That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘intelligent design’

From the ASA code:

3.4 Obvious untruths or exaggerations that are unlikely to mislead and incidental minor errors and unorthodox spellings are all allowed provided they do not affect the accuracy or perception of the marketing communication in any material way.

Well i guess that’s how they are going to justify this:

I have been wanting for a while to write an article that suitably articulates my theory on a link between evolution, selective breeding and the bible thumpers of America. This is just a thought piece at the moment and has no substantiation whatsoever.

A lot of the early settlers that moved to the US and occupy the mid west were the oppressed puritanical whackos, they left europe and became the dominant group in an otherwise uninhabited (from the european perspective) area. As the dominant group, not only did they ensure that their offspring were of a similar mindset but they can also ensure that outsiders or those that do not think the way they do are not as successful as those who conform. As the area was rich in resources the population has been able to explode almost unhindered in this new territory in the same way as the rabbits that were introduced to Australia.

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org

When I was a kid studying biology I was introduced to the charming story of the peppered moth. Kids nowadays may not have heard about it because it has been challenged by the witch hunters as flawed science. It’s laughable that the intelligent design crew are criticising the methods of science when their own evidence based practice consists of citing a bad translation of book which is mostly 2500 -3000 years old.

The peppered moth is still the poster child for explaining evolution to the great unwashed and it is a popular choice because the events described all happened in the last century and were observed by reliable recent sources.

For those who don’t know the story of the peppered moth, here’s the synopsis as I remember it:

White peppered moths used to be common across the British Isles and their wings made effective camoflage against the lichens on tree trunks. During the industrial revolution the lichens died out and the tree trunks were darkened by soot in some parts of the country and so the white moths were more easily spotted by predatory birds. At the same time the darkened form of the moth (occasional genetic freaks) were better camoflaged so thrived in numbers. Since the Clean Air Act was passed in 1956 the lichen has returned and the tree trunks have whitened; this has caused a resurgence in the white moth population.

My last encounter with doorstep creationists included their rebuttal of the peppered moth, the creationists told me that it had been dropped because the science behind it was flawed and so it was not to be considered as evidence of evolution. I asked why it had been dropped and for what reason but creationists rarely cite sources, they just recite what their handlers have told them to preach. They were incredulous at the thought that the moths had changed colour and seemed to be unable to grasp the very basics of the evolution theory that they were seeking to disprove.

The science behind the peppered moth has been done again with better methodology and it evidenced what reasonable people already knew, that light moths on dark trees are eaten by predators in greater numbers than dark moths on dark trees. The experiments were conducted with greater controls for other environmental factors and from my reading of the paper it seems a sound assumption that this was the cause of the changes in moth population (of course I don’t expect you to take my word for it, look at the paper by Majerus in 2005 on his Cambridge experiment).

The peppered moth is the chosen favourite explanation of evolution because it cuts through all the clouds of disinformation that the creationists preach and answers the simplest of questions: how do things evolve? The answer is this: as one species is more adapted to surroundings it has an advantage and numbers of that variation will increase. The moths did not change colour any more than we changed from being monkeys to humans in a lifetime, we evolved because genetic mutations and variations produced offspring who where more suited to their environment and they succeeded and passed on their traits to offspring in greater and greater numbers.

A while back I was on my local highstreet milling about. I was approached by a couple of young black kids who were preaching the word of their handlers the Lord to anyone who would listen. The conversation, quite predictably, came around to talk of evolution and creationism intelligent design and how apparently the scientific community has been lying to everyone for a great many years and have been hiding the flaws in the theory of evolution from the lay people. I was a little bored waiting for my partner to finish shopping so I engaged with these young lads and we had a very enlightening discussion where I tried to reason with them and they recited the script that they had memorised.

During the conversation they got quite excited on a number of occasions when I pointed out flaws in the traditional evolutionary theory. There is currently a lot of research which casts doubt on the selfish gene theory or at the very least modifies it to include the passing of learned traits through the generations. All of these doubts have been set upon by the fundies to ‘prove’ that the theory is absolute rubbish and a big bloke in the sky with a beard and a passion for child abuse is a more plausable explanation for the way things are today.

The point I was trying to make to deaf ears was that all along the road to scientific enlightenment is littered with debunked theories. They are theories because they have some evidence to support them but that does not make them fact. Science is a revisionary process, it starts with a hypothesis, an idea, and then evidence is gathered that supports it. Some times the evidence is there already and the hypothesis is created that then fits the evidence. Once this has been done and the hypothesis has been formed into a theory it is published to the wider scientific community who attempt to test it using their own reasoning.

My school had some very old text books and in some of them there were some rather strange theories about all manner of things. It used to be accepted that ‘negros’ and ‘orientals’ were separate sub species of human; that the smallest particles were protons electrons and neutrons. It was also accepted a little longer ago that the basic elements of the earth were fire, water, earth and air but these theories have been superceded by better explanations based on new evidence. There is no disrespect due to the authors of these old text books because based on the evidence available at the time many of their reasonings are sound. Science though, requires that all theories are constantly tested and results are compared to help us find better theories to explain the things around us.

I like that you have taken the time to read this blog, doing so suggests a thirst for answers, but I would hate to think that it was accepted blindly as truth. Many of the arguements and conflicts around the world are due to people taking things blindly on faith rather than questioning the information, gathering evidence for themselves and applying reason to make their own decisions.

I don’t know how we came to be here, by chance or by design. I suspect that nobody will every know the answer but having looked at the available evidence I have made up my own mind. My application of reason is this: evidence exists to support evolution and the scientific community is constantly working to improve the theory and gather evidence that either supports or debunks it. Intelligent design is a belief from one of those very old text books which was supported by the evidence available a few thousand years ago. The group who champion this belief are not prepared to challenge it themselves or revise it in the face of new evidence. The belief is entirely faith based and entirely incongruent with modern evidence, every rational and reasonable arguement that a rational and reasonable person may want to have with a believer is countered only with insistence that it is a matter of faith rather than one of evidence.