Conducting the Crazy Train

I keep wanting to avoid writing blog posts on the topic of politics, and the politicians keep not letting me.

This time it's Ted Cruz who appears in Skeptophilia based on statements from him and his campaign officials that leave me no possible conclusion other than that the whole lot of them seem like raving lunatics.

This is, by itself, not that worrisome.  Lunatics have been running for public office since time immemorial (I'm lookin' at you, Lyndon LaRouche), and mostly they have been unsuccessful.  Even though there's a flush of early support, eventually people recognize the nutjobs for what they are, and they (the nutjobs) end up getting caught on the unpleasant end of a landslide.

This time, though, it doesn't seem to be happening.  There are lots of nuts still in the running, and Ted Cruz is currently polling at 10%.  Now this may not seem like a lot, but recall that the Loony Vote is now being spread out amongst a bunch of candidates.  If any of them drop out, you can expect Cruz's support to rise.

That's despite the fact that he and his staffers keep saying things that, under other circumstances, would qualify you for a psychiatric evaluation.

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

Let's start with the co-chair of Cruz's campaign in Virginia, Cynthia Dunbar.  Dunbar was once a member of the Texas State Board of Education, during which time she said her sworn duty was to fix the "biblically-illiterate society" we live in.  Given the current textbook mess in Texas, it seems like she and her colleagues have achieved their aim pretty well, even though the downside is that they are promoting the teaching of a mythologically-based doctrine as if it were actual accurate history and science.

Unsurprisingly, this strategy heavily depends on making shit up.  About her support of American history texts that make it sound like Moses brought the Constitution along with the Ten Commandments when he descended from Mount Sinai, Dunbar said, "One of my favorite historians — brilliant, brilliant man — says that 94 percent of the quotes of the founding fathers contemporaneous to our nation’s founding were either directly or indirectly from holy scripture. We know what that means when we say ‘directly’ — they’re quoting scripture.  What does it mean when we say ‘indirectly’?  They were quoting men who were quoting scripture."

But this time, Dunbar is aiming higher.  She doesn't just want religion taught in public school, she wants to do away with secular education entirely:

It’s what I call the seed policy.  If you think about it, every major social issue you’re encountering as legislators actually directs back to what it talks about it in Genesis, ‘if I would put enmity between you and the seed of the woman.’  Because what happens, what is abortion?  Abortion is the destruction of the seed.  What is homosexuality?  It is the prevention of the seed.  And what is education? It is potential deception of the seed...  When we have 88 to 90 percent, which is approximately the number of the students that are being educated within our socialized education system, effectively indoctrinating our children with our own tax dollars, guess what?  We lose every other issue.  We lose life, we lose marriage — we lose all of it.  So I think this is the linchpin issue.

Now, lest you think that Dunbar is only a staffer whose ideas don't accurately reflect those of her boss, Cruz himself demonstrated his position as conductor of the Crazy Train this week with his claim that if he doesn't win, hordes of raving atheists will descend upon Arlington Cemetery and start defiling graves:

We're just steps away from the chisels at Arlington coming out to remove crosses and stars of David from tombstones.  It could happen if five liberals dominate the Supreme Court.

Right.  Because we atheists have nothing better to do than to find tombstones of the devout, and cut away every mention of religion.  And dance on the graves while doing it, probably.

What is wryly amusing about all of this is that the kind of thing Cruz is talking about -- a group of ideologues stepping in and demanding that everyone think like they do, or else -- is a sentiment you hear way more from the extremely religious than you do from the non-religious.  Most of us non-religious people like to use our free time to kick back with a beer, not in figuring out new and improved ways of oppressing everyone who disagrees with us.

But of course, "Hey, I've talked with religious people and non-religious people, and most of 'em on both sides are pretty nice," is not a talking point that gets you votes with Cruz's constituency.  Cruz's constituency thrives on fear.  If it turns out that the people they revile actually turn out to have no intention of forcing anyone else to believe anything, the whole thing collapses like a punctured balloon.

And they can't have that.  So they make up stories of deceived "seed" and atheists attacking headstones with chisels.

In my moments of yearning, I wish that once -- just once -- we could have an election where there was calm, rational discussion of the issues, followed by people voting for the candidate whose solutions to our problems seemed the most likely to succeed.  Instead, what we have is a race where all the candidates seem determined to win votes by out-wackoing all of the others.

Okay, back to writing on topics that like Bigfoot and ghosts and psychics.  At least that's a pretend world that makes me happy.

The bottom line

Sometimes I wonder if what drew me into rationalism was the fact that there is a whole side of my personality that is fanatically devoted to thinking irrationally.

In other words, my skepticism has evolved as a kind of internal defense mechanism.  On the one hand, I am capable of putting together evidence logically, making correct inferences, and thinking calmly and dispassionately about a wide variety of subjects.  On the other, I am simultaneously capable of being a wildly illogical neurotic who misinterprets everything, comes to conclusions that are based in fear and anxiety rather than fact, and if allowed, will run around in circles babbling incoherently in complete freak-out mode.

The whole thing comes up because yesterday I had the Medical Procedure For People Over 50 That Must Not Be Named.  I was, actually, five years overdue for the MPFPO50TMNBN, because I was heavily invested in pretending that it didn't exist.  I have spent the last five years completely convinced that screening and early cancer detection are absolutely critical, and also that the safest bet was to avoid the procedure entirely because if I had it, the doctor would tell me that I had three months to live.

But my wife and two friends finally twisted my arm into making an appointment.  The result was that I spent three weeks following scheduling my visit in an increasing state of panic.  I found myself having thoughts like, "Wow.  I wonder if this is the last time I'll hear this song, given that I have a terminal illness?" and "I hope my family will be able to get over their grief and move on quickly."  Knowing that these were ridiculous things to think -- I have absolutely zero incidence of cancer in my family, back to all eight great-grandparents, I'm not and have never been a smoker, I exercise regularly and eat right -- made no difference at all.

Of course, the closer it got, the worse it got.  Two days ago I had to start what is, honestly, the worst phase of the procedure, which is a thing with the innocent name of "prep."  "Prep" involves drinking ten glasses full of a liquid that appears to be chilled weasel snot.  After the second glass, I was reacting a little like Dumbledore did when Harry Potter had to force him to drink all the liquid from the basin so they could get the Horcrux.

But the taste is not the worst part.  The worst part is that the weasel snot causes a set of symptoms that I will not describe more fully out of respect for the more delicate members of my readership.  Suffices to say that I have it on good authority that "prep" was ruled out by Tomás de Torquemada as a means for inducing the prisoners of the Spanish Inquisition to confess to heresy, on the basis of its being too unpleasant and humiliating.

Anyhow, yesterday morning at 7 AM I was finally done with "prep," and my wife drove me to the hospital for the procedure. I sat in the car watching the trees and houses zoom past, feeling more and more like a condemned prisoner being marched toward the gallows.  I knew I was going to be sedated for the procedure, which was something of a relief; but still, the knowledge of what they could potentially find was absolutely terrifying.

At last, I was on the examining table, an IV in my arm, wearing one of those stylish hospital gowns that seem specifically designed to make it impossible for you to cover up your naughty bits when you move, and trembling like I had hypothermia.  My wife kissed me goodbye ("really goodbye," I thought), the doctor/executioner came in, the nurse put some sedative in my IV...

... and I proceeded to sleep soundly through the entire procedure.  I woke up in the recovery room and was immediately told that the whole thing had gone swimmingly, and that I didn't have to come back for a retest for ten years because I had no sign whatsoever of abnormality.

Well, physical abnormality, anyhow.  Even in my groggy post-sedative state, I was lying there thinking, "What an incredible goober I am.  I spent the last three weeks working myself up into a lather over nothing."  Which is absolutely true, but (I can say from hard experience) will not change my behavior one iota next time.  My rational brain learns from experience; my irrational brain has exactly the opposite reaction.  "Uh-huh," it shouts, flecks of spittle forming in the corners of its mouth, "all this means is that it'll be more likely that you'll be dying next time!  Mark my words!"

So I suppose, given my split personality, it's no real wonder that when I discovered rationalism during my teenage years, I embraced it wholeheartedly.  It seemed like a good way to immunize myself against loopy magical thinking.  And it's worked -- at least most of the time.  But like some latent parasitic infection, the magical thinking is still there, and all it needs is the proper incentive to come roaring back and screaming my calm logic into stunned silence.

In any case, I'm glad my irrational brain was wrong, because not only is it irrational, it's also a dreadful pessimist.  Apparently I will live to write Skeptophilia another day.  Unless, of course, there's something else I'm dying of that the test didn't catch.  Always a possibility, that.

A win for the good guys

I find it discouraging, sometimes, how often the hucksters win.  We still have homeopathic "remedies" on pharmacy shelves.  Selling supplements of dubious benefit and largely unknown side effects is still a multi-million dollar business.  Throw in all of the purveyors of woo who every year bilk thousands of people out of their hard-earned cash, and it all adds up to a pretty dismal picture.

But still, every once in a while, the good guys come out on top.

This  happened just this week with the announcement that the creators and marketers of the "Lumosity" brain-training games are being ordered to pay $2 million in reparations to customers who fell for their "unfounded claims that Lumosity games can help users perform better at work and in school, and reduce or delay cognitive impairment associated with age and other serious health conditions."

The selling points were attractive, with the aging population becoming increasingly (and justifiably) spooked by the specter of Alzheimer's and other age-related dementias.  I can understand the fear; I watched my aunt, my mother's older sister, outlive both of her siblings, finally dying at the age of 90 after spending the last ten years of her life essentially unresponsive and needing 24-hour care due to the ravages of Alzheimer's.  It's my worst nightmare, really.  The idea of having my body go on long after my mind is gone is absolutely terrifying.

So the claim that you could stave off dementia by playing some computer games was appealing.  So, too, were there other claims -- that you would improve your performance at work, at school, and on the sports field, feel more alert, perform cognitive tasks more quickly and accurately.  A direct quote from their advertisements said that playing their games three or four times a week would help users to reach "their full potential in every aspect of life."  With that kind of claim, it's understandable why people fell for their sales pitch.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The problem was, it had no basis in fact, and the Federal Trade Commission is requiring Lumos Labs, the company which created and marketed Lumosity, to refund money to their customers because they were participating in "misleading health advertising."

"Lumosity preyed on consumers’ fears about age-related cognitive decline, suggesting their games could stave off memory loss, dementia, and even Alzheimer’s disease," said Jessica Rich, Director of the Federal Trade Commission’s Bureau of Consumer Protection.  "But Lumosity simply did not have the science to back up its ads."

In fact, it wasn't simply a lack of evidence; there is significant evidence against their claims.  A 2014 joint statement from Stanford University and the Max Planck Institute said that "The strong consensus of this group is that the scientific literature does not support claims that the use of software-based 'brain games' alters neural functioning in ways that improve general cognitive performance in everyday life, or prevent cognitive slowing and brain disease."

But flying in the face of scientific evidence wasn't the only problem.  The FTC found that "...the defendants [failed] to disclose that some consumer testimonials featured on the website had been solicited through contests that promised significant prizes, including a free iPad, a lifetime Lumosity subscription, and a round-trip to San Francisco."

So promoting falsehoods for profit + paying people to give you good reviews = a $2 million penalty.  Which is exactly as it should be.

It's high time that the FTC crack down on these spurious claims.  You have to wonder how long it'll take before they can get the supplement-and-remedies cadre to stop hiding behind "This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, or cure any human illness" as a catch-all disclaimer and general Get Out of Jail Free card.

In any case, I find the whole thing heartening.  I do believe in the principle of caveat emptor, but we sure as hell wouldn't have to invoke it quite so often if the powers-that-be would pull back the reins on the false advertisers.

This is your brain on creativity

As a writer and a musician, I am intensely interested in the neurology of the creative process, and especially how creativity interfaces with emotion.  For me, both writing and music are about evoking emotion; even, to some extent, non-fiction writing, which in a lot of ways is supposed to be dispassionate and emotionless.  After all, why do people choose particular academic fields to pursue?  My own favored area of study -- population genetics -- I delved into for one reason: because the ideas are cool, and messing around with maps of allele frequencies makes me happy.

Okay, I know I'm a little odd.  Not that this will be a great shock to regular readers of this blog.

In any case, emotion is important, and in my opinion a writer of fiction, a musician, or an artist that fails to evoke emotion has, in large part, failed entirely.  The two parts of the generative process -- creativity and emotion -- are inextricably linked.

So I was really excited (although unsurprised) by the findings of a paper in this week's issue of Nature entitled, "Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians."  The paper describes a study by Malinda J. McPherson, Frederick S. Barrett, Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, Patpong Jiradejvong, and Charles J. Limb, of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, that found that there is a neurological underpinning for the expression of emotion in creative pursuits.

"The bottom line is that emotion matters," said Charles Limb, MD, senior author of the study.  "It can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re being creative and another way when you’re not.  Instead, there are greater and lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions.  And emotion plays a crucially important role in these differences."

The researchers took twelve jazz pianists, and showed them photographs of individuals expressing negative, positive, and neutral emotions.  Then, they asked the pianists to improvise a piece that expressed the emotion of the photograph they were shown.

[image courtesy of photographer Zoe Caldwell and the Wikimedia Commons]

The results were fascinating.  The researchers write:

When we examined the functional neuroimaging results, we found that the creative expression of emotions through music may engage emotion-processing areas of the brain in ways that differ from the perception of emotion in music.  We also observed a functional network involved in creative performance, and the extent of activation and deactivation in this network was directly modulated by emotional intent.  Our viewing controls showed that there were few significant differences between neural activity in response to any of the visual cues, therefore the differences between improvisation conditions are the result of the creative expression of emotion through music, rather than a direct response to the visual stimuli.  These results highlight that creativity is context-dependent, and emotional context critically impacts the neural substrates of artistic creativity.

Which is incredibly cool, but (for me) unsurprising, given my sense that creativity and emotion are impossible to tease apart.  My main creative world is in writing -- I am a musician, but not a composer -- and I have found myself so emotionally involved with scenes I'm writing that I can lose myself within them.  The creative enterprise, in a lot of ways, is very primal, seated in a part of the brain not really under conscious control.  This study showed that for people who express through creating music, the process can be equally visceral:

Creativity is not a single unified set of mental processes or abilities. While some types of creativity may require intense concentration and thought, other forms of creativity, such as jazz improvisation, may be predicated on "letting go..."   [T]his study shows that the impulse to create emotionally expressive music may have a basic neural origin: emotion modulates the neural systems involved in creativity, allowing musicians to engage limbic centers of their brain and enter flow states.  The human urge to express emotions through art may derive from these widespread changes in limbic, reward, and prefrontal areas during emotional expression.  Within jazz improvisation, certain emotional states may open musicians to deeper flow states or more robust stimulation of reward centers.

So the whole thing is fascinating.  It's nice to understand a little more about what happens in the brains of creative people; until recently, the whole idea of creativity has seemed to reside outside of the realm of science.  The fact that we're now zeroing in on how creativity, emotion, and the physiology of the brain are intertwined...

... well, it just makes me happy.

That's no moon. It's a space station.

The whole subject of "book reviews" has been much on my mind lately, because being (as well as a blogger) a fiction writer, with several titles to my name on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I am constantly monitoring my links to see if I've gotten good reviews.  Or bad reviews.  Or any reviews.  Because, let's face it, Brendan Behan was on to something when he said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

On the other hand, you have to wonder how accurate reviews really are, and I mean no disrespect to the people who have reviewed my work.  Especially those who have given it five stars.

The subject comes up because I was doing some research for today's post, on a topic suggested by a student, to wit, the conjecture that the Moon is an artificial construct.  It seems like the first serious exploration of the claim was done by Christopher Knight in his 2007 book, Who Built The Moon?, but it has recently come back to light because the cause has been taken up by noted wingnut David Icke in his latest publication, Human Race, Get Off Your Knees: The Lion Sleeps No More.  And no, I'm not making that title up, and I wonder if you had the same reaction as I did when you read it, which is to hear deep voices in the background going, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh."

Be that as it may, Icke is into the artificial-moon theory in a big way.  Here's a quote from his book:

I had that overwhelming feeling at my computer that the Moon was artificial and was being used to control life on this planet.  It is the Reptilians’ control system.  The placement of the Moon dictates the speed of Earth’s rotation and the angle at which it rotates – 22.5 degrees from vertical.  This angle creates the four seasons because of the way planet faces the Sun during its annual orbit.  The Moon has a major influence on the tides – far more than the Sun – and with the human body consisting of some 70 per cent water it is bound to have a fantastic influence on us, even on that level alone.  The Moon also dictates so much of our relationship with time, and the term ‘month’ is really Moonth, a period based on the cycles of the Moon.  The realisation that the Moon is a gigantic spacecraft is the strand that connects all the rest, not just in relation to Moon anomalies, but also to life on Earth and the conspiracy to enslave humanity.  The fact is that the Reptilians in the Moon and in underground bases on Mars depend on humans and the Earth for food – their very survival.   This is one key reason why they are desperate not to be exposed.  Water and other resources are constantly being taken from this planet to the Moon and Mars and this is not a new phenomena, either.  Ancient Zulu stories say the same.

Well, far be it from me to rely on the findings of science when they're contradicted by "ancient Zulu stories."  Even if it implies that because the human body is 70% water, we experience tides.

[image courtesy of photographer Luc Viatour and the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyway, Icke goes on like this for 690 pages, talking about how the Moon must be hollow, that it's older than the Earth is, and has "anomalous quantities" of "metals such as brass and mica" (for the non-geologists in the studio audience, let me point out that mica isn't a metal), that particles of metallic iron on the Moon's surface are "mysteriously resistant to rusting" (not a surprise given that rusting is oxidation, a process that is unlikely to occur in a place with no atmosphere), and that the maria ("seas") are places where meteorite collisions resulted in damage, which had to be repaired by the Reptilians using "an artificial cement-like substance."

690 pages of this. And it costs $25.84, plus shipping and handling, to purchase it from Amazon.

So anyway, I'm wading through all of this, and just shaking my head, but then I saw the thing that made me shake my head so much I looked like I had a severe disorder of the central nervous system -- that this book has received 110 reviews, of which 74 gave it five stars.  Here are a few selected phrases from these reviews:

• Icke is one of the very few conspiracy whistleblowers who has developed a relatively advanced spiritual awareness from which he can provide a useful context and understanding of the material he has uncovered.
• If you are sick of all this government crap then you should read this book because it really opens your eyes to the truth and makes you realize how stupid and fake this world really is.
• This could be the most important book EVER written. If you don't know where the world is headed, you need to find out and David Icke tells how we can return to freedom.
• Most informative book there is about what is happening in the world today and who is causing it. It also tells you what you can do to change it. 

All of which makes me, as a teacher of critical thinking, want to weep softly and bang my head on my desk.  However, there is one thought that gives me hope.

Reviews are, by their very nature, a skewed sample.  People who review this book have (one would hope) read it, which means that the presumably huge number of people in this world who would read the book's description, see its price, and then laugh and say "no freakin' way" are already eliminated from the pool.  Only once you have forked over your $25.84 (plus shipping and handling) are you going to be able to review the book, and this speaks to a certain level of, shall we say, credulity right from the starting gate.

So, anyway, I'm trying to be positive, here, which is sometimes difficult.  Wingnuts will always be out there trumpeting their theories; that is, after all, what wingnuts do.  And there will always be a small group of people who think that their nutty ideas make total sense, and I emphasize the words "small group" with every hopeful thought of which I am capable.  For right now, I'll just try to put the whole thing out of my mind, if only to stop the voices in my head from singing, "A wimoweh, a wimoweh, a wimoweh," which is getting a little annoying.

Private jets and deliberate contradictions

Two stories in the last couple of days highlight for me what is one of the most mystifying things about the extremely devout.

Note, however, that I am not talking about the majority of the religious, who are (I am convinced) perfectly fine with living their lives as they see fit, and letting the rest of us live ours.  But among the minority who are of the more rigid variety, there is a deep streak of irrationality that doesn't so much leave me frustrated as it does puzzled.

My puzzlement surrounds the undying support some religious leaders have, even though they say things that demonstrate conclusively that they are at best ripoff artists, and at worst, batshit insane.

Let's start with Reverend Ken Copeland, the Texas pastor who evidently thinks that Jesus's command to give away all of your belongings and follow him was more of a strongly-worded suggestion than it was an outright order.  Copeland has become filthy rich from his ministries, and owns 33 acres outside of Fort Worth that contains the Eagle Mountain International Church, television production and audio recording facilities, warehouse and distribution facilities, residences for the Copeland family...

... and the "Kenneth Copeland Airport."

It's this last that brought him to my attention yesterday, after he went on record as saying that god wants Copeland to have several private jets, because you apparently can't talk to god in coach.  Here's a transcript of his interview with Jesse Duplantis, on the television show Believers Voice of Victory:

Duplantis:  Brother Copeland, I was flying home from a meeting, I had come out of a glorious meeting, me and Creflo Dollar were preaching, it was a glorious meeting.  I was, for lack of a better way to say it, I was spiritually high.  People were saved, touched, and blessed.  I was on the plane that god so graciously gave us, and I was flying home.  As I was going home, the lord, he said quickly to me, "Jesse?  Do you like your plane?"  Now, I thought that was an odd statement.  I said, "Well, certainly, lord."  He said, "Do you really like it?"  And I thought, "Well, yes, lord."  Then he said this: "So, that's it?"  I didn't know how to handle that, so I went, "What?"  And he said, "Are you gonna let your faith stagnate?"  And when he said that, it shocked me.  I went, "Oh, wait."  I literally unbuckled the seatbelt on the plane and I stood up.  The pilot said, "You need something?"  I said, "No, I'm talking to god right now."  So he went back to flying.  And I said, "Lord, I don't think I was letting my faith stagnate."  He said, "So this is all I could ever do."  I said, "You're trying to tell me something."  He said, "Go to the Book of Amos."  So, if you have the Book of Amos, I want to read to you from the scriptures. 

Copeland:  Can I interrupt you?  You couldn't have done that on an airliner. 

Duplantis:  Nope.  No way. 

Copeland:  Stand up and say, "What did you say, lord?"  Some guy would say, "What the hell does he think he's doing?"  This is so important.  And for those of you who are just not coming into these things, in the first place, Jesse and I and others, Creflo and Keith Moore...  The world is in such a shape that we can't get there without this.  The mess that the airlines are in today -- I would have to stop -- I'm being very conservative -- I would have to stop 75 to 80, maybe 90 percent of what I'm doing.  Because you can't get there from here. 

Duplantis:  It's impossible. 

Copeland:  And this was such a good illustration... That's why we're on that airplane, we can talk to god.  When I was flying for Oral Roberts, Brother DeWeese, he said to me, "Now, Brother Copeland, this is sanctuary.  It protects the anointed of Brother Roberts.  Now, you keep your mouth shut, you wait until he talks, because when he's on a meeting he doesn't talk to anybody but god."  Now Oral used to fly airlines, but even back then, it got to the place that it was agitating his spirit, he had people coming up to him because he'd become famous, and they wanted him to pray for them and all.  You can't manage that today, with this dope-filled world, you're getting into a large tube with a bunch of demons.  It's deadly. 

Duplantis:  It works on your heart. 

Copeland:  So I wanted to make that clear, so that the devil can't say to you, "See that preacher spending all that money..."  No, that's not what this is about.  I'm in the soul business.  We got a dying world here, a dying world.

Now, I'm not puzzled by Copeland and Duplantis themselves.  Their motivations are pretty crystal-clear.  What amazes me is that they have thousands of followers who still give them cash -- lots of cash.  Then, apparently, the donors sit back and watch the preachers spend it on lavish living and private jets, and they don't once say, "Wait.  Maybe this isn't what my religion should be about."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Then we had evangelist Kent Hovind once again commenting on the literal truth of the bible, and how we evolutionary types are evil emissaries of the devil.  You know, the usual stuff.  But then he said something that caught my attention:

If I was God, I would write the [bible] in such a way that those who don’t want to believe in me anyway would think they found something. ‘Aha, here’s why I don’t believe.'  And then they could go on with their own life because they don’t want to believe God anyways.  I would put things in there that would appear without digging to be contradictions. I don’t think that’s deceptive, I think that’s wise for the Heavenly Father to weed out those who are really serious. 

Long again I made a choice to believe the Bible until it’s proven wrong. 

I know others who have decided, ‘I’m not going to believe it until you prove everything is right,.  Okay, you do whatever you want to do, but I made the opposite decision.

So, let me get this straight: the bible is the inerrant word of god, 100% literally true from beginning to end, except that there are some untrue or contradictory parts deliberately thrown in by god to trip up people who have weak faith, and those people get sent to hell to burn in horrible agony for eternity?

Which only brings up two questions: (1) What kind of person would worship a vindictive and spiteful god who would do such a thing?  And (2) If that's true, how do you tell the wrong parts in the bible from the right ones?

Oh, and there's a third question: (3)  Are you insane?

Like I said: I know plenty of reasonable, thoughtful religious folks, in whose lives religion provides context and comfort.  But I find it hard to believe that anyone can listen to the words of people like Duplantis, Copeland, and Hovind, and not immediately say, "Okay, this is bullshit."

But judging from their bank accounts, apparently there are lots of them.

Information revolution

One of the most common tropes that you hear in anti-evolution arguments is what they call the "problem of information."  The idea is that random mutations can't create new information -- perhaps they can modify the information that is already there, but evolution provides no way to generate novel genes (and therefore novel structures).

As Royal Truman put it over at the True Origin Archive:

Selection inevitably removes information from the gene pool... [C]onsider regulatory genes that switch other genes ‘on’ or ‘off’.  That is, they control whether or not the information in a gene will be decoded, so the trait will be expressed in the creature.  This would enable very rapid and ‘jumpy’ changes, which are still changes involving already created information, not generation of new information, even if latent (hidden) information was turned on...   Now, it is questionable whether any mutation can be shown to lead to some kind of improvement without causing deleterious functioning of some processes already encoded on the DNA (this is very different from the question whether one mutation could allow some members to temporarily survive some drastic environmental change).   Presumably a very bad mutation leads to death, weeding out such mutated genes from that species’ gene pool forever.

Despite Truman's confidence and the apparent sophistication of his argument -- he spends a long time, for example, wandering about in the realm of Bayesian information theory to support his views -- almost all biologists consider this view dead wrong.  As an example, consider preaptation  -- the evolution of a gene (and its gene product) in one context, and a small change in the gene resulting in a novel gene product with a completely different function.

The most striking instance of preaptation is the class of proteins called crystallins, which make up the lens of the vertebrate eye.  This is wryly amusing given the fact that the eye is one of those structures that the anti-evolutionist types call "irreducibly complex," even though as Richard Dawkins writes:

[P]lausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom.  A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye.  Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human.  Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours.  It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all.

Another blow to the "irreducible complexity" of the eye was dealt a blow when it was found that the transparent proteins in the lens are related genetically to a gene that produces heat-shock proteins, proteins produced during various types of physical stress (including thermal stress, which is what gave them their name).  One small mutation in the gene for heat-shock proteins creates a gene that makes a clear protein that can be used for focusing light.

If that's not "new information"...?

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even with examples like this, people of Truman's stripe aren't convinced.  They argue that okay, you can modify what's already there, but no one has been able to show how mutations create anything genetic that is genuinely new.

Until two days ago.

A team led by Jorge Ruiz-Orera of the Hospital del Mar Research Institute of Barcelona, Spain published a paper in PLOS-One called, "Origins of De Novo Genes in Humans and Chimpanzees," in which they show exactly how this can happen.  In their groundbreaking analysis, they have basically given a death blow to the so-called "problem of information."  Ruiz-Orera et al. write:

For the past 20 years scientists have puzzled over a strange-yet-ubiquitous genomic phenomenon; in every genome there are sets of genes which are unique to that particular species i.e. lacking homologues in any other species.  How have these genes originated?  The advent of massively parallel RNA sequencing (RNA-Seq) has provided new clues to this question, with the discovery of an unexpectedly high number of transcripts that do not correspond to typical protein-coding genes, and which could serve as a substrate for this process...  We have found thousands of transcripts that are human and/or chimpanzee-specific and which are likely to have originated de novo from previously non-transcribed regions of the genome.  We have observed an enrichment in transcription factor binding sites in the promoter regions of these genes when compared to other species; this is consistent with the idea that the gain of new regulatory motifs results in de novo gene expression.  We also show that some of the genes encode new functional proteins expressed in brain or testis, which may have contributed to phenotypic novelties in human evolution.

I think they show admirable restraint in not taking at least a sidewise swipe at the Intelligent Design advocates.  But in their discussion, even the most diehard IDer couldn't fail to catch the drift of their last statement:

Our results indicate that the expression of new loci in the genome takes place at a very high rate and is probably mediated by random mutations that generate new active promoters.  These newly expressed transcripts would form the substrate for the evolution of new genes with novel functions.

Which I think is about as close to a "boo-yah!' as is allowed in an academic paper.

The history of evolutionary research has been a long series of struggles against objections from individuals who have a vested interest -- usually religious in nature -- in the evolutionary model being wrong.  This assume-your-conclusion stance is pretty transparent to those of us who subscribe to the scientific method as a means for understanding, but their certainty has been remarkably resistant to attack.  Whether the research by Ruiz-Orera et al. will convince anyone remains to be seen, but at least it does one thing; it shows up yet another facet of their argument as specious.

And that, after all, is progress.  Or as Ruiz-Orera might put it, "new information."