Sense and nonsense about GMOs

Please allow me to start today's post with a brief genetics lesson.

There is a feature of the genetic code called universality.  Put simply, universality means that all organisms on Earth read DNA the same way.  DNA is made up of strings of nucleotides, and there are four kinds, represented by the letters A, C, G, and T.  The order of those four nucleotides spells out the genetic message, and allows DNA to act as a set of instructions for building proteins and guiding development.  And the language -- how the order is translated -- is identical, for every living thing.

Besides being a fairly powerful argument for common ancestry -- why would we all speak the same genetic language if we weren't all related? -- this has opened the door for genetic engineering.  Take a gene (a set of instructions from one organism) and insert it into another organism's DNA, and the recipient will read that gene the same way the donor did, and produce the same gene product.  It's how we now have human insulin produced from genetically modified bacteria; it's how scientists have created "golden rice," that stores vitamin A in its seeds; it's how goats were generated that express spider silk proteins in their milk.  It's also how, by transferring a gene for a fluorescent protein from jellyfish into the embryo of a cat, scientists created Glow Kitties:

The application to agriculture was obvious.  Once the technique was perfected, within short order we had bt corn and tomatoes (the crops produce a substance in the leaves that is toxic to caterpillars, reducing the amount of pesticides that need to be used); "RoundUp-Ready" soybeans, wheat, and barley (the crop plants are resistant to the herbicide RoundUp, allowing the use of that chemical on fields, reducing the labor from weeding and increasing crop yields); disease-resistant papayas, plums, cucumbers, potatoes, and squash; tomatoes with a significantly increased shelf life; and freeze-resistant strawberries.

Then the alarmists began to chime in.  GMOs (genetically-modified organisms) were dangerous, they said; GMO crops generated food that was unsafe for human consumption.  A (hoax) story began to circulate that a "scientific experiment" had been done, feeding chickens exclusively GMO corn, and "26 out of 33 of them died, and the survivors were stunted and unhealthy."  Critics claimed that companies like Monsanto, that had spearheaded GMO research, were lying to consumers about product safety.  This led to a widespread banning of GMOs in the EU, most of Africa, and elsewhere, and a powerful grassroots movement is demanding that world governments outlaw GMOs and genetic transfer research entirely.

Now, despite the fact that there is no possible way that all GMOs could have the same (negative) health effect -- by what possible mechanism could rice that makes vitamin A and a virus-resistant cucumber generate similar side effects? -- people lumped together all GMOs in their minds.  The whole thing isn't "natural."  And since natural, of course, equals good, GMOs equal bad.

No one was more virulent in fostering this viewpoint than Mark Lynas, who was one of the first people to rail against GMOs as toxic and dangerous.  But now -- miracle of miracles -- Mark Lynas has issued a public retraction of his original stance at the Oxford Farming Conference.  Why?

Science, that's why.

Here's a brief excerpt from his 5,000-word statement (but you should definitely read the whole thing):

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering—what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

He then goes on to describe how putting all GMOs in the same category is illogical; as each transferred gene does something different, it's impossible for them all to have the same effects, and therefore the safety of each new crop has to be weighed independently, just as we do with everything else.  Furthermore, the vast majority of them, as evaluated by careful, peer-reviewed science, are safe and beneficial, but that hasn't stopped alarmists from swaying governmental policy:

Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural...

So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.

All in all, it's a remarkable turnaround.  Finally, we have someone talking what is just plain common sense -- not trumpeting childish scare-tactics like labeling GMOs "Frankenfoods."  And his position is backed up by mountains of evidence-based science, not just urban legends and the naturalistic fallacy.

Of course, Lynas is pretty likely to be labeled as a shill.  I'll bet that before the words were even out of his mouth, someone had shouted, "How much did Monsanto pay you to say all that?"  As we've seen over and over in Skeptophilia, you just can't convince some people, not with volumes of carefully-researched data and the most flawless argument.  But the fact that someone like Lynas changed his mind -- and was willing to issue a public apology and a statement to that effect -- gives me hope.  Because, as he says, if we don't get smart about how we do it, and use the technology and resources we have, feeding all seven billion humans is going to be an increasingly impossible task to accomplish.

Reason vs. extremism

Let me say explicitly that I have no quarrel whatsoever with the majority of Christians.

Despite being an out, and rather outspoken, atheist, I am firmly of the opinion that everyone arrives at the truth in his/her own way and time.  My personal lack of belief should never be taken as some kind of tacit statement that I hold your philosophical or religious beliefs -- whatever they are -- in contempt.  Now, I may disagree with you, or think you are mistaken.  But whether we agree or not, you have every right to find your own path -- just as I do.

That said, I must ask a question of any Christian readers of this blog.  Why is it that so many of you refuse to stand up to the minority within your ranks who trumpet hate, intolerance, and fear-mongering?

It's a question I've asked before, and one that could equally well be applied in other realms.  In politics, individuals who break ranks with the party line (as Chris Christie did yesterday) are often briefly lauded as mavericks -- but the backlash they face from the establishment frequently makes their gains amongst free-thinkers a Pyrrhic victory.

Wouldn't it be nice, though, if that weren't true?  Wouldn't it be nice if rank-and-file Christians resoundingly repudiated Donald Wildmon, chairman of the American Family Association, for sending out emails like the one that went out to members yesterday, titled "What will religion look like in 2060?", and which contained the following passages:

What will religion look like in the year 2060?

Conservative Christians will be treated as second class citizens, much like African Americans were prior to civil rights legislation in the 1960s.

Family as we know it will be drastically changed with the state taking charge of the children beginning at birth...

Churchbuildings [sic] will be little used, with many sold to secular buyers and the money received going to the government...

Christian broadcasting will be declared illegal based on the separation of church and state. The airwaves belong to the government, therefore they cannot be used for any religious purpose.

We will have, or have had, a Muslim president.

Cities with a name from the Bible such as St. Petersburg, Bethlehem, etc. will be forced to change their name due to separation of church and state.

Or, how about the statement that Mathew Staver, dean of Liberty University's School of Law, made to Moody Radio's Janet Parshall about what would happen if gay marriage was legalized across the United States:

Basically marriage will be completely destroyed, families will be destroyed, children will be hurt by this and freedom of speech and freedom of religion, including in the pulpit itself, will absolutely be bulldozed over.  This would open a floodgate of unimaginable proportions…

This is the thing that revolutions literally are made of.  This would be more devastating to our freedom, to our religious freedom, to the rights of pastors and their duty to be able to speak and to Christians around the country, then anything that the revolutionaries during the American Revolution even dreamed of facing.  This would be the thing that revolutions are made of.  This could split the country right in two.  This could cause another civil war.  I’m not talking about just people protesting in the streets, this could be that level because what would ultimately happen is a direct collision would immediately happen with pastors, with churches, with Christians, with Christian ministries, with other businesses, it would be an avalanche that would go across the country.

Maybe I'm being a Pollyanna, here, but there's part of me that just can't accept that ordinary, regular Christians, the men and women who are the majority of Americans, actually believe that these men are speaking the truth.  Please reassure me; you don't really think that atheists like myself secretly want to tear churches down, that we would love to see the state taking charge of raising children, that we won't be satisfied until St. Paul, Minnesota is renamed "Nogodsville?"  That our disbelief implies that we will discriminate against you for your belief?  That if gays marry, it will have any other effect than... more gays being able to marry?

If I'm right -- that the majority of Christians recognize that what these men are saying is blatant foolishness -- why do so few stand up and say so?  Why does it take behavior as egregious as that of the members of the Westboro Baptist Church to make people willing to break ranks?  You are not betraying the cause by stopping the extremists, the hate-filled, the fear-mongers, from being your spokespeople.  By doing so you are opening a space for dialogue, fostering reconciliation, and recognizing what is nothing more than simple fact -- that despite our philosophical differences, we all have the same basic human needs and desires, and that given a chance, we can coexist happily.

So I will ask once again: have the courage to speak up against these men.  Say, simply, "You don't speak for me."  Be willing to be a voice of reason.  Heaven knows, we need them, on both sides.

The attractiveness of cults

One of my failings is my inability to comprehend how people can find themselves still being suckered in by ideologies that are obviously, demonstrably false.  Now, mind you, I get why people stick with what they were taught as children; if you grew up being told, for example, that the world is 6,000-odd years old, and that people are bad because the first woman on Earth got tricked into eating a piece of fruit by a talking snake, and that (furthermore) the talking snake is still around trying to trick you, too, it's unsurprising that you wouldn't listen to the likes of me.

What is completely incomprehensible to me, though, is how anyone from outside the system, who had seen other ways of thinking, would look at something like that and say, "Wow!  Now that makes intrinsic sense!"  Yet I know two former students, both extremely bright young men, who did exactly that, rejecting science and logic and rationality for biblical literalism.

My incomprehension, though, turns to incredulity when I see people voluntarily espousing ideologies that are not just flat-out wrong, but destructive, abusive, and (frankly) scary.  Cults, in other words.  And here I am, of course, referring to the Church of Scientology.

I've long avoided mentioning Scientology in this blog, largely because I'd rather not have Tom Cruise show up at my house and start jumping on my sofa.  For another thing, the hopeful part of me keeps assuming that this cult has to be on the way out, what with all of the bad press it's gotten the last few years -- more than one exposé by investigative reporters, not to mention the whole kerfuffle over the anti-Scientology episode of South Park.  (You might remember that the episode "Trapped in a Closet" resulted in Isaac Hayes, who voiced the character Chef, leaving South Park in protest, and Tom Cruise threatening Viacom that if they didn't pull the episode, he would withdraw from the cast of Mission Impossible III.  Viacom caved, and cancelled a rebroadcast of the episode; and Cruise, satisfied, went ahead with the movie, which went on to net a total of $2.56 in the box office.)

All of this makes Scientology seem ridiculous -- and certainly a good many of their beliefs fall into the "no, really?" category -- but there is a darker side to the organization.  People who have investigated church leaders have been harassed, sued, and threatened.  Wikipedia finally had to resort to closing off the main pages about the church and its leaders in 2009, because true believers wouldn't stop altering the pages to remove critical or negative passages.  The church continues to pour money into converting people in other countries, a move that some governments have resisted.  Just four days ago, a story in the Atlantic Wire describes charges being filed in Belgium against the church, including "extortion, fraud, privacy breaches, and the illegal practice of medicine."

People, however, continue to join, which baffles me.  Church leaders boast that Scientology is "the fastest-growing religion on Earth."  Given their secrecy, it's hard to get accurate numbers, but Janet Reitman, who did an investigative report for Rolling Stone in 2011, estimates their membership at between 100,000 and 200,000 worldwide.

So I must ask: what about this ideology do people find appealing?  It's a pretty bizarre amalgam of claims -- involving alien spirits ("Thetans"), an intergalactic overlord named "Xenu," a cult of personality about the founder that borders on hero-worship, and something very much like brainwashing.  Consider all of the negative press in recent years -- including an allegation that L. Ron Hubbard founded Scientology after making a bet with science fiction writer Robert Heinlein that he (Hubbard) could become filthy rich by making up his own religion.  (Hubbard won, obviously, but probably didn't need to collect, given how rich he did become.)

And yet people still join.  And donate.  Just yesterday, an article appeared in the online Australian news source The West entitled "Scientologists Build Underground 'Space Alien Cathedral,'" about a recently-discovered subterranean bunker near Roswell, New Mexico, which allegedly houses (in a thermonuclear-weapon-proof vault) an electronic copy of all of the writings of L. Ron Hubbard and his disciples.  Further, the shape of the bunker as seen from space is supposed to be a symbol recognizable to "Xenu," so if humanity tanks, the galactic overlord will still be able to find Hubbard's sacred texts.

Which, of course, means that they still somehow have the kind of cash and manpower at their disposal that would allow them to build something this complex.

This is absolutely beyond me, and in fact I'm finding it hard to think of any insightful commentary I might be able to add.  I'll just finish up by saying that as an aside, my dogs are trained to bite anyone who jumps on our sofa, so you might want to take that under advisement.  In fact, it might be best if you just stay in your bunker where it's safe.  Thank you.

Keep it on the QT

Dear Woo-Woos of the World,

Ten days?  Ten days is all you could wait?

You just couldn't bear to have a little more time go by before you started blathering on once again about cycles and calendars and End Times?  What, it wasn't enough to have four (count 'em, four -- May 21, October 21, December 12, and December 21) failed predictions of the end of the world in the last eight months, you now have to come up with a new one?

If for some reason, you want to take a closer look at the latest in idiotic prophecies, here's a page from the bizarre site Unexplained Mysteries entitled, "Quetzalcoatl: When Will He Return?"  In case you were optimistic about the webpage's contents, it is far too much to hope for that the entire article consists of one sentence: "HE DOESN'T EXIST, YOU MORON."  No, the writer, one L. M. Leteane, takes Central American Native mythology, and throws it in a blender with Babylonian mythology and Egyptian mythology (because of course, the more ridiculous incorrect beliefs you put together, the more logical things get), and comes up with the following:

The Egyptian god Thoth and the Central American god Quetzalcoatl are actually the same person, because obviously a dude with the head of an ibis and a winged, feathered snake are so similar that they must be one and the same.  QT (as I will hereafter refer to this combined god) has a real fondness for numbers, and his magic number is either 52 or 144,000, the latter being because that's the number of blocks in the Great Pyramid of Giza.  If you take 13 bunches of 144,000 days, you get about 5,125 years; that amount of years, if you start in 3,113 B.C. E. (why start there?  Because the Sumerians, that's why.  Stop asking questions) brings you to the year 2012.  But we just finished 2012, and the world didn't end, amazingly enough.  According to L. M. Leteane, that's because the year 2012 as an end date is "valid but not correct."

And no, I didn't make that quote up.

So, because QT also likes 52, add that number to 2012, and you get 2087.  Add 720 years to that, and you get the year 2807, which contains "13 (almost 14) lots of 52, just as Thoth said!"

No, I didn't make that quote up, either.

Now, add 562 years to that, because of something about Pisces and astrology and who the hell knows, and you get the year 3369, which is when the "comet Marduk" is supposed to return.  Marduk is a Babylonian god.  Apparently, it's also a comet.  Who knew?  Not the astronomers, I'm guessing, because Leteane says it is "not a comet mapped in recent times."

Oh, yeah, and there was something in there about the Great Flood of Noah happening in 10,983 B.C.E. because that was when the Earth's axial tilt was "at its most precarious."  What exactly this means, I'm not sure.  Maybe Leteane thinks that if the Earth tilts too much, it falls over and dumps ocean all over the place.  I dunno.

Anyhow, I'm gonna stop here, because the whole thing is making my head hurt.  If you're curious, you can take a look at the link, or buy Leteane's book, They Came From the Sky.  Me, I'm done with all this.  All I can say is that I'm glad that the predicted End Date is 1,357 years from now, because even in a best-case scenario, I'll be long dead by that time and won't have to worry about nimrods further "analyzing" the situation and trying to decide why, despite all of this faultless logic, the world once again didn't end.

The year in review

Well, 2012 was an exciting year here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, which of course was exactly what we expected given all the hoopla surrounding the catastrophic End of the World that didn't occur right on schedule at its end.  So I thought, as a way of ringing out the old and ringing in the new, it might be fun to look back at the top story for each month from the World of Woo-Woo.  A way of celebrating, if you will, what irrational, counterfactual nonsense we had to endure to get to the end of the year.  Each one comes with a link to the story, so that (if you'd like) you can go back and read the top stories of the past year at Skeptophilia.

In January, we had the announcement by the leaders of Iran that they had downed a US drone aircraft doing unauthorized surveillance of Iranian territory.  Never content to let stories remain within the realm of what is, technically, real, Iranian engineer Mehran Tavakoli Keshe crowed proudly that the Iranian actions had been accomplished using spaceships powered by "field forces [sic]... generated by dark matter, regular matter, and antimatter."

In February, we were informed by Google Earth that they had not, in fact, found Atlantis off the coast of Africa.  They offered explanations of why the Google Earth topographic seafloor maps seemed to show huge gridlines that looked like the remains of streets, city squares, and so on.  This denial convinced everyone except the conspiracy theorists who made the claim in the first place.

March produced a story that generated the third-highest number of hits for Skeptophilia to date; the claim that NASA had discovered an alien-constructed monolith on Phobos, confirming the claims made in the famous historical documentary 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Regular readers of this blog will be unsurprised to discover that the person who came up with this idea was our favorite frequent flyer of all: Richard C. Hoagland.

Another popular story cropped up in April, centering around the contention that "an oceanographer named Dr. Verlag Meyer" had found giant glass pyramids on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.  The story began to unravel when it was discovered that "Verlag" is not a name, but is the German word for "publishing house," and that the original story had come from none other than the Weekly World News.

In May, we had a claim by Seattle lawyer Andrew Basiago that the US government had developed, and was hiding evidence of, time travel.  Basiago said he had been one of the test subjects, and was ready to blow the story wide open.  Of course, Basiago is the same guy who said last year that he had once run into President Obama on Mars, so his credibility might not be all that great to start with.

June saw the release of a new biology textbook by a group called Accelerated Christian Education, and its adoption by government-funded charter schools in Louisiana.  It was no surprise, given its origins, that the biology textbook claimed that evolution is a big fat lie made up by Satan-influenced evolutionary biologists like myself to doom your children to eternal hellfire.  What was a bit of a surprise is that the textbook cites the existence of the Loch Ness Monster as evidence that evolution is false.

In July, the scientific world was rocked by the announcement from physicists at CERN that the long-sought Higgs boson -- the particle that confers the property of mass on ordinary matter -- was a reality.  It didn't take long for the woo-woos to get on board, with such luminaries of the scientific world as Diane Tessman proclaiming that the Higgs proved the existence of truth, god, collective consciousness, and the "time of celestial ascension."

For much of August, I was on hiatus in the beautiful country of Malaysia for birdwatching, curry, and some much-needed R & R, but even so, there were several stories that we followed closely, here at Worldwide Wacko Watch.  It is always to be hoped for that our reports will encourage people to behave in a more rational fashion, and the top story from August had a pretty important moral: don't dance on the side of a highway in a ghillie suit attempting to convince people they're seeing Bigfoot.

In September, NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity began to send back photographs from the Red Planet, exciting science buffs the world over.  And it didn't take long for woo-woos with magnifying glasses and overactive imaginations to find all sorts of anomalous objects in those photographs, including a grinning alien woodchuck, a flip-flop, various UFOs, and a fossilized human finger.

October was a busy month, and it ended on a tragic note, with the late season "superstorm" Sandy striking the eastern coast of the United States, creating devastating damage from wind and flooding.  And despite what you may have learned in your high school Earth Science class, this time it was not such phenomena as low-pressure systems, frontal boundaries, and steering currents that led to the formation of the storm; this one was caused by the most powerful meteorological force known to man -- gays.

In November, we had noted shrieking wingnut Paul Begley claiming that Obamacare should be repealed.  The reason, Begley said, was not that it was too expensive, nor that it would harm the quality of American medical care; no, the reason was that there was a provision in the bill to microchip everyone in the US, and whichever one of us got the microchip with the number "666" would become the Antichrist.

No story during the year got more press coverage than the End of the World, scheduled to occur on December 21, 2012, and which was variously thought to be caused by the Mayans, zombies, the arrival of the Borg, the arrival of friendly aliens, a collision with the planet Nibiru, and an attack by Giant Space Bunnies from the Andromeda Galaxy.  Okay, I made the last one up, but it hardly matters, because December 22 arrived with all of us still here, not that this will discourage the next End Times prediction from happening.


So, that's the year in stories.  I hope you had a wonderful 2012, despite all of them, and from all of us here at Worldwide Wacko Watch, I wish you the happiest of New Years.  Let's renew our dedication to science, skepticism, and critical thinking in the coming year, in the hopes that progress toward a rational world -- however incremental it may seem at times -- continues to happen.

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true...

The cryptozoological world has been buzzing the last few days over the alleged capture of a Bigfoot by a Sasquatch research group called "Quantra."

The whole thing started with a press release from Ed Smith, Quantra's spokesperson, who had remarkably sketchy information on the whole thing.  Here's a part of Smith's press release (you can read the whole thing here):

It appears that an unprecedented event is in motion, having been on the inside of this operation and now observing from the outside is a defiant [sic] change.

So here is what I know: "Daisy" has been moved to a examination area about 12 miles from the capture site at 3:17 this morning after being properly sedated. The capture site and examination area are on private property leased and or owned in order to conduct research and operations of this type.

This was confirmed by a source in the Quantra Group.

Here is what I don't know: The weight height hair color gender or location of capture. Or the health of the specimen.

Nor the actions leading up to the capture of the specimen.

Here is what I'm speculating: the examination team is continuing to assemble, examination should take 72 hours.

So, just about every woo-woo blog, website, Facebook group, and Twitter feed was hopping.  Would this be what everyone's been waiting for... a real, live Bigfoot, available for scientists and interested laypeople to study?  Would the world finally have an answer regarding the existence of sub-human proto-hominids on the North American continent, other than the members of the Westboro Baptist Church?

Then came the announcement yesterday that "Daisy" had been released.  [Source]

Tim Fasano, whose specialty within cryptozoology is the Florida Skunk Ape (yes, of course they have specialties.  With so many different kinds of creatures that don't exist, you can't study them all), made the following bizarre, rambling announcement, that he released on YouTube:

My phone has been ringing a lot.  One of the unique positions I've been in, being a cab driver in Tampa, Florida, is that I go onto MacDill Air Force Base to pick up people at Central Command Headquarters.  There's some high ranking officers that call me on my cell phone to pick them up when they need to go to the airport.  I've got a close buddy who is a retired lieutenant general.  That's three stars.  This guy was up there.  When I first met him, I asked him two questions: did we really land on the moon in 1969, and are there UFOs?  And he laughed, and come to find out, he had more than a passing interest in paranormal activities, and this type of stuff.  Anyway, let me cut to the chase.  My contacts know at least two operators in Quantra, and here's what's happened within the last hour.  Daisy has been released.  Understand that.  Daisy has been released.  Upon conferring, they released that based upon the tenets of the Geneva Convention, a prisoner of war cannot be held when there is no war.  This is akin to kidnapping.  And based upon the specifics of how they understand the nature of the creature they had in their possession, not to face criminal charges, Daisy as we speak right now is being released at the point of capture.  This was all a mistake...  Most of the information that revolves around this, that they have gathered, will be destroyed.  And like they say in Mission Impossible, "the secretary will disavow all knowledge."

After cleaning up the coffee that I spit all over my computer when he mentioned the "Geneva Convention," I sat back, and thought, "Well, how else did you expect this to end?"  Of course the Bigfoot had to disappear -- whether it was that it overpowered its guards and got away; somehow unlocked its cage; was rescued by its parents, Mr. and Mrs. Squatch; or... was released by the people who captured it.

Because of the Geneva Convention.

I have to admit that, much though I would love it if Bigfoot turned out to be real (if for no other reason, for the jolt it would give to the anti-evolutionists), I was suspicious of this one right from the get-go.  Why, if you were a Bigfoot researcher, wouldn't you get the media and reputable scientists in there immediately?  It would, I would think, be a case for verifying the veracity of the claim right out of the starting gate, rather than pussyfooting around with "Daisy is being taken to an undisclosed location for examination."

At least, that's how I would handle it.  I would be on the horn to vertebrate zoologists, primatologists, and the press before you could say "Return to Boggy Creek."

So, now, we are once again left with just a bunch of random claims from random people, with no hard evidence to back it up.  As usual.  And the cryptid hunters wonder why we skeptics scoff whenever they trot out new "evidence."

Viking dinosaurs

One of the main differences between skeptics and woo-woos is what we each think to be "sufficient evidence."

I ran into a great example of this yesterday, on S8intCom Blogger, which bills itself as "A Biblical View On Science."  (You are told on the homepage that "s8int" is pronounced "saint;" but by my linguistic analysis, "s8int" would be pronounced "satan-t," which is probably why they felt that the reader should be advised on how to pronounce it.)  In any case, most of the site is devoted to "proving" that the Great Flood of Noah happened, as per the Book of Genesis, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a big fat lie, and so on.  But one page struck me as especially interesting.  It was entitled "Ancient Viking Brachiosaurus," and makes the claim that the early inhabitants of Scandinavia depicted dinosaurs on their art -- because, well, real dinosaurs existed during the Viking age.

As evidence, they produce photographs of artifacts like this one, next to which they have helpfully superimposed a photograph of a brachiosaur skull and an artist's rendition of a brachiosaur, to make sure that you don't miss the similarity:

They also bring up the mention in Norse myth of giant serpents, like Ni∂hogg, the dragon who spent his time gnawing on the "World-Tree" Yggdrasil, and Jörmungandr, or "Midgard's serpent," the giant serpent that lay underwater, coiled around Midgard ("Middle-Earth," or the home of humans).  And this, we are told, is sufficient evidence to buy that dinosaurs were contemporaneous with humanity.

Okay, where do I start?

Let's begin with the artifact itself.  Even the S8intCom people admit that it hasn't been authenticated as being of genuine Viking make; in fact, they got the photograph of it from eBay, where it is being sold for $140 by some guy from Latvia.  Now, understand, it might be authentic; I'm not saying I have any reason to believe it isn't.  And questioning the artifact's provenance is only the beginning of the problems here.

A more serious problem is that dinosaurs of the genus Brachiosaurus are only known to come from the Morrison Formation, which is a Jurassic Age sedimentary rock formation... from western North America.  There were related forms, including Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Camarosaurus, and others --  but the various long-necked sauropods seem to have been largely a group confined to what is now the western United States.  (There is some evidence from the fossil record that similar species may have occurred in North Africa, but that is uncertain.)  In any case, what's pretty clear is that at no time in the past did Brachiosaurus and his cousins stomp their way around Scandinavia.

Well, the Vikings were great travelers, right?  Maybe they saw live brachiosaurs on their travels, and were impressed (who wouldn't be?), and depicted them in their art.  Okay, but the problem is, they also depicted other things, like trolls, multi-headed giants, flying horses with eight legs, guys with magic hammers, hundred-foot-tall wolves, and boars made of gold that can run through the air.  And as far as I can see, S8intCom isn't claiming any of that is true.  They pick the one thing from Norse myth and art that supports their claim -- that dinosaurs coexisted with humans -- and conveniently ignore the rest.

We also have the additional problem that the two actual examples of dinosaur-like creatures mentioned in Norse myth -- Ni∂hogg and Jörmungandr -- aren't, really, all that dinosaur-like.  Ni∂hogg, in fact, lived underground, but liked visitors -- and he could talk, spending his time in riddles and abstruse arguments with any who would listen.  (Tolkien's talking dragons Smaug and Glaurung were almost certainly inspired by Ni∂hogg.)  As for Jörmungandr, he was thousands of miles long, and lived underwater, and was the offspring of the god Loki and the giantess Angrbo∂a.  Neither one of these sounds like any dinosaur I've ever heard of.

Last, if the dinosaurs were contemporaneous with the Vikings, why haven't we found any bones?  Or teeth?  Or anything?  There are animal remains that date from that age -- some that have been mummified, or partially fossilized (full fossilization usually takes longer than 1,000 years), and others that have had their bones or teeth fashioned into things like knife handles, jewelry, and the like.  Why no 1,000 year old dinosaur parts?

What I find most maddening about this whole thing is that the writers at S8intCom want to take a tiny part of scientific research -- the actual dinosaur bones themselves -- and an equally tiny part of antiquarian research into the art and myth of ancient Scandinavia, and effectively jettison the rest in favor of their own favorite Bronze Age mythological explanation of the world.  The rest of science -- that the Earth is a billion years old, that the dinosaurs (with the exception of the lineage that led to birds) died out during the Cretaceous Extinction 65 million years ago, that evolution is correct as per the evidence -- they ignore or argue away.  The depiction of things like flying horses and hundred-headed frost giants is considered the fanciful ravings of ignorant pagans, but a piece of dinosaur-like Norse jewelry is a valuable find that could overturn everything we understand about paleontology.  They're perfectly willing to take 1% of the evidence, and use it to support the ridiculous ideas they already had, and ignore the other 99% as misleading or downright wrong.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'd just love it if the Norse myths were true.  They've always been my favorites, even if they take kind of a harsh view of the universe, what with the man-eating wolves and evil jotuns and fierce Valkyries, and the world getting destroyed at Ragnarokk, and all.  But at least they're better than the biblical myths, with an all-powerful, but petulant and capricious, god basically smiting the crap out of everyone for such egregious offenses as collecting firewood on the sabbath or eating shrimp or wearing clothes made of two different kinds of thread.  Given the choice, I'd take my chances with Odin and Loki and Thor.