the ground, are now worthless after
M&M were published with full and open review in Geophysical Research
Letters?

Moburg et al 2005, on its own, does not prove anything definitive
about climate. It does however destroy the pretentions of some people,
not a million miles from this blog, that their previous work was
“robust, to moderately high levels of confidence” when it was clearly
nothing of the kind.”

Of course, having posted this, Connelley couldn’t resist a follow-up
reply to make more ridiculous statements. I replied to this piece by
piece, and being true to form, Connelley applied the robust censorship
of opposing views for which realclimate.org and its authors are justly
famous.

So here’s what you won’t read on realclimate:

William Connelley wrote:

in fact the totemising has mostly been done by the
skeptics.

Really? I didn’t think your memory was that poor, Bill. The claim that
1998 was the “warmest year of the millenium” came directly from MBH99
and repeated endlessly by the IPCC and its hangers-on (just try
googling that phrase). It certainly didn’t come from those skeptics.

They used to lead on the satellite temperature record,
until that started to show warming, and then different versions showed
even more warming.

Actually those skeptics still refer to the satellite record, which
shows a slight warming since 1979, and being the only truly global
measure of temperature and properly baselined by balloon measurments,
shows that the surface record is warming anomalously, probably because
of poor record keeping as well as the Urban Heat Island error.

M&M was reviewed by GRL, but certainly not “openly” -
journal review is not an open process.

You mean, because Dr Mann contacted the editor of Geophysical Research
letters to try to persuade him to not publish the McIntyre/McKitrick
paper, that means it wasn’t open? The MM05 paper was available in
pre-print on Ross McKitrick’s site and all the supporting
calculations, data and source code used availiable on climate2003.com

Journal review is not an open process, but McIntyre and McKitrick
openly showed all their working, so that anyone could see it, which is
why people on this website including Mann, could refer to it in their
sometimes intemperate and frequently misleading responses.

Which reminds me, when is Mann going to show all his calculations and
source code?

As the post explicitly pointed out, Moberg doesn’t
strongly affect the “consensus” - indeed everything written in
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=86 remains true with the Moberg
record.

Moburg does demolish the notion from MBH99 that the natural variation
of climate was minimal in the last 1000 years until suddenly disturbed
in the 19th Century by “greenhouse warming” - a key claim by Mann et
al. It also re-establishes that the Medieval Warm Period and the
Little Ice Age were truly global events, something that Mann et al
specifically claimed were “limited to the North Atlantic region”

The idea that this paper destroys previous work is wrong.
As the post says, there will be a (scientific) debate, and an idea of
what is correct will emerge

Only in your imagination, Bill. Meanwhile we play our game of “Spot the Hockey
Stick” and put the spotlight on the promoters of global warming
like you, Bill, on the British
Antarctic Survey website who use the Mann Hockey Stick as the
sole reconstruction of climatic change for the last
1000 years.

I’ve added Climate Audit to the links at sidebar. This is a must-see site for those interested in the work of McIntyre et al in showing the incredible bad science ( at best … ) that resulted in the infamous Mann “Hockey Stick” diagram that the IPCC used to claim that current warming was unprecedented.

The evolution sticker quandary rears is ugly head again.

Two weeks after a federal judge ordered Cobb County to remove evolution disclaimers from science books, a state lawmaker has introduced a bill requiring that only “scientific fact” to be taught in public schools. To Republican State Rep. Ben Bridges of Cleveland, that rules out the theory of evolution.

Link

This is giving me a headache. Really. But it’s cocktail time, so I’ll make it go away.

News flash: Gravity really caused by angels pushing stuff around.

Don’t look at me that way. It’s a perfectly legitimate hypothesis. If you think like these people do.

Update:
Ok, I skrewed that one up. Without the cocktail. (as the resident lush, I can say that) On my trip to fix my pre-dinner drink, I realized why Rep. Ben Bridges’ (of Cleveland, Republican) idea gave me such a headache.

“A theory can be wrong. If it’s wrong, or possibly could be wrong, don’t teach it. Teach it with facts. If you’ve got facts to back it up, that’s great,” Bridges told 11Alive News Reporter Jon Shirek.

Read those two paragraphs carefully. He has no clue what science is. You don’t teach “facts”, you teach what is observed and then how those observations can be collected to form a hypothesis. And then, as more info is found, you generate a theory to explain your hypothesis. Teaching “facts” is sorta “deifying” science, when science and scientific theory are constantly evolving (should I use the term ‘changing over time’) to incorporate new observations.

An example, Spontaneous generation was once a well known scientific “fact”

From the time of the ancient Romans, through the Middle Ages, and until the late nineteenth century, it was generally accepted that some life forms arose spontaneously from non-living matter. Such “spontaneous generation” appeared to occur primarily in decaying matter. For example, a seventeenth century recipe for the spontaneous production of mice required placing sweaty underwear and husks of wheat in an open-mouthed jar, then waiting for about 21 days, during which time it was alleged that the sweat from the underwear would penetrate the husks of wheat, changing them into mice. Although such a concept may seem laughable today, it is consistent with the other widely held cultural and religious beliefs of the time.

Until, over time, people started questioning it, and Louis Pasteur finally laid it to rest. (ok, that was a “Readers Digest” version, but you get the point)

Back to my angels-pushing-stuff posit. Can anyone actually ’splain the through space interactions that are inherent in gravitational or electromagnetic theory? Don’t bother wasting time looking. We observe it, we can predict it, we can use it, but we can’t ’splain how it happens with absolute solid “facts”.

Blink…
Blink…

So, this bill will basically (if taken at absolute face value) cripple the ability to teach anything meaningful. Science does not have all the “facts”, those of us who do it realize that it is an ongoing process. Politicians, who think that all the “facts” are in, are scary. (Do I actually need that dependent clause?)

And while evolutionary theory has, uh, evolved over time, ID/creationism is not science. The basic concept of change and adaptation over time has not been tossed. The mechanism gets continual refinement, as it should, but, it is an observable phenomenon and to attempt to throw your religious dogma at the scientific method in an attempt to “discredit”, or not teach, evolution, is not going to help the students of Cobb County. Or any place. Period.

Use this link (or this one at the top) to comment in our discussion board.

Ooooh, it’s so sparkly

More on the evolution sticker issue.

From Fanatical Apathy, and jumping on a blogosphere pig-pile

Is God a lobster? No, probably not. Hard to say, really. But in the new Darwin debate, He’s got pincers. One arm is the old standby you’ve heard of, The Bible. You know, the big book He wrote that tells about Charlton Heston growling at people and other stories. That book. But the other arm of the pincers is the new Science of “Intelligent Design.” The discipline lives up to its name - it’s intelligently designed. But because the scientific community tends to unfairly dismiss it as “pseudo-science” and “fraudulent” and “bullshit,” I thought I’d provide you all with a Q&A entitled The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Intelligent Design.”

By Aubrey Stimola

Originally posted at http://www.acsh.org/factsfears/newsID.482/news_detail.asp

Posted with permission

Sexual behavior has historically carried moral and ideological import, particularly when it comes to young people. But it also raises issues of health and safety. So deciding what kinds of information sexual education courses should include is a notoriously controversial task. One school of thought supports “comprehensive sexual education,” which promotes abstinence but also includes information about condoms and other forms of contraception in order to educate young people about how to protect themselves if they become sexually active. Others favor programs that emphasize abstaining but provide no information, other than failure rates, on other forms of contraception – based on the assumption that such details contradict and undermine the abstinence-only message and encourage sexual activity. Whichever school of thought one belongs to, there should be no controversy over the goal of adolescent sexual education programs should be: educating youth on how best to protect themselves against the known risks associated with sexual activity – such as unplanned pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) – if they choose to become sexually active. Alarmingly, the current federal approach fails to meet these ends.

Since the 1996 passage of the welfare reform act, the federal government has spent over $800 million on “abstinence-only” education, most of it under the Bush administration.⁽¹⁾ Millions of young Americans, ages nine to eighteen, have participated in these programs. However, according to a comprehensive congressional staff analysis ordered by Rep. Henry Waxman, eleven of the thirteen most widely used abstinence-only curricula funded by the federal abstinence initiative contain scientifically false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.⁽²⁾ We at ACSH have not reviewed the study that yielded the results reported by Waxman, but if the results are correct, they are cause for concern.

The report points out that abstinence-only programs have not been proven to reduce sexual activity, pregnancy, or STDs (whereas comprehensive programs have), nor have abstinence-only programs been reviewed for accuracy by the federal government. These revelations lend weight to the speculation that these programs are motivated less by a desire to provide adolescents with scientifically accurate tools to make informed decisions about their sexual activity, and more by beliefs about the appropriateness of such activity in young adults. Manipulation of and withholding of facts to support an ideological message have no place in discussions of health risks and disease prevention, and are irresponsible, if not Orwellian, given the potential consequences.

The Waxman report found that many youths participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught false and outdated information about abortion risks. For example, one curriculum includes such claims as:⁽³⁾

–studies show that 5-10% of women will never again be pregnant after having a legal abortion;

–premature birth, a major cause of mental retardation, is increased following abortion of a first pregnancy;

–following abortion, women have a higher risk of tubal and cervical pregnancies;

–following abortion, women are more prone to suicide.

Modern obstetrics texts, however, indicate that abortion does not affect fertility and that common abortion methods have no affect on preterm delivery incidence or premature birth-weight, nor do they heighten the chances of ectopic pregnancies.⁽⁴⁾ Regarding increased suicide risks, an expert panel of the American Psychiatric Association does not support these findings, nor does a longitudinal study of women ages fourteen to twenty-one.⁽⁵⁾