Wallnau's witches

I've noticed a tendency amongst some people that is a little bit like what would happen if the sunk-cost fallacy had an unholy bastard child with confirmation bias.  It occurs when someone has put so much of their time, effort, money, and emotional energy into something that when it's proven wrong, they simply can't accept it -- and start casting around for explanations, however ridiculous or far-fetched, to account for it.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who watched Tuesday's presidential candidates' debate that I'm talking about the supporters of Donald Trump.  A friend of mine commented that prior performances by Trump had set the bar so low that all he had to do in order to win the debate was not shit his pants while in front of the camera, and he couldn't even manage that much.  Kamala Harris -- who was a lawyer, and is a skilled orator who knows how to use her opponents' weaknesses against them -- kept baiting Trump over and over, and Trump couldn't help himself.  He took the bait every damn time, with the result that his side of the debate was an incoherent rant about everything from "the kind of numbers I'm talking about, because child care is child care" (direct quote, that) to his having the best rallies in the history of politics to Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio eating people's cats and dogs for dinner.

Confronted with their beloved candidate doing what can only be called a complete face-plant in front of millions of viewers, the MAGA types had to figure out how Mr. Stable Genius came across as a barely comprehensible, probably demented nutjob who couldn't stick to the script long enough to answer a single question.  I've already seen one Trump supporter claiming that the only reason Harris did so well is that she was being fed answers through an earpiece.  (Was Trump wearing an earpiece that sucked answers out of his brain?)  Another, following the "Declare victory and go home" strategy, simply said that Trump won the debate and that was that.  But no one has come up with an explanation as creative -- and by "creative," I mean "absolutely batshit crazy" -- as Pastor Lance Wallnau.

Regular readers of Skeptophilia will undoubtedly be familiar with Wallnau's name, because he's been something of a frequent flier here.  Amongst his more "creative" ideas in the past:

• the January 6 rioters were there at the Capitol to "pick up trash."
• all of Trump's enemies would be struck down by God in May of 2024.  (It's currently September.  We're still waiting.)
• back in 2020, he declared that God would cure Rush Limbaugh's cancer and save his life.  (Despite this, Limbaugh died in February of 2021.)
• Wallnau "took authority" over Hurricane Maria in 2017, and ordered it in the name of Jesus to miss Puerto Rico.  (It didn't.)
• angels "dusted his face with gold flakes" because he loves Trump so much.
• the Nazis who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia (resulting in one person's death) were "paid actors" because white supremacists don't exist.

Now, Wallnau is responding to Trump's catastrophically bad performance Tuesday night -- apparently even the good pastor can't stretch the truth enough to pretend Trump was brilliant -- by saying that he flopped because he was under an evil spell cast by the moderators, who are actually witches.  Here's the quote in toto because otherwise you'll think I'm making this up:

When I say "witchcraft" I am talking about what happened tonight. Occult-empowered deception, manipulation and domination.  That’s what ABC pulled off as moderators, and Kamala’s script handlers set up the kill box.  One-sided questions and fact checking sealed the box.  Witchcraft.  It’s not over yet, but something supernatural needs to disrupt this counterfeit momentum because the same public that voted in Obama is voting again and her deception is advancing.

I dunno, Lance, every clip I've heard from Trump's rallies sounds like incoherent babbling, too, so what are you saying?  The "occult-empowered witches" are following him around?

Of course, Wallnau probably would answer that with a resounding "yes, of course they are."  And the more troubling part about this is not that Wallnau is a wacko crank spouting nonsense -- which, after all, is what wacko cranks do -- but that he's listened to, and taken seriously by, thousands of people.

Look, I get how hard it is to admit you were wrong, especially when you've invested a lot of your heart into something or someone.  But this goes beyond conservative versus liberal.  I know a good many people who lean right, and that's just fine; we might disagree on various issues, but those things we can discuss.

But how anyone at this point can look at that incoherent, babbling blowhard and think he's fit to run a country is absolutely beyond comprehension.

Wallnau apparently does, though, to the extent that he's blaming Tuesday night's fiasco on witchcraft.  Couldn't possibly be because he hitched his wagon to someone who was incompetent from the outset, but has since then demonstrated a level of fitness that includes publicly sucking up to dictators like Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, and claiming that he can levy taxes on foreign countries, that there are states where it is legal to "execute babies after birth," and that white people are being denied the COVID vaccine because of their race.  It's so bad that Wikipedia actually has a page called "False or Misleading Statements by Donald Trump," which -- counting only the ones in public record that have been adequately fact-checked -- number in the tens of thousands.  Donnel Stern, writing in the journal Psychoanalytic Dialogues in 2019, said, "We expect politicians to stretch the truth.  But Trump is a whole different animal...  He lies as policy, and will say anything to satisfy his supporters or himself."

So.  Yeah.  I'm probably doomed to disappointment in thinking that this might change anyone's mind, but hell, hope springs eternal and all that kinda stuff.  You never know, though.  Maybe Wallnau's witches are on to something.  I could try casting a few spells and seeing if it moves the poll numbers a notch.

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Argue with me

In recent months, I've done several posts that reference the backfire effect -- the tendency of people to double down on their previous beliefs when challenged, even when shown hard evidence that their views are incorrect.  But of course, this brings up the question, if people tend to plant their feet when you offer counterarguments, how do you change someone's mind?

A quartet of researchers at Cornell University, Chenhao Tan, Vlad Niculae, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Lillian Lee, have studied this very question, and presented their findings in a paper called, "Winning Arguments: Interaction Dynamics and Persuasion Strategies in Good-faith Online Discussions."  My wife stumbled onto this study a couple of days ago, and knowing this was right down my alley, forwarded it to me.

What the researchers did was to study patterns on r/ChangeMyView, a subreddit where people post opinions and invite argument.  If someone does succeed in changing the original poster's view, the successful arguer is awarded a ∆ (the Greek letter delta, which in science is used to represent change).  By seeing who was awarded deltas, and analyzing their statements, the researchers were able to determine the characteristics of statements that were the most successful, and the ones that were generally unsuccessful.

Argument Irresistible, by Robert Macaire (from the magazine Le Charivari, May 1841) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And the results are a fascinating window into how we form, and hold on to, our opinions.  The authors write:

Changing someone's opinion is arguably one of the most important challenges of social interaction.  The underlying process proves difficult to study: it is hard to know how someone's opinions are formed and whether and how someone's views shift. Fortunately, ChangeMyView, an active community on Reddit, provides a platform where users present their own opinions and reasoning, invite others to contest them, and acknowledge when the ensuing discussions change their original views.  In this work, we study these interactions to understand the mechanisms behind persuasion. 

We find that persuasive arguments are characterized by interesting patterns of interaction dynamics, such as participant entry-order and degree of back-and-forth exchange.  Furthermore, by comparing similar counterarguments to the same opinion, we show that language factors play an essential role.  In particular, the interplay between the language of the opinion holder and that of the counterargument provides highly predictive cues of persuasiveness. Finally, since even in this favorable setting people may not be persuaded, we investigate the problem of determining whether someone's opinion is susceptible to being changed at all.  For this more difficult task, we show that stylistic choices in how the opinion is expressed carry predictive power.

More simply put, Tan et al. found that it wasn't the content of the argument that determined its success, it was how it was worded.  In particular, they found that the use of calmer words, statements that were serious (i.e. not joking or sarcasm), and arguments that were worded differently from the original statement (i.e. were not simply direct responses to what was said) were the most effective.  Quotes from sources were relatively ineffective, but if you can post a link to a corroborating site, it strengthens your argument.

Another thing that was more likely to increase your success at convincing others was appearing flexible yourself.  Starting out with "You're an idiot if you don't see that..." is a poor opening salvo.  Wording such as "It could be that..." or "It looks like the data might support that..." sounds as if it would be a signal of a weak argument, but in fact, such softer phrasing was much more likely to be persuasive than a full frontal attack.

Even more interesting were the characteristics of the original posts that signaled that the person was persuadable.  The people who were most likely to change their minds, the researchers found, wrote longer posts, included more information and data in the form of lists, included sources, and were more likely to use first-person singular pronouns (I, my) rather than first-person plural (we, our) or third-person impersonal (they, their).

Unsurprising, really; if a person is basing his/her opinion on evidence, I'd expect (s)he would be easier to convince using different evidence.  And the "I" vs. "we" vs. "they" thing also makes some sense; as I posted a couple of weeks ago, despite our technological advances, we remain tribal creatures.  If you engage that in-group-identity module in the brain, it's no wonder that we are more likely to hang on to whatever views allow us to keep our sense of belonging to the tribe.

The Tan et al. research, however, does give us some ideas about how to frame arguments in order to give us the greatest likelihood of success.  Stay calm, don't rant or ridicule.  Give your reasoning, and expand on your own views rather than simply responding to what the other person said.  If you have links or sources, post them.  Especially, show your own willingness to be persuaded.  If the person you're arguing with sees you as reasonable yourself, you're much more likely to be listened to.

Most importantly, don't give up debate as a completely fruitless and frustrating endeavor.  Vlad Niculae, who co-authored the study, found their results to be encouraging.  "If you’ve never visited [ChangeMyView]," Nicolae writes, "the concept that people can debate hot topics without getting into flame wars on the internet might be hard to believe.  Or, if you read a lot of Youtube comments, you might be inclined to believe the backfire effect, and doubt that graceful concession is even possible online.  But a quick trip to this great subreddit will undoubtedly make you a believer."

Winner by a nose

A lot of Trump supporters are frustrated that Their Boy didn't do so well in the debate Monday night.  I mean, it would take a serious pro-Donaldite to feel like his performance was anything but a blustering, sometimes baffling word salad.  It's unsurprising considering his penchant for extemporizing -- a strategy that may play well when you're at a rally composed of your loyal followers, but doesn't exactly work on the national stage while being watched by (allegedly) more people than tuned in to the last Superbowl.

But the problem is, when someone you're counting on doesn't come through, you start casting around for an explanation.  Because obviously it couldn't be your candidate's fault, right?

Of course right.

So first, we had Donald himself blaming his poor showing on a faulty microphone.  How that could have an effect I don't know, given that we could hear him just fine.  Maybe he thought that the mic was magically turning his eloquent words into incoherent babbling like his comments on cybersecurity:

I have a son.  He's 10 years old.  He has computers.  He is so good with these computers, it's unbelievable.  The security aspect of cyber is very, very tough.  And maybe it's hardly doable.  But I will say, we are not doing the job we should be doing.  But that's true throughout our whole governmental society.  We have so many things that we have to do better, Lester, and certainly cyber is one of them.

Yeah!  Okay!  What?

But Trump wasn't the only one to claim that there was fishy stuff going on.  There's a conspiracy theory making the rounds that the moderator, Lester Holt, was deliberately throwing the debate for Hillary Clinton.  And not only that; Clinton herself was signaling him by giving him threatening coded hand gestures by scratching her nose.

I'm not making this up.  According to the video, Clinton scratched her nose six times.  She apparently did this to let Holt know if he was asking questions to Trump that were too easy or ones to her that were too hard, to coerce him into sidestepping awkward topics, and allowing Clinton to (and I quote) "interrupt and score with a zinger."

Never mind that according to a PBS staff writer, Trump interrupted Clinton 51 times in two hours.  Never mind that Trump himself was sniffing constantly during the entire debate, and no one's claiming that he was secretly signaling someone, possibly his coke dealer.

I mean, seriously, folks.  If you don't like Hillary Clinton's politics, that's absolutely fine by me.  But the idea that she was communicating with Holt in code so he could skew the debate in her favor is...

... kind of stupid.

For one thing, Lester Holt is a registered Republican.  Why on earth a registered Republican (who has been a respected figure in journalism since the early 1980s) would throw a debate in favor of a  Democrat is beyond me.  I have a feeling it's beyond the people making the claim, too.  After all, these sorts of things aren't about rationalism and logic, they're about the world conforming to their own personal view of things.

Damn the evidence, full speed ahead.

But even so, I've seen this claim surface on social media more than once in the past couple of days, and mostly the comments have been on the order of "I knew it would be rigged" and a knowing nod.  And this strikes me as a dangerous trend.  It's the approach of the toddler, you know?  If you don't get your way, if your every wish isn't immediately met, it's the whole world's fault.  It couldn't be that you're interpreting things wrong, or (heaven forfend) you might not understand what's going on.

Nope.  Can't be that.  Has to be a conspiracy.

All the more reason for me to stay right the hell out of politics.  I'm always reminded of the quote by Dave Barry: "When trouble arises and things look bad, there is always one individual who perceives a solution and is willing to take command.  Very often, that person is crazy."

The problem is, in order to get elected, the crazy person also has to have followers.  And they're often even crazier.

No science, no vote.

As a nation, we need to stand up and say that we are sick of political candidates who espouse ignorant, anti-science views.

No, let me amend that; we don't need to say it.  We need to shout it.

The topic comes up because of  the Republican primary debate night before last.  All eyes, of course, were on Donald Trump; with the lead he's got, he's going to be hard to beat for the nomination unless he makes a serious misstep.

He made one two nights ago.  But the bizarre thing is that damn near no one is talking about it.

I mean, he made a good many other cringe-worthy statements, all delivered with his badda-bing-badda-boom style that for some reason seems to excite people.  Perhaps the most embarrassing moment of all was the exchange with Carly Fiorina over his questioning how anyone "could vote for that face," which ended with a verbal right hook from Fiorina and a babbling you're-beautiful-who-loves-ya-baby backpedal response from Trump.  But despite his gaffes and handwaving and mugging for the camera, and his zero details, we'll-just-fix-it platform, he pretty much stuck with his political script throughout the whole debate.

Until the topic of vaccines came up, and Trump said he thought that vaccination causes autism.

"People that work for me, just the other day," Trump said, "two years old, two and a half years old, their child, their beautiful child, went to have the vaccine and came back and a week later got a tremendous fever, got very very sick, now is autistic."

[image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

The moderator asked Ben Carson and Rand Paul to respond to that.  Why did he pick those two, out of the ten other people in the debate?

Because they're doctors, that's why.  They should know the truth, and be unafraid to say it.

And both of them bobbled the question.  

At a moment when the appropriate response would have been, "You, Mr. Trump, are dead wrong, and are apparently incapable of reading peer-reviewed science," both of them gave milquetoast rebuttals that sidestepped the main point -- that what Trump had just said was dangerously incorrect.

Carson said:

There have been numerous studies, and they have not shown any correlation between vaccination and autism.  This was something that was spread widely fifteen or twenty years ago, and has not been adequately, you know, revealed to the public what's actually going on.  Vaccines are very important.  Certain ones; the ones that would prevent death or crippling.  There are others, a multitude of vaccines, that probably don't fit in that category, and there should be some discretion in those cases.  You know, a lot of this is pushed by big government.  And that's one of the things that people so vehemently want to get rid of, big government. 

Trump, whose motto is Death Before Backing Down, responded:

Autism has become an epidemic.  Twenty-five years ago, thirty-five years ago, you look at the statistics, not even close.  It has gotten totally out of control.  I am totally in favor of vaccines, but I want smaller doses over a longer period of time.  Because you take a baby in, and I've seen it, I've seen it, with my children, you give them over a long period of time the same amount.  You take this beautiful little baby, and you pump... I mean, it looks like it's meant for a horse, not for a child...  Give the same amount, little doses over a long period of time, you'll see a big impact on autism.

And Carson said in response to that:

The fact of the matter is, we have extremely well-documented proof that there is no autism associated with vaccinations.  But it is true that we are probably giving way too many in too short a period of time. 

So Dr. Carson, can you show me your peer-reviewed research that shows a connection between administering vaccines over a short period of time... and anything?

No, I didn't think so.

Then Rand Paul -- did I mention, he's also a doctor? -- was asked to weigh in:

One of the greatest discoveries of all times was vaccines, particularly for smallpox... I'm all for vaccines, but I'm also for freedom.  I'm a little concerned about how they're bunched up.  My kids had all of their vaccines, and even if the science says that bunching up is not a problem, I ought to have the right to spread my vaccines out at the very least.

Did you catch that?  Freedom to do what you want.  Even if the science says you're wrong, and that you are putting your own children, and other people's lives, at risk.

Okay, I know I'm not very political.  I'm up-front about that, and have mentioned it more than once in this blog.  I have neither the knowledge nor the experience to make statements on most political topics with anything close to authority.

But dammit, we can not continue to have leaders who ignore science.  And it doesn't matter why they're doing it -- political expediency, pandering to their voter base, or outright foolishness.  There are too many problems we are facing as a nation and a world that can only be approached from a scientific knowledge base to elect someone who is willfully ignorant (or as my dad used to call it, "stupid") regarding such issues as vaccination, climate, and the environment.

Science is a process.  It is a way of sifting out fact from fiction, good ideas from bad ones, solid theory from folly and superstition.  It is time for voters to treat a baseline knowledge of science, and a respect for scientific research, as a sine qua non for electability.

In which case Trump, Carson, and Paul just catapulted themselves right out of the running.

22 questions, 22 answers

So the Ham-on-Nye debate is history, and we science-minded types are breathing a sigh of relief that it went as well as it did.  As I pointed out six months ago, Bill Nye had every reason to refuse to debate Ken Ham.  In fact, it's misleading to call it a debate in the first place, as Ken Ham doesn't accept hard evidence as the sine qua non of understanding.  He said as much, during the question-and-answer period, when he was asked "What would it take to change your mind?" and he answered in what may have been the most telling quote of the entire evening:

Well, the answer to that is that is that I'm a Christian, and as a Christian, I can't prove it to you, but god has shown me very clearly through his word, and he has shown himself in the person of Jesus Christ, that the bible is the word of god.

I admit that this is where I start from.  I can challenge people, that you can go and test that, you can make predictions based on that, you can check the prophecies in the bible, you can check the statements in Genesis.  I did a little bit of that tonight.

I can't ultimately prove that to you, all I can do is to say is to say to someone, "Look, if the bible really is what it claims to be, if it really is the word of god (and that's what it claims), then check it out, and the bible says that if you come to god believing that he is, he will reveal himself to you and you will know.

As Christians, we can say that we know, and so far as the word of god is concerned, no, no one is ever going to convince me that the word of god is not true.

Contrast that to what Bill Nye said, to the same question:

We would need just one piece of evidence.  We would need one fossil that swam from one layer to another, we would need evidence that the universe is not expanding, we would need evidence that the stars appear to be far away but are not.

We would need evidence that the rock layers could form in just years as opposed to an extraordinary amount of time, we would need evidence that you can reset atomic clocks and and keep neutrons from becoming protons.

Bring on any of those things and you would change my mind immediately.

So it really wasn't a debate.  Further, it has the possible downside of giving the impression to anyone on the fence that there is controversy over the issue; as I've said many times before, there is far more controversy, in scientific circles, about the ultimate explanation for gravity, and the means by which it operates, than there is over evolution.

So the Great Debate was really preaching to the choir, as it would inevitably have to be.  Still, most folks I've seen seem to think that Ken Ham had his ass handed to him -- even a poll over at Christian Today gave Nye the win, with the final tally being a decisive 92%-8%.

This hasn't stopped the creationists from singing Ham's praises, of course, which is pretty much what I expected.  There was a post over at Buzzfeed that's been making the rounds, wherein writer Matt Stopera asked 22 creationists what message they had for the evolutionists.  And despite my stance that arguing with these folks is generally fruitless, I felt obliged to respond largely because of the level of derp evident in so many of these statements.

So here they are -- the 22 statements from creationists, and my 22 responses.  Just so I don't have to write "sic" a hundred times, you'll just have to trust that I'm copying them with the spelling and grammar as written (or click on the Buzzfeed link and verify it for yourself).

1.  Bill Nye, are you influencing the minds of children in a positive way?

My answer: Damn skippy he is.  I'll take a rational, evidence-based understanding of the world over Bronze-Age mythology and magical thinking any day of the week.

2.  Are you scared of a Divine Creator?

My answer:  Are you scared of Frost Giants?  Why would I be scared of something I don't believe in?

3.  Is it completely illogical that the Earth was created mature?  i.e. trees created with rings...  Adam created as an adult...

My answer:  Yes, it is.  If you're accepting that, then how do you know you weren't created five minutes ago by Zeus, with your memories as-is?  If you don't buy that we understand the world through logic, reason, and the information from our senses, and accept that the world acts in a regular, understandable way, you have to throw out all of science, not just evolution.  Interesting, isn't it, that questions like yours -- that undermine our ability to know the universe -- could equally well be applied to chemistry, but no one ever frames them that way?

4.  Does not the Second Law of Thermodynamics disprove evolution?

My answer:  Fer cryin' in the sink, take a fucking physics class.  The Second Law of Thermodynamics says that in a closed system, entropy (disorder) always increases.  The Earth is not a closed system, therefore there can be local and temporary decreases in entropy.  There is no conflict between thermodynamics and evolution.

5.  How do you explain a sunset if their is no God?

My answer:  The Earth rotates.  q.e.d.

6.  If the Big Bang theory is taught as science along with evolution, why do the laws of thermodynamics debunk said theories?

My answer:  See #4, especially the part about taking a fucking physics class.

7.  What about noetics?

My answer:  What about it?

8.  Where do you derive objective meaning in life?

My answer:  The meaning in my life comes from my connections to my family, friends, vocation, pets, and community.  I don't need a magical sky guy to give my life meaning; I create meaning for myself.

9.  If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate?  By chance?

My answer:  Pretty much, but the chance was really high.  Organic compounds are common in the universe, can readily be created by abiotic processes, and will self-assemble into cells.  Life is probably abundant in the universe.  Once again: no need for the hand of a magical sky guy.

10.  I believe in the Big Bang Theory.  God said "BANG!" it happened!

My answer:  How nice it must be for you to have an understanding of the universe that doesn't require you to do any hard work.

11.  Why do evolutionists/secularists/huminists/non-God believing people reject the idea of their being a creator God but embrace the concept of intelligent design from aliens or other extra-terrestrial species?

My answer:  Whatever drugs you have been ingesting, can I have some?

12.  There is no inbetween... the ONLY one found has been Lucy and there are only a few pieces of the hundreds necessary for "official proof..."

My answer:  You seriously think that the only hominid fossil is Lucy?  And that scientists have a numerical threshold for "official proof?"  "Nope, sorry.  We've only got 99 pieces of data supporting the existence of velociraptors.  If only we had one more... but for now, we'll have to classify them as "imaginary."

13.  Does metamorphosis help support evolution?

My answer:  Of course it does.

14.  If Evolution is a theory (like creationism and the Bible), then why is it taught as fact?

My answer:  Creationism (and the bible) are not theories.  Theories are testable models of how the world works.  Saying "god did it" is not a testable statement.  "Theory" doesn't mean "it could just as easily be false as true."

15.  Because science is by definition a theory -- not testable, observable, nor repeatable -- why do you object to creationism and intelligent design being taught in school?

My answer:  See #14.  And I object to it for the same reason that you would object if your child's chemistry teacher taught him that you can convert base metals into gold via alchemy; because it's wrong.

16.  What evidence has science discovered that evidences an increase of genetic information seen in any genetic mutation or evolutionary process?

My answer:  Three examples out of hundreds known: Chromosome duplication and subsequent divergence.  Segment and polarity genes in arthropods.  Allopolyploidy.  All of which are excellent supports for evolution and speciation, so thanks ever so much for asking.  (For a wonderful take-apart of the so-called "information problem," go here.)

17.  What purpose do you think you are here for, if not for Salvation?

My answer:  If you mean Purpose, capital "P," then I think there isn't one, an idea that seems to terrify religious people and doesn't bother me at all.  I don't really feel the need for there to be a Cosmic Reason for Everything.  As far as my more immediate purpose; to teach, learn, love, enjoy, grow, experience.  And that's enough to satisfy me.

18.  Why have we found only 1 "Lucy" when we have found more than 1 of everything else?

My answer:  That may be one of the dumbest questions I've ever read.  How do you manage to remember to walk without dragging your knuckles on the ground?

19.  Can you believe in the "Big Bang" without "faith?"

My answer:  Science doesn't require faith; science and faith are opposites.  (Unless you're talking about my faith that science actually is a valid way of knowing the universe; if that's what you mean, then we can talk, but I don't think that's what you're asking.)  The Big Bang is a model that explains the evidence we see; faith is the belief in things not seen.  It takes no more faith to "believe in" the Big Bang (although I hate using the word "belief" referent to a scientific model) than it takes faith to "believe in" genes, or atoms, or stars, or the core of the Earth.

20.  How can you look at the world and not believe Someone Created/thought of it?  It's amazing!!!

My answer:  Ah, yes, the Proof from Incredulity.  "I can't imagine this, so it must be god."  Well, yeah, okay, the world and all of the life in it is pretty amazing.  That I feel that way is why I became a biologist.  But it's also pretty crazily thrown together, too, which is why "intelligent design" doesn't work.  Take the human male reproductive apparatus, for example, which has to be one of the most oddly "designed" organ systems in the animal kingdom.  We have two extremely sensitive structures that have to be positioned outside of the abdominal cavity in order to work, right at a position where they are easily kneed, kicked, and head-butted by small children and large dogs; the sperm-delivery device is fused to the urinary system, thus (as a friend of mine put it) being the equivalent of running a sewer pipe directly through a playground; and the urethra passes right through the prostate gland, which is unusually likely to become cancerous and squeeze the whole thing shut.  If a deity planned all of that, he has a really twisted sense of humor.

21.  Relating to the big bang theory... where did the exploding star come from?

My answer:  If you can't be bothered to take a fucking physics class, will you people please at least read the Wikipedia article on a topic before you ask moronic questions?

22.  If we come from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?

My answer:  If my ancestors came from France, why are there still French people?


So, anyway, there you have it; my response to the Nye/Ham debate, and the 22 questions from creationists.  My head now hurts from all of the faceplants I did reading those, and I suspect yours might, too.  So, as my gift to you for making it all the way to the end, here's a Klingon facepalm, to show you that Worf is on our side.