Gabrielle's Friendship Day: Institute for Creation Research

Showing posts with label Institute for Creation Research. Show all posts

A repeated lie

It's okay if it's for Jesus

The Institute for Creation Research likes to honor its founder, the late Henry M. Morris, by reprinting his articles in Acts & Facts magazine. The April 2011 issue recycles Morris's essay on “Defending the Faith.” According to the tag at the end, the article was originally published in January 1997. I presume the following paragraph was carried over intact from Morris's initial version:

The excellent book Of Pandas and People was written to present biology in terms of “intelligent design,” without any reference to God, the Bible, or creation, hoping that it could be adopted as a high school biology textbook. Again, nothing doing! It was merely a sneaky way of getting creationism into the schools, said its opponents, and they won.

How closely must one have followed the creation/evolution argument to laugh at Morris's claim? Anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to the attempts by creationists to subvert public school science is aware that Pandas and People was not written as a intelligent design textbook. The original manuscripts conclusively demonstrated that “in the beginning” it was overtly a creation-science book. This was amusingly revealed during the Kitzmiller trial, when the search-and-replace revision of the manuscript was shown to have produced “cdesign proponentsists” as the undeniable intermediate form between creationists and intelligent design advocates.

We can try to be charitable about Morris's blatant mischaracterization of Pandas and People. It's possible that he took the published 1989 ID-based edition at face value and was innocently unaware of the book's true origins. It is not, after all, an ICR publication. However, what excuse does ICR have for republishing Morris's misrepresentation—deliberate or not—in 2011? Kitzmiller occurred in 2005. The current editorial staff at Acts & Facts has had more than five years to absorb its lesson. Nevertheless, they reprinted “Defending the Faith” without so much as a footnote to indicate that Morris was mistaken about Pandas and People. A decent respect by Christians for their own cherished scriptures should prompt them to pay attention to the injunction against bearing false witness.

They have no excuse.

Solving for X in Xmas

And getting it wrong

Henry Morris III has enlisted in the ranks of the defenders in the war on Christmas. In the December 2010 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research, Dr. Morris presents us with “Xmas: Removing the Reason for the Season”:

Sometime during the last century (it is difficult to find an actual beginning), the word “Xmas” began creeping into public correspondence and advertisements. It was a little thing, hardly noticed by anyone, but it set the stage for a profound movement away from “Christ” in any public discourse. X is, of course, the universal symbol for the unknown.²

Scary, isn't it? Morris sums up:

Quietly and unobtrusively at first, but rising to a crescendo of legal and governmental attacks against Christianity, the words and the symbols of the gospel message are being purged from open expression.

Permit me, however, to register a mildly dissenting note. When it comes to scholarship, creationists have the advantage of not having to respect factual data. Morris follows this template himself, but stumbles slightly by letting the truth slip in. If you go to the bottom of his article to check out footnote 2, you'll see that Morris admitted to something that vitiates his entire argument:

2. X has long been a mathematical symbol for an unknown variable. X later came into use as an abbreviation for the name Christ because it is the first letter of the Greek word for “Christ.” To the vast majority of people in our culture, however, the X in “Xmas” would be completely meaningless, effectively removing the Reason for the season.

Indeed. I was quite used to seeing the “chi-rho” in my parish church when I was a child. The chi looks like an X and stands for the “Ch” in “Christ.” It does not stand for “the unknown.”

Busted!

Morris has his history all wrong. In his compendious History of Mathematical Notations, Florian Cajori points out something important in Paragraph 340:

The use of z, y, x .... to represent unknowns is due to René Descartes, in his La géométrie (1637).

And “later” it became a symbol for Christ? No, Dr. Morris, you've got it all wrong—unless the early Christians occupied catacombs under the streets of Paris in the seventeenth century.

I'm sure you're accustomed to getting away with falsehoods, Dr. Morris, but you should be more careful about making a fool of yourself in your pseudo-scholarly footnotes. Have a merry Xmas anyway.

A too-easy question

Ooh! Ooh! I know! I know!

The October 2010 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research is emblazoned on its cover with a colorful display of astronomical images, including the planet Saturn. Text is laid over the cover art, spelling out the question, “Why does the universe look so old?”

I think I know the answer to this one:

Because it's old.

Poor creationists. They have to labor so diligently, so faithfully, and so blindly, to rationalize their God's duplicity. He may have implied in his holy book that the universe was created a scant few thousands of years ago, but then he went and made it look billions of years old. Either their God is a liar or he is a prankster. Loki or Coyote. It's not a very satisfying choice, is it?

Clumsily pruning the family tree

Attacking evolution root and branch

I can always rely on Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research to provide me with some wrong-headed diversion. The November 2009 issue was no exception.

ICR makes a fetish of appending academic degrees to the names of the authors in its publications. It's probably supposed to give their articles a veneer of scientific credibility. Brian Thomas, the writer of Did Humans Evolve from “Ardi”? glories in the possession of an M.S. He is featured in Acts & Facts as a science writer—at least, that's what they call him. In this role, he takes on the classification of Ardipithecus ramidus as a likely human ancestor and the unresolved questions that are still being addressed.

Speculation and evolutionary guesswork, not scientific observations, are offered to bridge these gaps. Consistent with this is the broad use of speculative verbiage on the part of the authors. In the eleven papers in Science, the word “probably” appeared about 78 times, and “suggest,” “suggesting,” “suggestive,” or “suggests” were used 117 times, among other terms that are associated with an unsubstantiated story rather than a scientific description.

I find this interesting. The ICR's “science” writer, who holds a master of “science” degree, appears to think that tentative conclusions have no place in scientific publications. What is that degree in? Political science?

New concepts in scholarship

Taking “ex nihilo” too literally

The notorious case of “Dr. Dino” made it clear that creationists' credentials are often as invalid as their arguments. The creationists, however, crave respect and recognition. It irks them that the scientific community treats them with contempt.

Lawrence E. Ford is the executive editor of Acts & Facts, the monthly magazine of the Institute for Creation Research. He is very unhappy about the failure of creationism's leading lights to get the accolades he thinks they deserve. There are, of course, faithful Christians who are scientists in good standing, but Ford is irritated that they are not his kind of Christian. In the September 2009 edition of Acts & Facts, Ford takes aim at Francis Collins, the scientist appointed by President Obama to head the National Institutes of Health. Collins is known for leading the Human Genome Project, a milestone in scientific endeavor, and for promoting “BioLogos,” which is rather something less. Collins, a professed Christian, would like people to take religion as seriously as science. He established the BioLogos foundation to advance this cause, but he's been having a rough go of it.

Ford and the folks at ICR don't like BioLogos because Collins accepts evolution. While Collins has been criticized for his fuzzy approach to evolution, he is definitely not a creationist. Any religious point of view that doesn't embrace a narrowly fundamental view of six literal days of creation is beyond the pale for the ICR folks.

[Collins] appears to be genuine and sincere in his belief that Jesus Christ is his personal Savior. But quite troubling is Collins' public and proud disbelief in the historicity of the Bible, the existence of Adam and Eve, the event of the Fall, and many more fundamental doctrines of God’s Word—leading one to conclude that even if he is a Christian, his self-selective beliefs are terribly resistant to God’s truth, revealing his dangerously poor view of the power of God.

I am charmed by Ford's unselfconscious choice of the phrase “self-selective beliefs” to criticize Collins. It's difficult to avoid thinking of pots and kettles.

Ford is quite nettled by the comments of Karl Giberson, the man picked by Collins to be the president of BioLogos. Giberson offended Ford by making the following statement:

Our key question is: Why do individuals such as Ken Ham, Tim LaHaye, David Barton, and James Dobson have such extraordinary influence when they are not leaders in their fields?

At the HarperCollins site devoted to Giberson's publications, Giberson goes on to say a few words about The Anointed, his forthcoming book about the leaders of the anti-science cult:

In our book, we juxtapose the above leaders with their more legitimate evangelical counterparts—genuine authorities who largely conform to the standards of the academy and are recognized as leading scholars in their respective fields. This strategy allows us to locate the tension in our project within evangelicalism, avoiding the tendency to caricature the entire evangelical community as hostile to mainstream academia. Our tactic will be to ask why so many evangelicals prefer Ken Ham to Francis Collins, Tim LaHaye to N. T. Wright, David Barton to Mark Noll, and James Dobson to David Myers.

Lawrence Ford seizes on the words “leading scholars” and hurls them back with his own list of cognoscenti:

Is Dr. Giberson ignorant of the scientific contributions of scientists such as Dr. Henry Morris, Dr. Duane Gish, Dr. Ken Cumming, Dr. Steve Austin, Dr. Andrew Snelling, Dr. Jason Lisle, Dr. Russ Humphreys, Dr. John Baumgardner, Dr. Larry Vardiman, Dr. A. E. Wilder-Smith, and many other credentialed and evangelical members of academia who are “leading scholars in their respective fields”?

I bet you know where this is going, don't you? Let us take a moment to examine the “leading scholars” identified by Mr. Ford. There are, in fact, no surprises.

While Google Scholar may not be the most sophisticated tool for examining the output of contemporary researchers, it's readily accessible and quite sufficient for our purposes. What does Google Scholar dredge up for Henry Morris? It's not an impressive list. Dr. Morris is credited with a bunch of creationist publications concerning Noah's flood and two items in his field of engineering: a 1955 paper on Flow in rough conduits and a 1963 book on Applied hydraulics in engineering.

The late Dr. Morris, if he was ever a leading scholar in engineering, has had his day. His is not a name to conjure with in 2009.

How about the estimable Duane Gish? No surprises here either. Dr. Gish's list includes articles on a synthetic preparation similar to arginine vasopressin (1954, 1958), peptide synthesis (1952), immunosuppressive nucleic acids (1971), tobacco mosaic virus amino acids (1961), and something having to do with cytosine (1976). His 1954 paper has been cited 109 times by Google Scholar's reckoning. Gish has published only anti-evolution tracts and books since leaving the world of research more than thirty years ago.

Not a leading scholar.

Ken Cumming? Is he the guy who works on muscle pathology (WJK Cumming) or the fellow who works on matters relating to fisheries (KB Cumming)? The only definite link to the Ken Cumming of ICR fame is his attack on the PBS series Evolution.

Not a leading scholar.

How about Steve Austin? Dr. Austin's high-water mark is a 1991 paper on the forward-backward search algorithm, cited 90 times by Google Scholar's count. But it's not the same Steve Austin. To make certain that we're not talking about the wrestler (“Stone Cold” Steve Austin) or the Six Million Dollar Man, we can turn to CreationWiki for some assistance. Their bio of Dr. Austin contains a convenient list of his publications, identifying three as having appeared in “secular” (i.e., research) publications. The others are all from ICR.

Andrew Snelling? Also trapped in the creationist ghetto. Google Scholar finds that all of his publications are related to creationism conferences and creationist journals. He cannot break into genuine peer-reviewed publications.

We finally get a small break when we reach Jason Lisle. Dr. Lisle is a genuine astrophysicist, although he's tossed over the rigorous discipline of his field in favor of cloud-castle architecture. He has a string of genuine research articles published in such estimable venues as the American Journal of Physics, The Astrophysical Journal, and Solar Physics. He seems to have made a specialty of solar supergranulation. Now that he is dedicated to such apologetic works as Taking Back Astronomy and The Ultimate Proof of Creation, one predicts his scientific productivity is going to take a severe dive. Once you've started advancing arguments that the planets began as water worlds “which God then supernaturally changed into the substances of which the planets are comprised today,” you really have stopped being a scientist.

It's the same story throughout Ford's list of creationism's research superstars. Fizzle after fizzle. The usual pattern is a publication or two in a genuine journal, followed by a flood of articles devoted to proving that the earth is young or that a great flood once covered the whole planet.

And Francis Collins? Google Scholar finds page after page of published research papers. The first one, Initial sequencing and analysis of the human genome, is identified as having 6468 citations (more than all of Ford's list of superluminaries together).

There's a reason creationist scientists get no respect: They don't do science.

In the numbers

But maybe not the way you were thinking

The September 2009 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research contains the usual collection of strained creationist arguments. It also, however, carried a testimonial from a grateful mother who has been “educated” by ICR's publication:

Thank you for sending me Acts & Facts over the years. I have gleaned much from the articles. Even though I am not a scientist, I have been able to write arguments to my son, who was persuaded to accept evolution in college. I’m sharing those with you, so you can see how your ministry has touched my life personally.

There follow some excerpts from one of the woman's ICR-inspired messages to her college-educated son. She had hit on the scheme of belaboring him with the old “design” argument:

Every design carries in it the signature of its creator. So, normally, one viewing a creation, and who is trained, can recognize that signature. It can be recognized because it tells the observer who made it by displaying certain characteristics that the creator endows it with and that reflect the character of the creator.

Yawn!

But I read on and discovered an argument that caught my attention. Clever, clever creationist mom! It turns out that Sudoku proclaims the handiwork of the creator!

I recently discovered Sudoku puzzles. Each row, column, and square of nine squares has to have the numbers 1 to 9 in them and the numbers may not be repeated in any row, column, or square of nine squares. The outcome, however, always results in a design of numbers, unique from any other puzzle except one that duplicates itself. In order to solve a puzzle, you must figure out an intelligent strategy to end up with a “unique design” in the end.

Unique design is the operative phrase. It takes intelligence to create this design. If you just randomly stick in numbers you will never come to the organized end result. Solving these puzzles helps prove to me that evolution is a lie. Randomness for the most part results in chaos. Each Sudoku puzzle may only be solved by thoughtful manipulation of the numbers until a unique pattern (design) is formed.

Our anonymous creation mom is not responsible for the emphasis in the sentence about chaos. I added that. The phrase “for the most part” drew my attention. Did she notice that she just left the barn door open?

No one argues that random variation usually results in order (or increased fitness in a species). I mean, unless you are an ignorant creationist setting up a straw man.

Creation Mom is also hung up on the word “unique.” Here again she is missing something important, just as most creationists do. Evolution is not goal-driven. There is no target. There can be many variations that lead to increased fitness. Natural selection is not driving any species toward a foreordained conclusion. (Creationists who think evolutionists claim this are often misled by experiments such as the much-discussed WEASEL program by Dawkins.) The Sudoku puzzle is therefore a terrible choice for an anti-evolution argument. Valid Sudoku puzzles are anything but unique. Even if a particular instance of a puzzle has but one valid solution, valid Sudoku patterns are anything but rare.

In 2005, Bertram Felgenhauer of Dresden and Frazer Jarvis of Sheffield demonstrated that there are 6,670,903,752,021,072,936,960 valid ways to fill in the 9 × 9 Sudoku grid.

We're not going to run out of Sudoku puzzles any time soon.

Of course, valid Sudoku grids are rare in a relative sense. There are, after all, 9! ways (362,880) to fill a 3 × 3 grid with the integers from 1 through 9. Since there are 9 such grids in a Sudoku, there are (9!)⁹ ≈ 1.09 × 10⁵⁰ candidates for Sudoku puzzles. That is, there are many, many more invalid grids than valid ones. But randomly generated grids containing the integers 1 through 9 in each of the 3 × 3 subgrids could be easily checked for validity—just determine whether each row sum and column sum is equal to 45.

That's an extremely simple criterion for determining “fitness.” (Cue the infinite number of chimps—or weasels.)

Creation Mom elaborates her argument with some cant about “random organization,” which she knows won't turn monkeys into humans.

There is something of the order of 2 percent difference in the genetic make-up of man versus monkey. That’s according to what scientists now know, but if you were to replace the 2 percent monkey with the 2 percent that is man, you will no longer have the pattern of a monkey, but a man. The pattern for a monkey doesn’t randomly organize (an intellectual activity) itself into a more complex system. To create a more complex system, you need to engineer (again an intellectual activity) the lower step to the higher by intelligent manipulation. It will not happen through random processes any more than you will be able to create a specific Sudoku pattern through anything but intelligent strategy.

Sorry, Creation Mom. A simple algorithm suffices to separate the Sudoku wheat from the chaff. Natural selection suffices to separate the useful variations from deleterious ones. God as Sudoku master is no more persuasive than God as watchmaker.

But I'm sure the watchmaker was already enough for you. Was it enough for your son, too? (I noticed you didn't say.)

ICR prepares a fall-back position

A back door to science truthiness?

The July 2009 issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research provides a heaping helping of your minimum monthly requirement of creationist goodness. In addition to the warmed-over offerings of the ICR's late founder, Henry M. Morris, the new issue contains exciting developments in the Institute's educational mission:

The Institute of Creation Research announces its new School of Biblical Apologetics

M.C.Ed. with a joint major in Biblical Education and Apologetics

Choose from four targeted minors:
Genesis Studies
Creation Research
Christian School Teaching
Sacred Humanities

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? You might, if you recall that ICR has failed to get the approval of Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board for its graduate program for a master's degree in science education (or “science so-called,” to borrow a phrase from the creationist lexicon). Had ICR succeeded, it could have churned out “science teachers” with master's degrees from an accredited institution of higher learning.

They lost that battle when the THECB voted down their application for accreditation. ICR, however, did not lose heart. It filed a lawsuit to force the Texas authority to grant their accreditation and, just in case, prepared what appears to me to be a fall-back position.

If they don't get accreditation from the Texas authority for secular education, why not set up a program that qualifies as religious education, but with a dash of “science” to spice it up? ICR is now accepting applications for the new School of Christian Apologetics. Can you say “yes” to the question “Do you want to use this program's education to better prepare yourself for glorifying God?” (see question #26 on the application for admission). Then this might be just the indoctrination program you're looking for!

If you study diligently, even you might be able to come up with closely reasoned and logically air-tight arguments such as those advanced by ICR's leading lights. For example, just try to refute Frank Sherwin (ICR's Senior Science Writer) when he says (also in the July 2009 Acts & Facts),

Since there is no evolutionary pattern inherent in any biological information, Genesis must be accurate.

My goodness! See how Sherwin has us wriggling in the crushing grip of reason?

The ends justify the meanness

Those who will not see

A daily devotional is an inspirational reading devised to put a believer in an exalted state of mind for the day. Various religious groups churn out devotionals for the edification of their adherents. The Institute for Creation Research is no exception. The ICR's Days of Praise sprinkles its sayings with generous helpings of creationism. The entry for December 27, 2008, is a case in point. It dredges up entropy, the misconstruction of which is a favorite creationist ploy.

The devotional is attributed to the late Henry Morris, the flood geologist who is ICR's founder. Morris's words are supposed to be inspirational, but notice how aggravating they are:

Human life must eventually deteriorate and die; this declension cannot be reversed any more than water poured down on the ground can be “un-poured” up into the cup again.

This principle is the famous law of entropy (“in-turning”). Physical systems wear out; biological organisms get old and die; societies and empires fall and vanish. All these phenomena are local expressions of God's universal curse on man and all his dominion (Genesis 3:14-19). It applies to everything, without exception.

What was your reaction to the spilled water? Mine was the obvious one: Water does not stay spilled. It evaporates. The “un-spilling” is a leisurely but well-understood process. I smirked at Morris's obtuse analogy, but my jaw dropped when I continued reading. The next paragraph was the usual contrived Christian apologetics, but the one after that was stunning. Observe:

However, the very existence of the law of entropy points to a Creator, because systems that are wearing out must first have been made new, and beings that die must first have been given life. The very idea of a universal naturalistic evolution of all things into more complex systems is contrary to all real scientific data and is contradicted by all human experience.

Nevertheless, the God who created all things can surely “devise means” by which the law of decay can be set aside. Solar energy and the hydrologic cycle can raise the spilled water; the sinful life can be purified by God's grace and the blood of Christ; and the dead can be revived by the resurrection life of Christ.

Morris admits to the existence of the hydrologic cycle, but waves it off as God's little miracle for raising spilled water. He impresses the sun into service as the deity's magic engine (although he never deigned to notice the sun back when he argued that evolution was impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics). He hijacks a perfectly naturalistic explanation by imputing it to the hand of God. No doubt the law of gravity is just a metaphor for God's arduous labor of pushing the planets around their elliptical orbits.

There is a lesson for us in this installment from Days of Praise. The creationists are impervious to reason. If no natural explanation is known for a phenomenon, then God did it. If a natural explanation is known, then it is merely God's means for accomplishing his ends. It's a win-win technique for creationists while being lose-lose for rational thought and science.

How inspirational.

Specified prolixity

PZ Myers cited in vain

We nonbelievers grew weary a long time ago from the efforts of proselytizing Christians to “explain” Christianity to us and “share the good news” with us. Sorry, guys. We've heard the so-called good news, but it's like watching a news report on Fox: We simply don't believe it. The recruiters for the cult of Christianity assume we don't know what the Bible says, but a lot of us do know. We just reject it.

We find it insulting to be assumed ignorant.

Creationists are trying to borrow this page from the nonbeliever's book. You see, they understand evolution and natural selection. They just reject it.

Oh, really?

We probably need to make some allowances for the conscious liars who use discredited arguments because they're effective rhetorical devices for advancing their holy cause. (Does anyone really think that Duane Gish doesn't know that his argument about the second law of thermodynamics is invalid? He was refuted in detail time and time again, but he never abandoned it in his public presentations because people continued to fall for it.) They know their arguments are bogus, but the “noble lie” is a pragmatically mendacious approach to redeeming souls for Christ. (Apparently the ends justify the means.) But many of the anti-evolution polemicists are likely to be entirely sincere. Their arguments reveal their profound ignorance rather than their willful dishonesty.

A case in point is this month's issue of Acts & Facts from the Institute for Creation Research. The December 2008 edition contains an essay titled More Than Just “Complex.” The author is Brian Thomas, who is described as a “science writer.” Thomas cites a remark by PZ Myers that criticizes creationists:

The lesson of Darwin is that unguided natural processes have the ability to generate complex functionality, so it takes more than just showing complexity and function to demonstrate purpose. Creationists don't understand that at all, so they keep whining “it's complex!” as if they have brought up an irrefutable argument for design, when they've done no such thing.

In typical creationist fashion, Thomas goofs up the quotation a bit. He truncates PZ's final sentence by deleting his conclusion and moves the exclamation point outside the quotes (“it's complex”!), as if PZ were not imputing the exclamation to the creationists. Sloppy, but not surprising.

After the Myers quote, Thomas rolls out the we-know-but-reject argument:

The reason that “the lesson of Darwin” is rejected by creationists is not because they don't understand it. Rather, it is because they rightly observe that “unguided natural processes” cannot generate both complexity and functionality...

(By the way, I truncated the final sentence in my quote from Thomas's article. Go check out the original to see if I did violence to it.) Thomas goes on to complain that natural selection is incapable of generating “specified complexity,” but then falls promptly into a creationist's classic post-hoc misconstruction of the problem. He does this by rhapsodizing about the protein complexes known as chaperonins:

Chaperonins have a precisely-placed enzymatic active site, detachable caps, flexible gated entryways, a timed sequence of chemical events, and precise expansion and flexion capacities. Each of the parameters—size, shape, strength, hydrophobicity distribution, timing, and sequence—represents a specification. With each additional specification, the likelihood of a chance-based assembly of these parts diminishes…to miracle status.

A miracle! God is obviously required.

Let's try a simple explanation of this inane interpretation of complexity. If I draw a hearts royal flush from a standard deck of cards, that's pretty close to a miracle. (No, this has never happened to me.) There's only 1 chance out of 2,598,960 of drawing the ace, king, queen, jack, and ten of hearts in a random selection from a standard deck. (That big number is ₅₂C₅, the number of ways of choosing 5 items from a set of 52 distinct things.) We could choose even less likely things for our illustration, but this will do as an example.

We understand, of course, that any hand of five cards has one chance in 2,598,960 of being drawn, but most of those hands are nondescript and insufficiently interesting to catch our attention. A hearts royal flush, however, is a killer winning hand. If you were to predict (specify) in advance of a deal that you were going to get a hearts royal flush, it would be a pretty miraculous example of meeting your specification if the dealer were then to deal out those cards to you. (People might call for an investigation.)

But a hearts royal flush is not the only “killer winning hand” that the dealer could have given you. There are two royal flushes made up of red cards. Would you be unhappier with a diamonds royal flush? I think not. It would serve your purposes quite as adequately. It would look a little odd if you had “specified” hearts and then drew diamonds, but you're still a winner. And your chances of a red royal flush are twice that of a hearts royal flush alone. You know what you did? You over-specified.

Did you grasp the lesson? Even if we don't go on to talk about equally satisfactory outcomes with black royal flushes and results that are nearly as good with other straight flushes and four of a kind?

While Thomas waxes eloquently over all the details of chaperonins (I wonder how much he really knows about them?), listing all the specific features they have as they exist today, he completely misses the possibility (likelihood, actually) that there are millions (billions?) of other formulations that would have created alternate-universe chaperonins of equal functionality.

Try this little experiment the next time you're playing poker: When you pick up your five cards, recoil in amazement at the hand you're holding (no matter what it is, strong or weak), throw the cards down on the table face up so that your companions can see them, and scream, “Oh, my God! It's a miracle! This hand occurred in the face of odds greater than one in two million! Surely an Intelligent Dealer was involved in specifying this hand!”

Depending on the intelligence of the dealer in question, he may lean over and punch you on the shoulder.

Creationists discover Wikipedia

But don't actually read it

The October 2008 issue of Acts & Facts has been published by the Institute for Creation Research. In addition to a querulous editorial about the unfairness of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board turning thumbs down on ICR's plan to offer graduate degrees in “science” (as they define it), Acts & Facts presents a tribute to that famed creationist and anti-Darwinian, Gregor Mendel.

Surprised? I was. While I'm sure that Mendel was essentially a creationist, having been a Roman Catholic monk in the days before Darwin published The Origin of Species, I didn't realize that the good Augustinian abbot was on record as being an unfriend of Charles Darwin. Nevertheless, that's what Christine Dao claims in her article Man of Science, Man of God: Gregor Johann Mendel.

Ms. Dao is identified as the magazine's assistant editor and bears no academic initials after her name, so we may presume she is not one of ICR's scientific superstars. We should still, however, be able to expect some simple journalistic competence, perhaps seasoned with just a dash of fact-checking. And by “fact-checking,” I mean more than cutting and pasting from Wikipedia.

Let's beginning with a brief review of the key scientific achievement of Mendel's life, his experimental discovery of the laws of inheritance. This is what Wikipedia says:

Between 1856 and 1863 Mendel cultivated and tested some 29,000 pea plants (i.e. Pisum sativum). This study showed that one in four pea plants had purebred recessive alleles, two out of four were hybrid and one out of four were purebred dominant. His experiments brought forth two generalizations which later became known as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance.

Mendel read his paper, "Experiments on Plant Hybridization", at two meetings of the Natural History Society of Brünn in Moravia in 1865. When Mendel's paper was published in 1866 in Proceedings of the Natural History Society of Brünn,it had little impact and was cited about three times over the next thirty-five years.

Christine Dao heartily concurs in her Acts & Facts article:

Between 1856 and 1863, he cultivated some 29,000 pea plants (Pisum sativum). The study showed that out of four plants, one received recessive alleles, two were hybrids, and one had the dominant alleles. His experiments were the foundation for two generalizations known today as Mendel's Laws of Inheritance. Based on his work, he produced the paper Experiments on Plant Hybridization and read it to the Natural History Society of Brünn in 1865. The society published the paper in its Proceedings in 1866.

We all know, of course, that facts are facts, so there are only so many ways to recount the same facts. And, if you have to tell the same story, it's just more efficient to use essentially the same words, too. Ms. Dao is efficient.

But not thorough. At the end of the excerpt I quoted, Wikipedia notes that Mendel's discoveries languished for several years. In a later paragraph, the on-line encyclopedia reports one of the reasons for Mendel's initial neglect:

At first Mendel's work was rejected, and it was not widely accepted until after he died. The common belief at the time was that Darwin's theory of pangenes were responsible for inheritance. The modern synthesis uses Mendelian genetics.

Ms. Dao should have clicked on “pangenes” to discover the nature and timing of Darwin's theory of pangenesis, because the Wikipedia article does not make the sequence of events entirely clear. That extra bit of effort would have saved her from the following embarrassing claim:

Mendel's paper was rejected at first, since he evidently produced it as a counter to Darwin's theory of pangenesis, which was popular at the time and accepted as being responsible for inheritance.

Excuse me, Christine, but Darwin published his theory of pangenesis in 1868, while Mendel published his paper in 1866. You see the problem?

Ms. Dao is good enough, however, to cite a paper by B. E. Bishop as a reference. In Mendel's Opposition to Evolution and to Darwin, Bishop argues that Mendel could have been familiar with the 1860 German edition of Darwin's Origin and therefore viewed his paper on heredity as a contribution toward the fixity of species and therefore opposed to Darwin's views. This, at least, is a defensible thesis, although Mendel never mentions Darwin or evolution (let alone the future theory of pangenesis) in his paper.

As for Ms. Dao's time-disordered account of events, there is no defense at all.

We the sheeple

A pseudo-scholarship vignette

The July issue of Acts & Facts is out from the Institute for Creation Research. Since ICR includes “Research” in its title, you know those folks must be serious, painstaking scholars. Here's one of them in action, Henry M. Morris IV, namesake and scion of Henry Morris the so-called flood theorist:

When the United States of America was founded on July 4, 1776, the signing of the Declaration of Independence was preceded by prayer at the urging of Benjamin Franklin, the senior statesmen of the fledgling nation. It was certainly no coincidence, then, that the very first sentence of this historic document acknowledged God as Creator (“nature's God”).

There are only a few small problems with Morris's account. First of all, it was during the drafting of the U.S. Constitution, not the Declaration of Independence, that Franklin reportedly suggested that the convention begin each day's business with prayer. The tale has grown in the telling.

James Madison took notes during the constitutional convention and recorded Franklin's motion: “I therefore beg leave to move that henceforth prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven, and its blessings on our deliberations, be held in this Assembly every morning before we proceed to business, and that one or more of the Clergy of this City be requested to officiate in that Service.” Madison also reported that Franklin's motion died without action. After some discussion, the prayer proposal was superseded by a motion to adjourn, which carried.

In addition to misplacing Franklin's motion in time, Morris also assumes it was adopted and that our founding fathers quickly bowed their heads in prayer. We know that several of the founders were religious (a few were even clerics), but others were known to be dubious about traditional Christianity, with Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson leading this list. Morris thinks nothing of the fact that Jefferson chose the phrase “Nature's God” when he penned the Declaration. (What would Morris think if he knew that Jefferson wrote both words in lowercase as “nature's god” in his rough draft?) By relegating God to a possession of nature, Jefferson was most likely employing a bit of deistic finesse, citing a deity to assuage the knee-benders among the founding fathers without any genuflection on his part.

Of course, if I were an ICR scholar, I could just state it as fact. It's easier that way.

The good news!

I would be remiss if I failed to note that there are opportunities for people with academic degrees to be ICR “scholars.” To emphasize its devotion to academics, ICR never fails to cite the degrees of its writers and staff. If an ICR employee holds a doctorate or a master's degree, you can be certain that it will be appended to the end of his or her name at every opportunity. Even Henry M. Morris III gets into the act, listing “D. Min.” after his name. After all, what's better than a degree in ministry to establish your credentials in scientific research? (On the other hand, poor Henry M. Morris IV is—except for the Roman numeral—suffix free.)

The July issue of Acts & Facts calls for people to join the ranks of ICR's crack team of creation researchers, but those who answer the call need to understand that their conclusions have already been conveniently provided by the biblical account in Genesis. That makes it all much easier!

ICR is growing! We now need additional Ph.D. science faculty and researchers in geology (both soft-rock and hard-rock), astronomy/cosmology, paleontology, and science education. Thankfully, our life-science faculty is strong (and young), but we need to recruit and train those who will be the creationist scientists for the coming decades. The basic qualifications are: Ph.D. from a reputable school in the desired field, complete agreement with the ICR tenets (both biblical and scientific), and a “fire in the belly” for the creationist ministry. If you are such a person—or if you know such a person—get a resumé to us soon. We are ready to hire and are diligently looking for God’s warriors to “stand in the gap” (Ezekiel 22:30).

My favorite part is the comment that applicants should have degrees from a “reputable school.” I guess that leaves out “Dr.” Kent Hovind. Or, for that matter, any graduate of ICR's unaccredited graduate school.

At this RATE

High-speed creationism

The monthly newsletter of the Institute for Creation Research is always a treasure trove of human perversity. ICR is devoted to the notion that a supreme being cooked up the university in six literal days about 6,000 years ago. That's an awfully small container into which to stuff the planet's history. The December 2007 issue of Acts & Facts takes another shot at it.

Many radioisotopes have half-lives of millions or billions of years. The presence of their decay products on our planet give us the opportunity to measure how long they've been in existence. The conclusion is inescapable—the earth is billions of years old—unless, of course, the scientists are all wrong about the half-lives. Working backward from their assumption that Genesis is literally true, ICR's “creation scientists” have figured out that radioactive decay has had periods of enormous acceleration.

ICR's vehicle for “proving” the earth's youth is its RATE project (Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth). Larry Vardiman frequently writes about RATE. His article in the December 2007 Acts & Facts is titled RATE in Review: Unresolved Problems. Vardiman draws out attention to three such problems:

The RATE project found that:
A large amount of radioactive decay has occurred in earth history.
Nuclear decay processes were accelerated during episodes in earth history.
Conventional radioisotopic dates are therefore incorrect by large factors.
These findings led to the major conclusion that the earth is thousands–not billions–of years old. However, RATE left three unresolved problems concerning theology, heat, and radiation.

As explained by Vardiman, the theological problem is especially delicious:

The Theological Problem

The use of the term “accelerated decay” for nuclear processes during the Creation Week seems to create an apparent conflict for some people with the statement given by God in Genesis 1:31: “And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” The RATE project was able to show that accelerated decay occurred during the Genesis Flood, but this was not sufficient to explain all the observed daughter products in rocks, such as lead. The production of lead by accelerated decay during the first three days of the Creation Week could explain this, but that would introduce the concept of “decay” during this period that was stated by God to be “very good.”

Dear, dear. A damned difficult problem. But the second problem is greater!

The Heat Problem

Of greater concern to both supporters and skeptics of the RATE project is the issue of how to dispose of the tremendous quantities of heat generated by accelerated decay during the Genesis Flood. The amount of heat produced by a decay rate of a million times faster than normal during the year of the Flood could potentially vaporize the earth’s oceans, melt the crust, and obliterate the surface of the earth. The RATE group is confident that the accelerated decay they discovered was not only caused by God, but that the necessary removal of heat was also superintended by Him as well. Dr. Russell Humphreys, a member of the RATE group, has suggested one possible mechanism that may explain this dilemma. He has found evidence, both scientific and scriptural, that cooling of the earth by the expansion of the cosmos may have occurred simultaneously with the heat produced by accelerated decay.

Where exactly is the problem? If God is rigging the game, he can whisk the extra heat away with a snap of his fingers. Despite their faith in an omnipotent God, the ICR folks insist on trying to find science-type explanations for miracles. It's not exactly necessary, but they're desperate to appear scientific.

The third problem is the best one: How did Noah avoid radiation poisoning?

The Radiation Problem

Another consideration is how Noah and his family could have survived the massive dose of radiation unleashed during the Flood. It is likely that the humans aboard the Ark would have been protected from most of the radiation occurring on the surface of the earth by the water covering the planet. It is common knowledge that water absorbs radiation, and an average of 8,000 feet of water covering the earth would have made a very effective shield. However, some have expressed concern that a radioactive element like potassium-40 that is present in the human body may have produced radiation within Noah’s body itself.

Poor old Noah, quick-cooked by the accelerated decay of the isotopes in his own body (probably exacerbated by the glowing bodies of his family members and everything else in the ark).

Never fear: The brave creation scientists of ICR are on the job. Vardiman tells us the next step: “Evidence for accelerated decay in meteorites has been identified as one of the most important research projects for the future.”

“Evidence,” he says. I can hardly wait.

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