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~Open Thread: Friday Afternoon Edition~

Friday, October 16th, 2009

Thank G-d: once again it is Friday, and accordingly for Jews this means the beginning of the Holy Shabbat. Every week, Jews read a portion of the Torah and study it.  Highly pertinent to many on this blog, this week we are reading a highly contentious portion around some parts called Bereishit (”In the beginning”) (Genesis 1:1-6:8).

The Creation of the World, and Adventures of the First Humans

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/134/407666284_e8c271c468.jpg

Dateline: December 1968

From his window he could watch the blue orb of planet earth getting smaller and smaller. Looming in front of him in all its detail was a giant moon.  Astronaut Frank Borman of Apollo 8 was filled with emotion, as he drew closer and closer to the fulfillment of one of man’s greatest dreams of landing on the moon. As the lunar module orbited, the crew could perceive the moon in its pristine state, untouched by human hands, exactly as it left the hands of its Creator. (One could imagine Adam opening his eyes for the first time and viewing a pristine Earth with the same awe.)

Borman wanted to convey this feeling to everyone glued to their TVs and radios, just so they could in some sense share the experience of this milestone in history. What text could express this feeling? What human poet or author could capture in words that awesome feeling of the smallness of man and the vastness of the universe?

To the ears of billions of earthlings, Borman declared, “In the beginning God created the Heaven and the Earth!” The first chapter of Genesis was read on that historical day to all mankind. (In contrast to the Cosmonauts who orbited the Earth in Sputnik and proclaimed, “We went to Heaven and didn’t find God!”) This is the beginning of the story of man and his world.

{The Rest of The Article}

Despite false claims to the contrary, Creation is deeply rooted in Torah.   The following are a few exceptionally general, and basic statements of Jews regarding Creation.

“IN THE BEGINNING” – INTRODUCTION TO THE TORAH

Judaism believes that the Bible is a Divine book. Just as a human author generally writes about topics that interest him, we can similarly assume that the Divine Author of the Torah writes about things that interest Him. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the opening chapters of the Torah:

(1) “In the beginning God created Heaven and Earth” (Genesis 1:1). What a contrast between the vast endless heaven containing countless stars, and one tiny speck in the universe called Planet Earth! Yet the following verse begins, “And the Earth was…” and the rest of the book focuses on Earth. Conclusion: God is interested in Earth!

(2) The six days of creation are described in detail. The trees and grass, the animals, fish, birds, and insects. Then was created one human. What a contrast between the vast expanse of planet Earth, and one individual person! Yet from this point on, the Torah focuses exclusively on humans (and NOT on the trees or insects). Conclusion: God is interested in humanity!

(3) After expounding upon the first human, the Torah lists 10 generations with no events recorded. These generations evidently did not interest the author and are only included for the purpose of chronology. Finally we find the passage, “and Noah was a righteous man” (Genesis 6:9), followed by an entire section concerning Noah. Conclusion: God is interested in “righteous people”!

(4) This is followed again by a list of names for chronological purposes. Another 10 generations go by, until we come to Abraham our Father. Abraham is 75 years old at the time the Torah speaks of him (more details of his youth are found in the oral tradition). From this point on, the Torah records exclusively the story of Abraham’s life and then that of his descendents – right up until the emergence of the Jewish people. The rest of the Torah recounts God’s relationship with the Jewish people. Conclusion: God is interested in the Jewish people who undertake a unique mission, to be a “light unto the nations,” to teach the world about spirituality and our Creator. (Rabbi Avigdor Miller)

There is a lot covered in the above article (many debated issues) so, if interested, I highly recommend the above link.

An antidote on the subject of Creation from a Jewish source.

“A disbeliever once asked Rabbi Akiva, ‘Who created the world?’ ‘The Almighty,’ replied Rabbi Akiva. ‘Prove it,’ demanded the disbeliever. Rabbi Akiva replied, ‘Come back tomorrow.’

“When the man returned on the following day, Rabbi Akiva asked him, ‘What are you wearing?’ ‘A robe,’ replied the man. ‘Who made it?’ asked Rabbi Akiva. ‘The weaver,’ said the man. ‘I don’t believe you! Prove it,’ demanded Rabbi Akiva.

” ‘That is ridiculous. Can’t you tell from the fabric and design that a weaver made this garment?’ answered the man. Rabbi Akiva then responded, ‘And you – can you not clearly tell that God made the world?’

“After the disbeliever left, Rabbi Akiva explained to his students, ‘Just as a house was obviously built by a builder and a garment obviously sewn by a tailor, so was the world (which follows a natural order) obviously made by a Creator!’ ”

{The source}

Creation from a Christian Source:

(Author Note:  This Thread is not to a space for name-calling, personal attacks, angry vitriol, etc.  I expect those who are small minded, and intellectually constrained on this issue to be discussed, but I encourage you to please do so politely, and factually! In short, this is a Thread about G-d – so act in His image!)

I wish the Jews a blessed Holy Shabbat, and to all else a meaningful weekend and day(s) of worship!

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Posted in Judaism, Open thread, Religion, Science | 371 Comments »

Palaeontology is Hard!

Monday, October 12th, 2009

Especially for palaeontologists, it would seem,

Many dinosaurs may be facing a new kind of extinction—a controversial theory suggests as many as a third of all known dinosaur species never existed in the first place.

That’s because young dinosaurs didn’t look like Mini-Me versions of their parents, according to new analyses by paleontologists Mark Goodwin, University of California, Berkeley, and Jack Horner, of Montana State University.

Instead, like birds and some other living animals, the juveniles went through dramatic physical changes during adulthood.

This means many fossils of young dinosaurs, including T. rex relatives, have been misidentified as unique species, the researchers argue.

How T. Rex Became a Terror

The lean and graceful Nanotyrannus is one strong example. Thought to be a smaller relative of T. rex, the supposed species is now considered by many experts to be based on a misidentified fossil of a juvenile T. rex.

The purported Nanotyrannus fossils have the look of a teenage T. rex, Horner said in the new documentary. That’s because T. rex’s skull changed dramatically as it grew, he said.

The skull morphed from an elongated shape to the more familiar, short snout and jaw, which could take in large quantities of food.

But the smoking gun, Horner said, was the discovery of a dinosaur between the size of an adult T. rex and Nanotyrannus.

As I’ve said before on numerous occasions, palaeontology isn’t necessarily an exact science.   Just ask Java Man.

It’ll be interesting to see how evolutionists spin this.  The one science that they really, truly were pinning their hopes on to save evolution’s bacon – and it turns out the primary “scientists” involved can’t even distinguish juvenile and adult dinosaurs of the same species.  This – along with the long procession of “proto-human hominid ancestors” whose skeletons are reconstructed based on the testimony of a couple of jawbones, or wristbones from an extinct species of peccary – calls into question the competence of the whole structure of the palaeontological pseudoscience.  It really does.  We all the time hear about “missing links” and whatnot that are discovered, only to later turn out to be deformed members of already-known species, and so forth.  That’s what happens when the obsession to validate a philosophical presupposition takes the place of careful, empirical study.

I find it ironic that the discovery of a missing link is what calls the science of missing links into question. 

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Posted in Evolution, Science | 397 Comments »

What Happened to Global Warming?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

That’s sort of like asking, “What happened to the tooth fairy?”

What is really interesting at the moment is what is happening to our oceans. They are the Earth’s great heat stores.

According to research conducted by Professor Don Easterbrook from Western Washington University last November, the oceans and global temperatures are correlated.

The oceans, he says, have a cycle in which they warm and cool cyclically. The most important one is the Pacific decadal oscillation (PDO).

For much of the 1980s and 1990s, it was in a positive cycle, that means warmer than average. And observations have revealed that global temperatures were warm too.

But in the last few years it has been losing its warmth and has recently started to cool down.

These cycles in the past have lasted for nearly 30 years.

So could global temperatures follow? The global cooling from 1945 to 1977 coincided with one of these cold Pacific cycles.

Professor Easterbrook says: “The PDO cool mode has replaced the warm mode in the Pacific Ocean, virtually assuring us of about 30 years of global cooling.”

Pacific decadal oscillation.   Yeah, baby.

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Posted in Global Warming, Science | 117 Comments »

How Frankencell becomes Boobzilla in diaper science 101 for evolutionists ~ By Do-While Jones.

Friday, October 9th, 2009

If you don’t find the video amusing, you need to read this first to understand the underlying issues.

Reactions to our video will vary.  Innocently ignorant evolutionists will be confused because they won’t get too many of the jokes. Hopefully, it will get them to thinking.  Intimidated intellectual evolutionists will be greatly angered by our video because they will get the jokes, and will realize that they expose the absurdity of their claims. But since their belief in evolution is based on fear rather than reason, our video won’t have much affect on them.  Creationists will get all the jokes, will laugh, and love the video.


This website ScienceAgainstEvolution is very informative.  Perhaps it is the engineer in me that finds it so appealing?

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Posted in Evolution, Humor, Open thread, Science | 238 Comments »

Dendrochronological Data – Again – Refutes the Global Warming “Hockey Stick”

Monday, October 5th, 2009

What happens when you approach the anthropogenic global warming issue using ALL the data, instead of just a few handpicked points that can be made to appear to support AGW? The “evidence” for AGW does a disappearing act, that’s what,

A[s] WUWT readers know, the Briffa tree ring data that purports to show a “hockey stick” of warming in the late 20th century has now become highly suspect, and appears to have been the result of hand selected trees as opposed to using the larger data set available for the region.

OK, first the obligatory Briffa (Hadley Climate Research Unit) tree ring data versus Steve McIntyre’s plot of the recently available Schweingruber data from the same region.

 

Red = Briffa’s 12 hand picked trees Black = the other dataset NOT used

The Hantemirov- Shiyatov (HS) tree ring data that I downloaded from the NCDC is available from their FTP server here. I simply downloaded it and plotted it from the present back to the year 0AD (even though it extends much further back to the year 2067 BC) so that it would have a similar x scale to the Briffa data plot above for easy comparison. I also plotted a polynomial curve fit to the data to illustrate trend slope, plus a 30 year running average since 30 years is our currently accepted period for climate analysis.

Compare it to the Briffa (CRU) data above.

When I first saw this plot, I thought I had done something wrong. It was, well, just too flat. But I double checked my data import, the plot, the tools used to plot, and the output by running it 2 more times from scratch. Then I had Jeff Id over at the air vent take a look at it. He concurs that I’ve plotted the data correctly.

The trend is flat as road kill for the past 2000 years, though it does show an ever so slight cooling.

The first thing to note is that these data are not directly indexable to the set which Steve McIntyre used last week to demonstrate the non-existence of the “global warming hockey stick.” That being said, this data from 2002 is nevertheless relevant in addressing the evidence, if any, for warming from the tree ring data. Over 2000 data points went into this study, unlike the cherry-picked set used by Briffa in preparing his hockey stick graph. As can be seen from a non-cherry-picked data set, the plot of reconstructed temperature per year is essentially flat. What’s sad is that so would Briffa’s, if he had not artificially limited his data set.

Combine this with Steve McIntyre’s original decisive refutation of this latest “hockey stick” that the AGW cult had imagined it had found, and we see the case that can be made for AGW is quickly dissolving.

The second image below is, in my opinion, one of the most disquieting images ever presented at Climate Audit.

The image? The first one that is given above – the one showing how the reconstructed temperature plots differ, with and without all the extra data that Briffa lacked that allowed him to invent the hockey stick that supposedly proves global warming. The AGW collapse is happening so fast, in part, because so many of these proponents of AGW are being caught cooking the data. In other words, they’re being dishonest.

Frankly, it’s nearly to the point that if someone is really serious about arguing for AGW, they are either:

 1) Astoundingly ignorant

2) On somebody’s payroll

3) Dating an environmentalist

Perhaps this is why over 31,000 American scientists have signed a petition stating,

We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.

There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.

And it has come to my attention that pro-AGW fanatics are relying on some “remix” put together by Peter Sinclair. As was demonstrated previously, relying on Sinclair as an authority on matters of climate change is ridiculous. He’s an independent filmmaker, not a scientist, for crying out loud.

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Posted in Global Warming, Science | 189 Comments »

World’s Most Important Data PROOOOOOVING Global Warming, Um, Disappeared

Saturday, September 26th, 2009

Sheesh, haven’t these people heard of thumb drives?

Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.

Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.

Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren’t talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.

In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia established the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world’s first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It’s known in the trade as the “Jones and Wigley” record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a “discernible human influence on global climate.”

Putting together such a record isn’t at all easy. Weather stations weren’t really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.

So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren’t the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren’t specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/– 0.2°C in the 20th century.

Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that “+/–” came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones’s response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, “We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Reread that statement, for it is breathtaking in its anti-scientific thrust. In fact, the entire purpose of replication is to “try and find something wrong.” The ultimate objective of science is to do things so well that, indeed, nothing is wrong.

Then the story changed. In June 2009, Georgia Tech’s Peter Webster told Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre that he had requested raw data, and Jones freely gave it to him. So McIntyre promptly filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the same data. Despite having been invited by the National Academy of Sciences to present his analyses of millennial temperatures, McIntyre was told that he couldn’t have the data because he wasn’t an “academic.” So his colleague Ross McKitrick, an economist at the University of Guelph, asked for the data. He was turned down, too.

Faced with a growing number of such requests, Jones refused them all, saying that there were “confidentiality” agreements regarding the data between CRU and nations that supplied the data. McIntyre’s blog readers then requested those agreements, country by country, but only a handful turned out to exist, mainly from Third World countries and written in very vague language.

It’s worth noting that McKitrick and I had published papers demonstrating that the quality of land-based records is so poor that the warming trend estimated since 1979 (the first year for which we could compare those records to independent data from satellites) may have been overestimated by 50 percent. Webster, who received the CRU data, published studies linking changes in hurricane patterns to warming (while others have found otherwise).

Back when I was in college and grad school obtaining degrees in chemistry, we of course all learned some basics about what qualifies something as “science.”  Science is supposed to be observable, reproducible, transparent and all that other good stuff.  This global warming nonsense has never really met any of those standards, and this latest set of hijinx really takes the cake.

Essentially, Jones is hiding the data.  Or he lost them.  Or he lost them while hiding them.  Or he’s hiding them by losing them.  Or maybe he just made the whole durn thing up out of whole cloth.  Who knows? 

Let’s see if we can piece this together.  The data Jones and Wigley used to construct the theory that is presently being used by the UN IPCC to push for the destruction of the industrialised world is based on shoddy data to begin with.  Temperature sensors places on asphalt parking lots and near exhaust vents will not produce reliable data.  Even a child should be able to recognise that.  Yet, Ph.Ds all over the world seem blissfully unaware of this fact.  Nevertheless, the data is tainted – which calls into question whether it truly meets the criterion of observability.

Then, the shoddy data for 25 years is kept under lock and key and the gatekeepers refuse to release it to fellow scientists whom they fear might use it to “try and find something wrong with it.”  There goes reproducibility out the window.

THEN, the data IS released to one scientist who subsequently used it to “prove” that global warming will cause more hurricanes (which, by the way, has proven to be false, per my post from a few days ago).  At the same time, the data is NOT released to other scientists – who presumably were not felt to be sufficiently pro-AGW enough to merit seeing the data – using the lie that there were all these vitally important confidentiality agreements blocking release of the data.  I can understand confidentiality if we’re talking about secret projects by the Defence Department, but civilian meteorological research that supposedly will have an impact on us all?  Wow.  That, along with the lying, means that transparency just left the building. 

Then the data disappears.  Obvious question of the day: What was in the data that Jones didn’t want people finding out at last, knowing that eventually the stonewalling was going to have to end?

Folks, it’s time that we cut to the chase.  Anthropogenic global warming is complete, utter, bilious nonsense.  It’s nothing more than a cover story for the radical left and its radical, anti-human environmentalist agenda.  There’s nothing to it.  What’s more, people, when you see somebody seriously stumping for the global warming religion, you can be almost assuredly guaranteed that there is a money trail.  Somebody is getting some coin for trying to scaremonger us into believing this rubbish.   And most likely, that coin is courtesy of the American taxpayer.

 

 

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Posted in Global Warming, Politics, Science | 345 Comments »

Saudi Arabia Opens First Co-Ed University

Friday, September 25th, 2009

Although shocking….this is a great sign.

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Posted in Religion, Saudi Arabia, Science, World | 212 Comments »

Open Thread for Science Nerds – The Genetic Archaeology of India

Thursday, September 24th, 2009

Anyone even remotely interested in this sort of subject, please keep reading. Anyone who isn’t, please consider this to be an open thread!

Interesting genetic research on the population of India,

The population of India was founded on two ancient groups that are as genetically distinct from each other as they are from other Asians, according to the largest DNA survey of Indian heritage to date. Nowadays, however, most Indians are a genetic hotchpotch of both ancestries, despite the populous nation’s highly stratified social structure.

“All Indians are pretty similar,” says Chris Tyler-Smith, a genome researcher at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute near Cambridge, UK, who was not involved in the study. “The population subdivision has not had a dominating effect.”

[snip]

The researchers showed that most Indian populations are genetic admixtures of two ancient, genetically divergent groups, which each contributed around 40-60% of the DNA to most present-day populations. One ancestral lineage — which is genetically similar to Middle Eastern, Central Asian and European populations — was higher in upper-caste individuals and speakers of Indo-European languages such as Hindi, the researchers found. The other lineage was not close to any group outside the subcontinent, and was most common in people indigenous to the Andaman Islands, a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal.

The researchers also found that Indian populations were much more highly subdivided than European populations. But whereas European ancestry is mostly carved up by geography, Indian segregation was driven largely by caste. “There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes,” says Reich.

These findings are very interesting, and in some circles will prove to be pretty controversial. I’m interested in this because I think this genetic data pretty decisively decided the on-going Indian origins debate between the “One India” (OI) theory and the “Indo-Aryan Invasion” (IAI) theory in favour of the latter (please note: the term “Aryan” as it is used here does not have anything to do with Nazis or Nazism).

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Posted in Science | 49 Comments »

Global Warming is Failing as Science

Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009

One of the standards used to determine whether something is “science” by the strict definition of the word is whether a theory can be used to make accurate predictions.  In light of the President’s ill-advised cheerleading at the UN yesterday, we should ask ourselves whether global warming actually meets this definition of science.  Global warming fanatics have proposed that as carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere increases, we will see proportional increases in temperature coupled with other climatological effects.  As Tony Watt at Watts Up With That points out, one of the key arguments  for global warming – that sea ice coverage continues to decrease (which in GreenSpeak translates into “RISING SEA LEVELS WIPING OUT COASTAL CITIES AND KILLING MILLIONS!!!!!”) is failing the prediction test,

2009 Arctic Sea Ice Extent exceeds 2005 for this date

Those that have been watching the IARC-JAXA Arctic sea ice plot, and noting the slope of gain, rather expected this to happen. Today it did.
Here’s the current IARC-JAXA Sea Ice Extent plot:

 

While 2009 minimum on 09/13 of 5,249, 844 was just  65, 312 sq km below 2005 in minimum extent, which occurred on 9/22/2005  with 5,315,156 sq km, it has now rebounded quickly and is higher by 38,438 sq km, just 2 days before the 9/22/05 minimum. On 9/22/2009 it may very well be close to 60-80,000 sq km higher than the minimum on the same date in 2005.
While by itself this event isn’t all that significant, it does illustrate the continued rebound for the second year. The fact that we only missed the 2005 minimum by 65, 312, which is about one days worth of melt during many days of the melt season is also noteworthy.
What this all means is that the extent of the surface of the Arctic Ocean which is (as of 9-22-2009) covered in ice has reached the level seen in 2005.  As you can see from the graph, Arctic Sea ice coverage reached a minimum in 2007, and has been increasing over the past couple of years.  The trend from 2002 to 2007 was for less coverage, but the past two years show more.  What this means in laymen’s terms is that over the past couple of years, the summertime peak in Arctic ocean temperature (which, of course, affects how much ice is floating around in that ocean) has been been lower than it was in 2007.  In fact, it’s cooled to 2005 levels, and the trend suggests a cooling process is in action.  In short, the Arctic Ocean appears to be cooling down again, despite the predictions from global warming fanatics that it should continue to get warmer and warmer. 

Of course, Dr. Watt has pointed out that other predictions made by the AGW Truthers are not panning out, either.  More and more dangerous hurricanes?  Isn’t happening.  Tornadoes becoming more frequent and energetic?  Nope, that’s not happening either. 
No wonder the American people aren’t buying this AGW scaremongering – only 2% of us think the issue is a matter of priority, showing once again how out of touch our President really is. 

And, as the Czech President Vaclav Klaus (who’s probably a Ron Paulian, a creationist, a Birther, and a Glenn Beck fan) notes, the whole UN “global warming” pageant this week has a definite weird streak to it,

“It was sad and it was frustrating,” said Klaus, one of the world’s most vocal skeptics on the topic of global warming.

 

“It’s a propagandistic exercise where 13-year-old girls from some far-away country perform a pre-rehearsed poem,” he said. “It’s simply not dignified.”

 

At the opening of the summit attended by nearly 100 world leaders, 13-year-old Yugratna Srivastava of India told the audience that governments were not doing enough to combat the threat of climate change.

 

Klaus said there were increasing doubts in the scientific community about whether humans are causing changes in the climate or whether the changes are simply naturally occurring phenomena.

 

Am I the only one who thinks it’s not healthy that our President is taking advice on the “need” for climate change legislation from a 13-year old kid?

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Posted in Global Warming, Science | 170 Comments »

Like a Phoenix, Irreducible Complexity Rises Again

Tuesday, September 15th, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, etihwelppA selrahC at LGF 1.0 posted about an article that appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) entitled “The Reducible Complexity of a Mitochondrial Molecular Machine.” As is usual for selrahC – who is not a scientist, and does not evince any actual knowledge of any scientific field – there was a whole lot of crowing about irreducible complexity “going down in flames.” Yet, this “evidence” for evolution was anything but. And today, Michael Behe, who pioneered irreducible complexity in the microbiological/biochemical fields, observes why this and other articles fail in this regard,

 Recently a paper appeared online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled “The reducible complexity of a mitochondrial molecular machine” As you might expect, I was very interested in reading what the authors had to say. Unfortunately, as is all too common on this topic, the claims made in the paper far surpassed the data, and distinctions between such basic ideas as “reducible” versus “irreducible” and “Darwinian” versus “non-Darwinian” were pretty much ignored.

Since PNAS publishes letters to the editor on its website, I wrote in. Alas, it seems that polite comments by a person whose work is the clear target of the paper are not as welcome as one might suppose from reading the journal’s letters-policy announcement (“We wish to provide readers with an opportunity to constructively address a difference of opinion with authors of recent papers. Readers are encouraged to point out potential flaws or discrepancies or to comment on exceptional studies published in the journal. Replication and refutation are cornerstones of scientific progress, and we welcome your comments.”) My letter received a brusque rejection. Below I reproduce the letter for anyone interested in my reaction to the paper. (By the way, it’s not just me. Other scientists whose work is targeted sometimes get the run around on letters to the editor, too. For an amusing / astounding example, see here.)

Call me paranoid, but it seems to me that some top-notch journals are real anxious to be rid of the idea of irreducible complexity. Recall that last year Genetics published a paper purportedly refuting the difficulty of getting multiple required mutations by showing it’s quick and easy in a computer – if one of the mutations is neutral (rather than harmful) and first spreads in the population. Not long before that, PNAS published a paper supposedly refuting irreducible complexity by postulating that the entire flagellum could evolve from a single remarkable prodigy-gene. Not long before that, Science published a paper allegedly refuting irreducible complexity by showing that if an investigator altered a couple amino acid residues in a steroid hormone receptor, the receptor would bind steroids more weakly than the unmutated form. (That one also made the New York Times!) For my responses, see here, here, here, and here. So, arguably picayune, question-begging, and just plain wrong results disputing IC find their way into front-line journals with surprising frequency. Meanwhile, in actual laboratory evolution experiments, genes are broken right and left as bacteria try to outgrow each other.

 Well, at least it’s nice to know that my work gives some authors a hook on which to hang results that otherwise would be publishable only in journals with impact factors of -3 or less. But if these are the best “refutations” that leading journals such as PNAS and Science can produce in more than a decade, then the concept of irreducible complexity is in very fine shape indeed.

 

This is pretty typical, really. Since evolutionism is not science, but is a philosophical predilection, it is very difficult for those who have had their whistles whetted by the thought that finally, this time around, they’ve refuted them doggone creationists to have to backtrack and admit that maybe they were a bit hasty. For them, doing so is, in a sense, a lot like having to recant a dearly held religious doctrine. Remember, this happened with Ida. The supposedly rock-solid evidence of proto-human evolution turned out to be an extinct lemur or some such. The MSM loudly trumped it, and were mimicked by non-science types like selrahC, even as the scientists were quietly backing away from the initial claims as it became apparent that there were too many problems with the data for Ida to retain celebrity status.

When I saw the post at LGF 1.0, the first thing I did was to go to PNAS’ website and print off the actual paper, figuring that the claims being made were not supported by the actual data. I was not disappointed. The data in Lithgow et al. does NOT support the wild-eyed ravings about refuting irreducible complexity. Not even close. I was going to go through the actual science involved and provide a precise demonstration of why the paper in question is scientific junk, but I just noticed that Casey Luskin at the Discovery Institute already did so. Go there and read the details. When I call Lithgow et al. “scientific junk,” I’m not just being pejorative. It actually IS junk. The whole paper is full of speculation, argument from (loose) analogy, and argument using assertions that have not been proven (and hence cannot, by the strict rules of logic, be used as support for their arguments) but are merely assumed a priori. At one point, the authors even say that they are engaging in speculation (their word, not mine) about a key point needed to sustain their argument.

As an aside, I also appreciate the point that Luskin makes that the authors of this paper are forced, once again, to rely upon the use of teleological language in their discussion. No matter how hard evolutionists try to get around it, it seems as if purpose and design keep intruding. This is a point I’ve consistently made for quite a while now – evolutionism can’t get anywhere without making evolution (a process) act teleologically (which presumes an intelligence directing the process to a definite, purposeful end). You see it all the time when evolutionists talk about evolution “designing more complex eyes” and whatnot.

Anywise, back to the article. Essentially, the logic behind this paper can be boiled down to a four-point syllogism:

1) The molecular machines that transport proteins through the mitochondrial membranes are made up of one complex of proteins.

2) In certain species of alpha-proteobacteria (which are assumed, but never demonstrated, to be evolutionary precursors to mitochondria, which were then “captured” by other cells, and became mitochondria), there are proteins with similar structures.

3) The genome that codes for these proteins could possibly have mutated to start coding for the proteins we see in mitochondria, which then could have adopted a new function (i.e. the mitochondrial transmembrane protein transport).

4) Therefore, they did.

That’s it. Behe and Luskin are right – the logic is spurious, and so is the PNAS article. There’s no demonstration that any of the presumptions in the article actually happened. No exhibition of data or evidence that would suggest that these speculations were anything more than that – mere speculations. Similarity of protein structure, I hate to tell them, does not prove, or even necessarily suggest, common descent or origin. They certainly haven’t provided anything to suggest otherwise in this case.

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