Strange bedfellows

There's a Senegalese expression that goes, "There are forty kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

The outcome of this general principle is that trying to support pseudoscientific claims sometimes forces alliances between groups you'd never think would have anything in common -- such as the cryptozoologists and the young-Earth creationists teaming up to find evidence of the "Mokèlé-Mbèmbé," a water-dwelling beastie that supposedly lives in the Congo River Basin.

The first written account of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé seems to be from science writer (and cryptozoology buff) Willy Ley in his 1941 book The Lungfish and the Unicorn, but his description was (he said) taken from an unpublished report written by German military officer and explorer Ludwig Freiherr von Stein zu Lausnitz, who was summarizing sightings by natives he'd spoken to in Cameroon.  Here's what Ley had to say:

The animal is said to be of a brownish-gray color with a smooth skin, its size is approximately that of an elephant; at least that of a hippopotamus.  It is said to have a long and very flexible neck and only one tooth but a very long one; some say it is a horn.  A few spoke about a long, muscular tail like that of an alligator.  Canoes coming near it are said to be doomed; the animal is said to attack the vessels at once and to kill the crews but without eating the bodies.  The creature is said to live in the caves that have been washed out by the river in the clay of its shores at sharp bends.  It is said to climb the shores even at daytime in search of food; its diet is said to be entirely vegetable.  This feature disagrees with a possible explanation as a myth.  The preferred plant was shown to me, it is a kind of liana with large white blossoms, with a milky sap and apple-like fruits.  At the Ssombo River I was shown a path said to have been made by this animal in order to get at its food.  The path was fresh and there were plants of the described type nearby.  But since there were too many tracks of elephants, hippos, and other large mammals it was impossible to make out a particular spoor with any amount of certainty.

So already we're talking about a third-hand account; Ley recounting what he'd read that von Stein had written about what natives told him.  Ley also quotes one Lieutenant Paul Gratz, who is not a lot more convincing:

The crocodile is found only in very isolated specimens in Lake Bangweulu, except in the mouths of the large rivers at the north.  In the swamp lives the Nsanga, much feared by the natives, a degenerate saurian which one might well confuse with the crocodile were it not that its skin has no scales and its toes are armed with claws.  I did not succeed in shooting a Nsanga, but on the island of Mbawala I came by some strips of its skin.

Ley says that the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé and the Nsanga are the same, which I guess is true because it's very likely that neither one is real.  Skeptic Donald Prothero dismisses alleged sightings of the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé as being either crocodiles, black rhinos, or simply overactive imaginations, and I'm inclined to agree with him.  The only alleged photograph of the beast, taken by explorer Rory Nugent in 1985, is almost certainly a distant snapshot of a floating log.

A sketch of a Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, which I have to admit looks nothing like either a crocodile or a rhino, but does appear to have been heavily influenced by watching The Land Before Time [Image is in the Public Domain]

So the whole thing would be in the same category as Bigfoot and Nessie and Mothman et al. -- but then the creationists got involved.

Scottish explorer and young-Earth creationist William Gibson funded and led two expeditions into the Congo River Basin to try to prove the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé exists, although how this would support creationism is beyond me.  Maybe it's because the creationists have asserted for years that humans coexisted with dinosaurs, and that the dinosaurs went extinct because they all missed getting on the Ark or something, so having one around today would mean we still coexist.  Q.E.D.

Hey, don't yell at me.  I'm not claiming it makes sense, I'm just telling you about it.

A highly scientific artist's conception of prehistory, as per the Creation Museum

In general, it's hard to see how the existence of "living fossils," organisms long thought to be extinct that have proven to be very much alive -- the coelacanth inevitably comes to mind -- is any kind of cogent argument against evolution, but the sad fact is that your average creationist wouldn't know a logical train of thought if it came up and bit them on the ass.  Be that as it may, the creationists are all in on the Mokèlé-Mbèmbé, with the general consensus being if one is discovered, all the evolutionary biologists will retreat in disarray and immediately join evangelical Christian churches.

So we have here a case of strange bedfellows -- the cryptozoologists, who are generally well-meaning even if they have a different standard for what constitutes reliable evidence than I do, are on the same team as the young-Earth creationists, who by and large want to turn the entire world into an autocratic Christian theocracy.

Me, I think it'd be cool if Mokèlé-Mbèmbé existed, but purely because it'd be a fascinating new area of biological study.  Sadly, the fact that there's exactly zero evidence other than hearsay (which, after all, isn't really evidence at all) argues against it.  For those of you who were hoping for confirmation of a Brachiosaurus lumbering around in the Congo Basin, I'm afraid it's kind of a non-starter.

And that goes double for those of you who think Adam and Eve had a pet velociraptor.

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Leading the way into darkness

New from the "I Thought We Already Settled This" department, we have: the West Virginia State Legislature has passed a bill, and the Governor is expected to sign it, which would allow the teaching of Intelligent Design and other "alternative theories" to evolution in public school biology classes.

It doesn't state this in so many words, of course.  The Dover (PA) decision of 2005 ruled that ID is not a scientific theory, has no place in the classroom, and to teach it violates the Establishment Clause of the United States Constitution.  No, the anti-evolutionists have learned from their mistakes.  State Senator Amy Grady (R), who introduced the bill, deliberately eliminated any specific mention of ID in the wording of the bill.  It says, "no local school board, school superintendent, or school principal shall prohibit a public school classroom teacher from discussing and answering questions from students about scientific theories of how the universe and/or life came to exist" -- but when questioned on the floor of the Senate, Grady reluctantly admitted that it would allow ID to be discussed.

And, in the hands of a teacher who was a creationist, to be presented as a viable alternative to evolution.

I think the thing that frosts me the most about all this is an exchange between Grady and Senator Mike Woelfel (D) about using the words "scientific theories" without defining them.  Woelfel asked Grady if there was such a definition in the bill, and she said there wasn't, but then said,  "The definition of a theory is that there is some data that proves something to be true.  But it doesn’t have to be proven entirely true."

*brief pause for me to scream obscenities*

No, Senator Grady, that is not the definition of a theory.  I know a lot of your colleagues in the Republican Party think we live in a "post-truth world" and agree with Kellyanne Conway that there are "alternative facts," but in science you can't just make shit up, or define terms whatever way you like and then base your argument on those skewed definitions.  Let me clarify for you what a scientific theory is, which I only have to do because apparently you can't even be bothered to read the first paragraph of a fucking Wikipedia article:

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world and universe that can be (or a fortiori, that has been) repeatedly tested and corroborated in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results.  Where possible, some theories are tested under controlled conditions in an experiment... Established scientific theories have withstood rigorous scrutiny and embody scientific knowledge.

Intelligent Design is not a theory.  It does not come from the scientific method, it is not based on data and measurements, and it makes no predictions.  It hinges on the idea of irreducible complexity -- that there are structures or phenomena in biology that are too complex, or have too many interdependent pieces, to have arisen through evolution.  This sounds fancy, but it boils down to "we don't understand this, therefore God did it."  (If you want an absolutely brilliant takedown of Intelligent Design, read Richard Dawkins's book The Blind Watchmaker.  How, after reading that, anyone can buy ID is beyond me.)

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Hannes Grobe, Watch with no background, CC BY 3.0]

And don't even get me started on Young-Earth Creationism.

What gets me is how few people are willing to call out people like Amy Grady on their bullshit.  People seem to have become afraid to stand up and say, "You are wrong."  "Alternative facts" aren't facts; they are errors at best and outright lies at worst.

And if we live in a "post-truth world" it's because we're choosing to accept errors and lies rather than standing up to them.

As historian Timothy Snyder put it, in his 2021 essay "The American Abyss":

Post-truth is pre-fascism...  When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.  Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves.  If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions...  Post-truth wears away the rule of law and invites a regime of myth.

But Carl Sagan warned us of this almost thirty years ago, in his brilliant (if unsettling) book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.  I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

People like Amy Grady are leading the way into that darkness, and it seems like hardly anyone notices.

We cannot afford to have a generation of children going through public school and coming out thinking that ignorant superstition is a theory, that sloppily-defined terms are truth, and that pandering to the demands of a few that their favorite myths be elevated to the status of fact is how science is done.  It's time to stand up to the people who are trying to co-opt education into religious indoctrination.

In the Dover Decision, we won a battle, but it's becoming increasingly apparent that we have not yet won the war.

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Species, types, and the "No True Scotsman" fallacy

One of the most frustrating of logical fallacies is the No True Scotsman fallacy.

It gets its name from an almost certainly apocryphal story, in which a serial rapist and killer is being pursued by the police in Glasgow, and a Scottish MP encourages the police to search amongst the immigrant population of the city.  "No Scotsman would do such a thing," the MP said.

When the criminal was caught, and turned out to be 100% Scottish, the MP was challenged about his remark.

"Well," he said, drawing himself up, "no true Scotsman would have done such a thing!"

The crux of this fallacy is that if you make a statement that turns out, in view of evidence, to be false, all you do is shift your ground -- redefine the terms so as to make your original point unassailable.

Very few other fallacies have such a capacity for making me want to smack my forehead into a wall as this one.  Someone who commits this fallacy can't be pinned down, can't be backed into a corner, can't receive his comeuppance from the most reasoned argument, the most solidly incontrovertible evidence.  The dancing skills of a master of the No True Scotsman fallacy are Dancing With The Stars quality.

All of this comes up because of an online discussion that I read, and (yes) participated in, a couple of days ago, on the topic of the demonstrability of evolution.  Someone, ostensibly a supporter of evolution but seemingly not terribly well-read on the subject, was using such evidence as the fossil record as a support for the idea.  A creationist responded, "The fossil record, and fossil dating, are inaccurate.  You evolutionists always think that bringing us a bunch of bones and shells proves your point, but it doesn't, because no one can really prove how old they were, and none of them show one species turning into another.  You can't show a single example, from the present, of one species becoming another, and yet you want us to believe in your discredited theory."

Of course, I couldn't let a comment like that just sit there, so I responded, "Well, actually, yes, I can.  I know about a dozen examples of speciation (one species becoming another) occurring within a human lifetime."

Challenged to produce examples, I gave a few, including the ones that I described in an earlier post (Grass, gulls, mosquitoes, and mice, February 9, 2012), and then sat back on my haunches with a satisfied snort, thinking, "Ha.  That sure showed him."

Well.  I should have known better.  His response, which I quote verbatim: "All you did was show that one grass can become another grass, or a mosquito can become another mosquito.  If you could show me a mosquito that turned into a bird, or something, I might believe you."

Now, hang on a moment, here.  You asked me for one thing -- to show one species turning into a different species, in the period of a few decades.  I did so, adhering to the canonical definition of the word species.  And now you're saying that wasn't what you wanted after all -- you want me to show one phylum turning into a different one, in one generation?

I sat there, sputtering and swearing, and not sure how to answer.  So I said something to the effect that he'd pulled a No True Scotsman on me, and had changed the terms of the question once he saw I could answer it, and he'd damned well better play fair.  He humphed back at me that we evolutionists couldn't really support our points, and we both left the discussion as I suspect most people leave discussions on the internet -- unconvinced and frustrated.  So I was pondering the whole thing, and after taking my blood pressure medications I had a sudden realization of where the confusion was coming from.  It was from the idea of a type of organism.

Most people who aren't educated in the biological sciences (and I'm not including just formal education, here; there are many people who have never taken a single biology class and know plenty about the subject) really don't understand the concept of species.  They think in types.  A bird is one type of thing; a bug is a different one.  If you pressed them, they might admit that there were a few types of birds that seemed inherently different.  You have your big birds (ostriches), your medium-sized birds (robins), and your little birds (hummingbirds).  I've had students that have thought this way, and when they hear I'm a birdwatcher, they seem incredulous that this could be a lifelong avocation.  Wouldn't I run out of new birds to see pretty quickly?  When I tell them that there are over 10,000 unique species of birds, they seem not so much awed as uncomprehending.

The phylogenetic tree of birds (Class Aves) [credit: Dr. Gavin Thomas, University of Sheffield, UK]

I suspect that the source of this misapprehension is the same as the source of the general misapprehension regarding the antiquity of the Earth and the origins of life: the Bible.  In Leviticus 11, where they go through the whole unclean-foods thing that eventually would be codified as the Kosher Law, they split up the natural world in only the broadest-brush terms; you have your animals that have hooves and chew the cud, various combinations of ones that don't, creatures that have fins and scales and ones that don't, insects that jump and ones that don't, and a few different classes of birds (which, to my eternal amusement, includes bats).  And that's pretty much it.  Plants were sorted out into ones that had edible parts (wheat, figs, olives), ones that had useful wood (boxwood, cedar, acacia), and ones that had neither of the above (thorn bushes).  And these distinctions worked perfectly well for a Bronze-Age society.  It kept you from eating stuff that was bad for you, told you what you could build stuff from, and so on.  But as a scientific concept, the idea of "types of living things" kind of sucks.  And yet it still seems to live on in people's minds, lo unto this very day.

So, anyway, that was my brief excursion into that least useful of endeavors, the Online Argument.  It gave me a nice example of the No True Scotsman fallacy to write about here.  And it really didn't affect my blood pressure all that much, but it did make me roll my eyes.  Which seems to happen frequently when I get into conversations with creationists.

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The kludge factory

Know what a kludge is?

Coined by writer Jackson Granholm in 1962, a kludge is "an ill-assorted collection of poorly-matching parts, forming a distressing whole."  Usually created when a person is faced with fixing something and lacks (1) the correct parts, (2) the technical expertise to do it right, or (3) both, kludges fall into the "it works well enough for the time being" category.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Zoedovemany, Screen Shot 2015-11-19 at 11.54.48 AM, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Evolution is essentially a giant kludge factory.

At its heart, it's the "law of whatever works."  It's why the people who advocate Intelligent Design Creationism always give me a chuckle -- because if you know anything about biology, "intelligently designed" is the last thing a lot of it is.  Here are a few examples:

• Animals without hind legs -- notably whales and many snakes -- that have vestigial hind leg bones.
• Primates are some of the only mammals that cannot synthesize their own vitamin C -- yet we still carry the gene for making it.  It just doesn't work because it has a busted promoter.
• Human sinuses.  Yeah, you allergy sufferers know exactly what I'm saying.
• The recurrent laryngeal nerve in fish follows a fairly direct path, from the brain past the heart to the gills.  However, when fish evolved into land-dwelling forms and their anatomy changed -- their necks lengthening and their hearts moving lower into the body -- the recurrent laryngeal nerve got snagged on the circulatory system and had to lengthen as its path became more and more circuitous.  Now, in giraffes (for example), rather than going from the brain directly to the larynx, it goes right past its destination, loops under the heart, and then back up the neck to the larynx -- a distance of almost five meters.
• Our curved lower spines were clearly not "designed" to support a vertically-oriented body.  Have you ever seen a weight-bearing column with an s-bend?  No wonder so many of us develop lower back issues.
• One of the kludgiest of kludges is the male genitourinary tract.  Not only does the vas deferens loop way upward from the testicles (not quite as far as the giraffe's laryngeal nerve, admittedly), along the way it joins the urethra to form a single tube through the penis, something about which a friend of mine quipped, "There's intelligent design for you.  Routing a sewer pipe through a playground."  It also passes right through the prostate, a structure notorious for getting enlarged in older guys.  C'mon, God, you can do better than that.

The reason all this comes up is that the kludging goes all the way down to the molecular level.  A study from a team at Yale, Harvard, and MIT that appeared last week in the journal Science looked at the fact that when you compare the human genome to that of our nearest relatives, you find that one of the most significant differences is that our DNA has deleted sections.

That's right; some of why humans are human comes from genes that got knocked out in our ancestors.

The researchers found that there are about ten thousand bits of DNA, a lot of them consisting only of a couple of base pairs, that chimps and bonobos have and we don't.  A lot of these genetic losses were in regions involved in cognition, speech, and the development of the nervous system, all areas in which our differences are the most obvious.

The reason seems to have to do with gene switching.  Deleting a bit of switch that is intended to shut a gene off can leave the gene functioning for longer, with profound consequences.  Often these consequences are bad, of course.  There are some types of cancer (notably retinoblastoma) that are caused by a developmental gene having a faulty set of brakes.

But sometimes these changes in developmental patterns have a positive result, and therefore a selective advantage -- and we may owe our large brains and capacity for speech to kludgy switches.

"Often we think new biological functions must require new pieces of DNA, but this work shows us that deleting genetic code can result in profound consequences for traits make us unique as a species," said Steven Reilly, senior author of the paper.  "The deletion of this genetic information can have an effect that is the equivalent of removing three characters -- n't -- from the word isn't to create the new word is...  [Such deletions] can tweak the meaning of the instructions of how to make a human slightly, helping explain our bigger brains and complex cognition."

So yet another nail in the coffin of Intelligent Design Creationism, if you needed one.  Of course, I doubt it will convince anyone who wasn't already convinced; as I've observed more than once, you can't logic your way out of a belief you didn't logic your way into.

But at least it's good to know the science is unequivocal.  And, as astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "The wonderful thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it."

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Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [Image is in the Public Domain]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists -- both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is six thousand or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the two hundred million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of God's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia knockoff that attempts to remodel the world so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:

I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely, Richard Lenski

And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:

I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.  Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham et al. shut up, but maybe they'll eventually have to adapt their strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... they'll need to evolve.

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The evolution of the anti-evolutionists

Dear readers:

I am going to take a long-overdue two-week break from writing here at Skeptophilia, so this will be my last post until Thursday, August 25.  Until I return, keep suggesting topics, keep reading, keep thinking, and keep hoisting the banner of critical thinking!

cheers,

Gordon

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Sometimes I see a piece of scientific research that is so brilliant, so elegant, all I can do is sit back in awestruck appreciation.

Such was my reaction to Nicholas J. Matzke's paper in Science entitled, "The Evolution of Antievolution Policies after Kitzmiller v. Dover."  And if you're wondering... yes, he did what it sounds like.

He used the techniques of evolutionary biology to show how anti-evolution policy has undergone descent with modification.

I read the paper with a delighted, and somewhat bemused, grin, blown away not only by how well it worked, but how incredibly clever the idea was.  What Matzke did was to analyze the text of all of the dozens of bills proposed since 2004 that try to shoehorn religious belief into the public school science classroom, and generate a phylogenetic tree for them -- in essence, a diagram summarizing how they are related to each other, and how they have changed.

In other words, a cladistic tree of evolutionary descent.

"Creationism is getting stealthier in the wake of legal defeats, but techniques from the study of evolution reveal how creationist legislation is evolving," Matzke said in an interview.  "It is one thing to say that two bills have some resemblances, and another thing to say that bill X was copied from bill Y with greater than ninety percent probability.  I do think this research strengthens the case that all of these bills are of a piece—they are all ‘stealth creationism,’ and they all have either clear fundamentalist motivations, or are close copies of bills with such motivations."

"They are not terribly intelligently designed," Matzke added. "Some of the bills don’t make sense, they’ve been copied from another state and changed without thought."

He linked the bills to each other by doing statistical analysis of patterns in the text, much as evolutionary biologists use patterns in the DNA of related organisms, and arranged them into a cladistic tree using the "principle of maximum parsimony," which (simply put) is the arrangement that requires you to make the fewest ad hoc assumptions.

So without further ado, here is Matzke's tree linking 65 different, but related, pieces of legislation:

In particular, he was able to show where the documents incorporated language from a 2006 anti-evolution proposal in Ouachita Parish, Louisiana, and how subsequent generations had pieces of it remaining, often -- dare I say -- mutated, but still recognizable.

"Successful policies have a tendency to spread," Matzke said.  "Every year, some states propose these policies, and often they are only barely defeated.  And obviously, sometimes they pass, so hopefully this article will help raise awareness of the dangers of the ongoing situation."

So when there are iterations that are better fit to the environment, in the sense that they went further in the court systems before being defeated or (hard though this is to fathom) were actually approved, the anti-evolutionists passed those versions around to other states, while less-successful models were outcompeted and become extinct.

There's a name for that process, isn't there?  Give me a moment, I'm sure it'll come to me.

Okay, it's not that I think this paper will make much difference amongst the creationists and supporters of intelligent design.  They don't spend much time reading Science, I wouldn't suppose.  But even so, this is a coup -- using the techniques of cladistic analysis to illustrate the relationships between bills designed to force public school students to learn that cladistic analysis doesn't work.

I can't help but think that Darwin would be proud.

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Shame, lying, and Archie Bunker

One of my sensitive spots has to do with embarrassment.  Not only do I hate being embarrassed myself, I hate watching other people in embarrassing situations.  I remember as a kid detesting sitcoms in which a character (however richly deserving) was made to look a fool -- the sensation was close to physical pain.

Of course, it's worse when it's a real person, and worst of all when (s)he doesn't realize what's going on.

This whole wince-inducing topic comes up because of a wonderful academic paper called "Cooperation Creates Selection for Tactical Deception," by Luke McNally and Andrew L. Jackson of Trinity College (Dublin, Ireland).  The paper describes research into the evolution of deception, and is a sterling piece of work, showing how a game-theoretical model of cooperation results in selective pressure favoring "tactical deception" -- better known as lying.

"Our results suggest that the evolution of conditional strategies may, in addition to promoting cooperation, select for astute cheating and associated psychological abilities," the authors write.  "Ultimately, our ability to convincingly lie to each other may have evolved as a direct result of our cooperative nature."

It's a fascinating piece of research, and it generated some buzz in the media -- even meriting an (also nicely done) summary in HuffPost Science.

So far, what's the problem?  A well-written paper on how game theory predicts the evolution of behavior, and the media (for once) reporting it as they should.  No cause for wincing here, surely?

Nope.  The winces started once the creationists got wind of this.

The site Creation Evolution Headlines evidently found out about McNally and Jackson's paper -- although whether they actually read it remains to be seen.  Because the piece they wrote in response is called...

... wait for it...

"Evolutionists Confess to Lying."

Yes, you're interpreting this correctly; they think that because the paper supports an evolutionary edge for people who are deceptive, it is equivalent to the evolutionary biologists stating, "Ha ha!  We were lying all along!"

I couldn't make something this ridiculous up if I wanted to.

Don't believe me?  Here is an excerpt.  Make sure you have a pillow handy for when you faceplant.

If lying evolved as a fitness strategy, can we believe anything an evolutionist says?...  Brooks [the author of the HuffPost piece] has the Yoda complex.  So do McNally and Jackson.  They believe they can look down on the rest of humanity from some exalted plane free of the evolutionary forces that afflict the rest of humanity.  No; they need to climb down and join the world their imaginations have created.  In the evolutionary world, there is no essential difference between cooperation and deception.  It’s only a matter of which side is in the majority at the moment...

Having no eternal standard of truth, the evolutionary world collapses into power struggles.  The appeals by Brooks and Sam Harris to try to “resist our temptations to lie” are meaningless.  How can anyone overcome what evolution has built into them?  How can either of them know what is true? 

Since all these evolutionists believe that lying evolved as a fitness strategy, and since they are unable to distinguish between truth and lies, they essentially confess to lying themselves.  Their readers are therefore justified in considering them deceivers, and dismissing everything they say, including the notion that lying evolved.

My wincing-at-people-embarrassing-themselves response was activated so strongly by all this that I could barely tolerate reading the entire article... especially given that the Creation Evolution Headlines piece got linked on the Skeptic subreddit by the obviously astonished friend of one of the original paper's authors.  (Of course, you're probably thinking, "If you hate seeing people embarrassed so much, why are you calling further attention to it by writing about it?"  To which I can only respond: touché.  And also, that my outrage over a nice bit of evolutionary research being trashed this way trumped my dislike of watching morons shame themselves.)

Let's just take this a piece at a time, okay?

First, McNally and Jackson didn't say that everyone is lying; they said that some people are lying, and benefit by it, a contention that I'd guess atheists and theists would both agree on.  Second, given that the original research looked at cooperative species -- of which there are many -- why does that somehow turn evolution into "power struggles," into a world of every individual for him/herself?  Do ants in a colony only cooperate because they recognize an "eternal standard of truth?"

And I always find it wryly amusing when the theists claim that we atheists must be without morals because we don't think morality comes from some higher power, and suggest that we aren't to be trusted.  Honestly, devout Christians; if the only thing that's keeping you from running around stealing, raping, and murdering is some Bronze Age book of mythology, I think you are the ones we should be watching out for.

As Penn Gillette more eloquently put it, "The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want?  And my answer is: I do rape all I want.  And the amount I want is zero.  And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero.  The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine."

But as far as the McNally/Jackson paper goes, the creationists are missing the most basic problem with their claim.  Saying that lying is an evolved strategy doesn't mean that we "are unable to distinguish between truth and lies."  If evolutionists were unable to distinguish between truth and lies, IT WOULD BE REALLY FUCKING HARD TO WRITE A SCHOLARLY PAPER ABOUT LYING, NOW WOULDN'T IT?

*pant pant gasp gasp*

Okay, I'll try to calm down a little.

What's the worst about these people is that they don't seem to have any awareness that what they're saying, with apparent confidence, is absolute nonsense.  It reminds me of watching the character of Archie Bunker on the 70s television series All in the Family, who week after week would have conversations like the following:

Mike (Archie's son-in-law): Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

Archie: Denmark ain't no state, it's the capital of Colorado.

And, of course, Archie would never admit that he was wrong.  In his reality, he was always right, world without end, amen.

I bet Archie would have loved that article in Creation Evolution Headlines.  And he'd probably look at me and say, as he did to once to his wife, "You don't believe in nothin', Edith.  You're one o' them, whaddyacallem, septics."

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If Monday's post, about the apparent unpredictability of the eruption of the Earth's volcanoes, freaked you out, you should read Robin George Andrews's wonderful new book Super Volcanoes: What They Reveal About the Earth and the Worlds Beyond.

Andrews, a science journalist and trained volcanologist, went all over the world interviewing researchers on the cutting edge of the science of volcanoes -- including those that occur not only here on Earth, but on the Moon, Mars, Venus, and elsewhere.  The book is fascinating enough just from the human aspect of the personalities involved in doing primary research, but looks at a topic it's hard to imagine anyone not being curious about; the restless nature of geology that has generated such catastrophic events as the Yellowstone Supereruptions.

Andrews does a great job not only demystifying what's going on inside volcanoes and faults, but informing us how little we know (especially in the sections on the Moon and Mars, which have extinct volcanoes scientists have yet to completely explain).  Along the way we get the message, "Will all you people just calm down a little?", particularly aimed at the purveyors of hype who have for years made wild claims about the likelihood of an eruption at Yellowstone occurring soon (turns out it's very low) and the chances of a supereruption somewhere causing massive climate change and wiping out humanity (not coincidentally, also very low).

Volcanoes, Andrews says, are awesome, powerful, and fascinating, but if you have a modicum of good sense, nothing to fret about.  And his book is a brilliant look at the natural process that created a great deal of the geology of the Earth and our neighbor planets -- plate tectonics.  If you are interested in geology or just like a wonderful and engrossing book, you should put Super Volcanoes on your to-read list.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The odds of creation

In today's contribution from the Department of Specious Statistics, the owner of a biblical timeline business and self-proclaimed mathematician has stated that she has calculated the likelihood of the biblical creation story being wrong as "less than 1 in 479 million."

Margaret Hunter, who owns Bible Charts and Timelines of Duck, West Virginia, stated in an interview, "I realized the twelve items listed in the Genesis creation account are confirmed by scientists today as being in the correct order, starting with light being separated from darkness, plants coming before animals and ending with man.  Think of the problem like this.  Take a deck of cards.  Keep just one suit—let’s say hearts.  Toss out the ace.  Hand the remaining twelve cards to a one year old child.  Ask him/her to hand you the cards one at a time.  In order.  What are the chances said toddler will start with the two and give them all to you in order right up to the king?"

Not very high, Hunter correctly states.  "Being a mathematician, I like thinking about things like this," she says.  "Moses had less than one chance in 479 million of just correctly guessing [the sequence of the creation account].  To me, the simplest explanation is Moses got it straight from the Creator."

Righty-o.  This just brings up a few questions in my mind, to wit:

1. Are you serious?
2. Maybe you "like thinking about mathematics," but you seem to know fuck-all about science.
3. There's a town called "Duck, West Virginia?" 

I have to give her one thing; she got the odds of toddler-mediated correct card-ordering right.  For any twelve different objects, the number of possible combinations is 12!  (For non-mathematicians, this isn't just me saying the previous sentence excitedly.  12!, read as "twelve factorial," is 12*11*10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2*1, or 479,001,600.)

 

However, the major problem with this is that we can all take a look at the events in the biblical creation story, and see immediately that Moses didn't get them right.  Here, according to the site Christian Answers, is the order of creation:

1. the Earth
2. light
3. day & night
4. air
5. water
6. dry land
7. seed-bearing plants with fruit
8. the Sun, Moon, and stars
9. water creatures
10. birds
11. land animals (presumably birds don't count)
12. humans

One immediate problem I see is that there was day and night three days before the Sun was created, which seems problematic to me, as the following photograph illustrates:

[Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA/JPL]

But of course, the problems don't end there.  Birds before the rest of "land animals?"  Plants before the Sun and Moon?  The plants are actually the ones on the list that are the most wildly out of order -- seed-bearing plants didn't evolve until the late Devonian, a long time after "water creatures" (the Devonian is sometimes called "the Age of Fish," after all), and an even longer time (about 4.5 billion years, to be precise) after the formation of the Sun.  Humans do come in the correct place, right there at the end, but the rest of it seems like kind of a hash.

So even if we use Hunter's mathematics, we run up against the unfortunate snag that if putting the twelve events of creation in the right order has a 1 in 479,001,600 likelihood of happening by chance, then the likelihood of putting them in the wrong order by chance is 479,001,599 in 479,001,600.  Which is what happened.  Leading us to the inevitable conclusion, so well supported by the available hard evidence, that Moses was just making shit up.

You know, I really wish you creationists would stop even pretending that this nonsense is scientific.  Just stick with your "the Bible says it, I believe it, and that settles it" approach, because every time you dabble your toes in the Great Ocean of Science, you end up getting knocked over by a wave and eating a mouthful of sand.  And it's becoming kind of embarrassing to watch, frankly.  Thank you.

**************************************

One of the characteristics which is -- as far as we know -- unique to the human species is invention.

Given a problem, we will invent a tool to solve it.  We're not just tool users; lots of animal species, from crows to monkeys, do that.  We're tool innovators.  Not that all of these tools have been unequivocal successes -- the internal combustion engine comes to mind -- but our capacity for invention is still astonishing.

In The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another, author Ainissa Ramirez takes eight human inventions (clocks, steel rails, copper telegraph wires, photographic film, carbon filaments for light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips) and looks not only at how they were invented, but how those inventions changed the world.  (To take one example -- consider how clocks and artificial light changed our sleep and work schedules.)

Ramirez's book is a fascinating lens into how our capacity for innovation has reflected back and altered us in fundamental ways.  We are born inventors, and that ability has changed the world -- and, in the end, changed ourselves along with it.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [Image licensed under the Creative Commons GrahamColm at English Wikipedia, Phage, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

"Anti-evolutionists," see "Goalposts, Moving the."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is six thousand or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the two hundred million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of God's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia clone that attempts to remodel reality so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:

I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange.

Sincerely, Richard Lenski

And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:

I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another.  Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham shut up, but maybe he'll eventually have to adapt his strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... he'll need to evolve.

*********************************

The sad truth of our history is that science and scientific research has until very recently been considered the exclusive province of men.  The exclusion of women committed the double injury of preventing curious, talented, brilliant women from pursuing their deepest interests, and robbing society of half of the gains of knowledge we might otherwise have seen.

To be sure, a small number of women made it past the obstacles men set in their way, and braved the scorn generated by their infiltration into what was then a masculine world.  A rare few -- Marie Curie, Barbara McClintock, Mary Anning, and Jocelyn Bell Burnell come to mind -- actually succeeded so well that they became widely known even outside of their fields.  But hundreds of others remained in obscurity, or were so discouraged by the difficulties that they gave up entirely.

It's both heartening and profoundly infuriating to read about the women scientists who worked against the bigoted, white-male-only mentality; heartening because it's always cheering to see someone achieve well-deserved success, and infuriating because the reason their accomplishments stand out is because of impediments put in their way by pure chauvinistic bigotry.  So if you want to experience both of these, and read a story of a group of women who in the early twentieth century revolutionized the field of astronomy despite having to fight for every opportunity they got, read Dava Sobel's amazing book The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars.

In it, we get to know such brilliant scientists as Willamina Fleming -- a Scottish woman originally hired as a maid, but who after watching the male astronomers at work commented that she could do what they did better and faster, and so... she did.  Cecilia Payne, the first ever female professor of astronomy at Harvard University.  Annie Jump Cannon, who not only had her gender as an unfair obstacle to her dreams, but had to overcome the difficulties of being profoundly deaf.

Their success story is a tribute to their perseverance, brainpower, and -- most importantly -- their loving support of each other in fighting a monolithic male edifice that back then was even more firmly entrenched than it is now.  Their names should be more widely known, as should their stories.  In Sobel's able hands, their characters leap off the page -- and tell you a tale you'll never forget.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hands down

One of the most frustrating arguments -- if I can dignify them by that name -- from creationists is that there are "no transitional fossils."

If evolution happened, they say, you should be able to find fossils of species that are halfway between the earlier form and the (different-looking) later form.  That's actually true; you should find such fossils, and we have.  Thousands of them.  But when informed of this, they usually retort with one of two idiotic responses: (1) that evolution predicts there should be "halfway" forms between any two species you pick, which is what gave rise to Ray "BananaMan" Comfort's stupid "crocoduck" and "doggit" (dog/rabbit blend) photoshop images you can find with a quick Google search if you're in the mood for a facepalm; or (2) that any transitional forms just makes the situation worse -- that if you're trying to find an intermediate between species A and species C, and you find it (species B), now you've gone from one missing transitional form to two, one between A and B and the other between B and C.

This always reminds me of the Atalanta paradox of the Greek philosopher Zeno of Elea.  The gist is that motion is impossible, because if the famous runner Atalanta runs a race, she must first reach the point halfway between her starting point and the finish line, then the point halfway between there and the finish line, then halfway again, and so on; and because there are an infinite number of those intermediate points, she'll never reach the end of the race.  Each little bit she runs just leaves an unending number of smaller distances to cross, so she's stuck.

Fortunately for Atalanta she spent more time training as a runner than reading philosophy, and doesn't know about this, so she goes ahead and crosses the finish line anyway.

But back to evolution.  The problem with the creationists' "transitional fossil" objection is that just about every time paleontologists find a new fossil bed, they discover more transitional fossils, and often find species with exactly the characteristics that had been predicted by evolutionary biologists before the discovery.  And that's the hallmark of a robust scientific model; it makes predictions that line up with the actual facts.  Transitional fossils are an argument for evolution, not against it.

We got another illustration of the power of the evolutionary model with a paper last week in Nature, authored by Richard Cloutier, Roxanne Noël, Isabelle Béchard, and Vincent Roy (of the Université du Québec à Rimouski), and Alice M. Clement, Michael S. Y. Lee, and John A. Long (of Flinders University).  One of the most striking homologies between vertebrates is their limbs -- all vertebrates that have limbs have essentially the same bone structure, with one upper arm bone, two lower arm bones, and a mess of carpals, metacarpals, and phalanges.  Doesn't matter if you're looking at a bat, a whale, a dog, a human, or a frog, we've all got the same limb bones -- and in fact, most of them have not only the same bones, but the same number in the same positions.  (I've never heard a creationist come up with a good explanation for why, if whales and humans don't have a common ancestor, whales' flippers encase a set of fourteen articulated finger bones -- just like we have.)

In any case, it's been predicted for a long time that there was a transitional form between fish and amphibians that would show an intermediate between a fish's fin and an amphibian's leg, but that fossil proved to be elusive.

Until now.

Readers, meet Elpistostege.  As far as why it's remarkable, allow me to quote the authors:

The evolution of fishes to tetrapods (four-limbed vertebrates) was one of the most important transformations in vertebrate evolution.  Hypotheses of tetrapod origins rely heavily on the anatomy of a few tetrapod-like fish fossils from the Middle and Late Devonian period (393–359 million years ago). These taxa—known as elpistostegalians—include Panderichthys, Elpistostege, and Tiktaalik, none of which has yet revealed the complete skeletal anatomy of the pectoral fin.  Here we report a 1.57-metre-long articulated specimen of Elpistostege watsoni from the Upper Devonian period of Canada, which represents—to our knowledge—the most complete elpistostegalian yet found.  High-energy computed tomography reveals that the skeleton of the pectoral fin has four proximodistal rows of radials (two of which include branched carpals) as well as two distal rows that are organized as digits and putative digits.  Despite this skeletal pattern (which represents the most tetrapod-like arrangement of bones found in a pectoral fin to date), the fin retains lepidotrichia (fin rays) distal to the radials.  We suggest that the vertebrate hand arose primarily from a skeletal pattern buried within the fairly typical aquatic pectoral fin of elpistostegalians.  Elpistostege is potentially the sister taxon of all other tetrapods, and its appendages further blur the line between fish and land vertebrates.

Well, that seems like a slam-dunk to me.  An amphibian-like limb bone arrangement -- with fish-like fin rays at the end of it.

No transitional forms, my ass.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Placoderm2, Elpistostege watsoni, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Study lead author Richard Cloutier said basically the same thing, but more politely, in an interview with Science Daily: "The origin of digits relates to developing the capability for the fish to support its weight in shallow water or for short trips out on land.  The increased number of small bones in the fin allows more planes of flexibility to spread out its weight through the fin...  The other features the study revealed concerning the structure of the upper arm bone or humerus, which also shows features present that are shared with early amphibians.  Elpistostege is not necessarily our ancestor, but it is closest we can get to a true 'transitional fossil', an intermediate between fishes and tetrapods."

So there you have it.  Evolution delivers again.  I'm not expecting this will convince the creationists -- probably nothing would -- but at least it's one more fantastic piece of evidence for anyone who's on the fence.  Now y'all'll have to excuse me, because I'm off to the kitchen to get another cup of coffee, and it's going to take me an infinite amount of time to get there, so I better get started.

*******************************

In the midst of a pandemic, it's easy to fall into one of two errors -- to lose focus on the other problems we're facing, and to decide it's all hopeless and give up.  Both are dangerous mistakes.  We have a great many issues to deal with besides stemming the spread and impact of COVID-19, but humanity will weather this and the other hurdles we have ahead.  This is no time for pessimism, much less nihilism.

That's one of the main gists in Yuval Noah Harari's recent book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.  He takes a good hard look at some of our biggest concerns -- terrorism, climate change, privacy, homelessness/poverty, even the development of artificial intelligence and how that might impact our lives -- and while he's not such a Pollyanna that he proposes instant solutions for any of them, he looks at how each might be managed, both in terms of combatting the problem itself and changing our own posture toward it.

It's a fascinating book, and worth reading to brace us up against the naysayers who would have you believe it's all hopeless.  While I don't think anyone would call Harari's book a panacea, at least it's the start of a discussion we should be having at all levels, not only in our personal lives, but in the highest offices of government.