Did T-Rex Cuddle With Adam & Eve?

What do you think of when I say the word "museum"? School groups of bored kids shuffling from one exhibit to another? Fossils? Rocks? Your grandma's house?

How about dinosaurs living in the Garden of Eden?

No? Neither do I. A museum is a place of learning, where geeky scientists attempt to cause a little bit of scientific learning to absorb into the brains of a typically uninformed public by making what they think will be compelling displays of scientific data or artifacts.

I was amused the other day when a friend of mine (Thanks, PeaceFrogs!) sent me the following link that interviews the founders of the Creation Museum in Kentucky while it was being built back in '06:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzjjxi7f0Oc

If you believe what the Creation "Museum" is telling us, you would believe that the world is only 6,000 years old, that dinosaurs coexisted with Adam and Eve in the Garden, and that dinosaurs climbed onto Noah's Ark two-by-two along with lambs and crickets and lions and tigers and bears (oh my!) and they all lived happily and non-carnivorously for 40 days and 40 nights with Noah's soon-to-be incestuous family. Funny, I don't remember reading about dinosaurs in Genesis!

Oh, sweet T-Rex, if only you could cuddle with me at night and keep me warm like you did Adam and Eve in their innocent, Platonic beds!

To teach these "lessons", they use animatronic dinosaurs playing alongside happy little animatronic children dressed in caveman garb and a giant T-Rex tromping through the Garden of Eden.

Yes, and though the Creation "Museum" hides in a shroud of scientific inquiry, like the Intelligent Design mumbo-jumbo they espouse, nary there will you find reference to any peer-reviewed papers in any journals of geology, biology, or ecology. But for the low low price of $19.95 per adult ticket, you, too, can enter the "museum" and partake of such scientific activities as a tour that highlights "God's judgment of the Tower of Babel" or a seminar entitled "Security for faith-based organizations".

Here's a rather amusing interview conducted with the director of the museum and a bona fide scientist: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HajP5pE4BE0.

Wow. Just goes to show that no amount of evidence from tens of thousands of published scientific articles each year will change the irrational mind of zealots. So I have to ask what's really on display at the Creation "Museum" – the supposed "evidence" that dinos laid down with the lions and the lambs, or the white-bread, wide-eyed fundamentalists who cheerfully enter the "special-effects theater complete with misty sea breezes and rumbling seats" and swallow the Bible as literal fact, then file off to the gift store to buy more propaganda illustrating how us evil, godless scientists are lying to them with devil-inspired scientific inquiry.

I wonder how they would react to "museums" inspired by other creation myths, such as that of Hindu or Greek mythology. Would T-Rex be shown hatching out of the creation egg with Brahma? Would velociraptors be depicted strutting around on Olympus with Zeus and Epimetheus? How preposterous would that be? It is no less preposterous to me than the Creation Museum's version.

But, hey, who am I to rain on their holy theme park? Praise Jesus and pass the tickets!


Image ruthlessly adapted from HERE and HERE.

Apparently I'm Stronger Today

I’ve been sick with the flu. Yesterday morning I came to work around 9AM despite feeling ill. Within two hours I fled to go home, feeling horribly nauseous and fatigued, and sporting a low fever. As soon as I got home I went to bed and slept for six hours. I woke up at 5:30PM only because I had to pick up the kids from daycare and watch them. Once they went to sleep around 9PM, I promptly fell back in bed and slept until 7AM the next morning. In all I was awake only about five or six hours yesterday, and I didn’t eat anything at all. Today I’m not nauseous, and I went to work, but I’m not “all there.” We’ll see if I work the entire day. The last couple years have been the worst for diseases for me and my wife, probably because we have two walking incubators called children.

Well, as Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.”

It is in line with this sentiment that a new book has been authored by Marlene Zuk, entitled Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007). Zuk is an evolutionary biologist better known for her investigations into the evolutionary development of sex.

http://www.physorg.com/news95002406.html

Zuk argues that the battle against disease has defined the evolution of our species in many ways. She even argues that fighting disease is part of what led to the development of sexual reproduction in our species, in that cloning would not diversify our genetic code enough to develop resistance. Zuk is also very concerned about the extent to which we have over-exposed ourselves to antibiotics in soaps, cleaners, and other materials, and over-prescribed antibiotic pharmaceuticals. The end result is that we do not develop immunity, causing a decreased resistance and increasing rates of asthma and allergies. Hospitals are becoming problematic for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This is nothing new, but there is a growing movement away from the use of antibiotics for this reason.

When I went to college, I knew a guy who readily ate food out of trash cans. No kidding, he would dig through the trash and eat pizza slices from boxes that had been thrown in the trash the day before, for instance. He said he had always done that, and never got sick. He thought the rest of us were prudes for letting good food go to waste in the trash. I’ve often wondered how he has fared since then. Has he died from some horrible disease from contaminated food, or is he one of the healthiest guys on earth? I think I’d believe either possibility.

Apparently Zuk says disease can be a “vital partner and friend.” I’m not sure I’d go that far. That which tries to kill or maim you isn’t a friend, in my opinion, but we can evolve a tolerance. A better question is, “Are there viruses out there which do not cause sickness, but in some manner better humanity?” I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I’d be interested to know, and wouldn’t be surprised.

Update (4/13/07): I had to rush home yesterday because my lovely wife had caught this bug and was throwing up. She's better today, as am I. It's hard to think of diseases as our "friends" when you're perched over the porcelain god barfing your brains out.

Nudging The Wall Of Dogma

Brothers and Sisters, I come before you now to report that one of our congregation, the reverend Dr. Francis Collins, Director of the National Human Genome Institute, has testified of his love of the Lord. Ye-es!

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/03/collins.commentary/index.html

Do you see the light? I sa-id, Do you see the light, brother?Back in the Dark Ages, when Europe languished under the yolk of the Catholic church, and all science was faith-based, the few scientists and doctors allowed to study their profession were forced to have as their driving force NOT the pursuit of the unknown interactions of their environment, but the search for God in the workings of life. I think of Roger Bacon, searching for holiness in the refraction of light in rainbows, for instance. There’s a reason why it was called the Dark Ages. What we didn’t know was explained away as the workings of God, not to be explored without consent from the Church. Long before that, even before the prototypical Greek enlightenment, were tribal beliefs, still found in the dark jungles and vast savannas of the world, where all the unknown was explained with magic and mysterious gods.

Now the director of the human genome project has fallen into the same holy trap.

Collins’ goal, in his letter to CNN, was to profess his belief in Christianity, his theological exploration that led him there, and that scientists can pursue their science just fine and rationally, thank you, while still believing in God and faith. He elaborates by suggesting that science is correct in its analysis of the world, including evolution, but that the source of the world’s complexity, and even the source of the first evolutionary steps of life, is not a random event or process but the hand of God. That somehow it all fits into a celestial plan.

We’ve heard this before. It’s called Intelligent Design.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, Intelligent Design is nothing more than Creationism cloaked in pseudo-scientific babble. There is nothing testable about it, and that makes it untenable for serious scientific scrutiny. Worse, it is a cop-out no different from the alchemical stumblings of the Dark Ages and tribal worship. Yes, my flock, let us fall to our knees at our lab benches and pray, for we must be on the cusp of finding God at the edge of the unknown.

Scientists can believe whatever they wish when they walk around on the streets, go home, or attend church. There is comfort in thinking that some paternal hand is guiding the seeming chaotic nature of our world. But when you walk through the lab door, check your faith at the coat rack. The danger here is obvious. When you start believing that the truth you are searching for is one taken on faith, you start overlooking data and pursuing the wrong path. In fact, like the alchemists of the Dark Ages, it blinds you to progress until it stops you altogether. At some point further experimentation runs against the walls of dogma and becomes blasphemy. Think here about Galileo and his run-in with the inquisition. As science has progressed, every hundred years or so that wall of dogma gets pushed back a little further, such that we can now accept that the Earth revolves around the sun, for instance, or that species change their morphology and DNA from generation to generation, mediated by natural selection, to slowly form a new species. Though Creationists argue against evolution, even the Vatican admits the evidence for it has substance. Now neoconservatives like Collins have pushed the wall of dogma back further, once again, to the dim envelope of science, and said that THERE, at the base of all evolutionary beginnings, or at the moment of the Big Bang, we can know the finger of God.

Eventually science will open those doors, too, and find only godless, rational data and a fractal-like, ever-expanding set of questions to be explored. There will always be conservatives there, too, pointing the finger down those dark hallways and saying that God is just down the next corridor.

And how will Collins’ belief structure change his role in analyzing the human genome? Who knows? Will he steer his lab rats away from exploring the function of human embryonic stem cells, for instance? Will he attempt to find the finger of god in those moments of genetic divergence hidden in our DNA, overlooking some crucial factor that would shed light on natural speciation? If any data goes against the prevailing neoconservative agenda, will he have an open mind enough to question those beliefs, or will the data be shelved, ignored, or buried?

HERE is an excellent and funny schematic demonstrating the difference between science and faith (from Wellington Grey’s blog).

Thump your Bible as you please, Dr. Collins. Just don’t bring it in the lab.

Can I get an Amen?

Sunlight, DNA Mutation, And My Face Melting Off

Man, I hate sunburns. My paternal grandmother was deathly afraid of sun damage, skin cancer in particular, so much so that she often carried an umbrella (she called it a parasol) outside with her, even just to sit in the yard for a few minutes. Interestingly, her fears came true. She developed a few skin polyps on her nose in her last years, despite all the umbrella-toting.

My grandmother's umbrella came screaming back to my consciousness a few years ago when I burned my face off. I went downhill skiing the first (and only) time – and didn't bring sunblock. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just be here a couple hours." Oh, woe is me! How very naïve I was of the dangers of high-altitude UV radiation and snow reflection! I was there for several hours more than I thought I would be, enjoying a newfound excitement of speeding down snowy hillsides, avoiding other skiers, and tumbling onto my butt and through the air in exotic poses of flailing arms, skis, and ski poles. Great fun. I'll do it again some day.

The next morning I noticed a strange moisture seeping out of my cheeks. It was clear liquid. Was I sweating? I didn't know what to think of it, so I taped some gauze on my cheek and went to work anyhow. Once at work, I busied myself as usual. After an hour or so I noticed the gauze was soaked, so I went to the bathroom to re-evaluate my strange condition. When I took the tape off, part of my cheek went with it! And, boy, did the liquid start coming out! I was positively dripping!

Long story short, I rushed to a medical clinic (and sat for hours in their stupid waiting room) and found out I had a second-degree sunburn. The top layer of skin hadn't bothered turning red first, it just said, "Goodbye cruel sunlit world" and died. My pasty face melted off over the course of about a week. "Peeled off" would be too kind of a phrase. I didn't have enough leave time left at work, so I had to work during that time, my face covered with bandages. Not a good situation. Needless to say, I wasn't very popular with coworkers. The thought running through my mind that whole time was, "Am I going to get skin cancer from this rather severe amount of UV radiation?"

Well, researchers at Ohio State University and their colleagues in Germany have now been able to directly observe UV radiation mutating DNA:

http://www.physorg.com/news89563086.html

It's reported in the latest addition of _Science_: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/315/5812/625

It's been known for a long time that exposure to UV light (like in sunlight) can cause skin cancer because the energy level from the intense UV radiation causes mutations in the DNA, leading to uncontrolled cell growth (cancer) or cell death (in the case of a sunburn or, more extreme, your friggin' face melting off!). Femptosecond transient absorption spectroscopy is a very new method for visualizing extremely fast reactions at the molecular level. In short, this method uses lasers to excite molecules and an extremely fast light pulse and detector are used to look at changes in the energy levels of the molecule changed by the laser. Using this method, the researchers directly observed how UV radiation caused the formation of two chemical bonds between thymine molecules in the DNA structure. This was a pretty artificial test sample (artificial thymine-only DNA), and not in actual cells, and didn't involve all the chemical pathways involved with sunburn, but it DOES show for the first time actual DNA mutation from UV radiation, which is a huge step in understanding such mutations.

The authors probably don't go so far, but I'm wondering, could similar, non-deadly mutations happen that could lead to genetic changes in the morphology of bacteria or simple-celled organisms, perhaps even changes that could lead to development of new species adaptations, leading toward evolution?

Anyhow, this all makes me even more concerned about skin cancer and my little bout with my skiing incident!

Clueless Conservatives and Evolution

Ah, Creationism! That myth-based view of the creation of the world, wholly untestable and without reason. Who besides those irreligious, heathen scientists could possibly argue against the divine! Why, a poll conducted last year found that 42% of Americans believed in a Creationist view, while only 26% took the view of Evolution (yes, brothers and sisters, pronounce it "Evil-ution"). You know the prevailing Creationist belief, right? It goes like this:

In the beginning, Nareau walked alone in the oppressive darkness of Te-Po-ma-Te-Maki ("the Darkness of the Embrace") and from a mussel shell he created the world. Then from sand and water he created two beings: Na Atibu and Nei Teuke, man and woman. They created the sun and the moon from Nareau's eyes, the stars from his brain and from his flesh and bones they made the islands and trees. From the union of those first two beings came forth the other gods. Nareau still appears on earth, as a spider.

Oh, I'm sorry, were you expecting the Christian creation myth? My apologies. I thought you would first think of the ancient Kiribati creation myth, like I do. But really, can you disprove it any more than the Christian myth? Is this Micronesian story of Nareau and his children really any less silly than the thought of a god creating the cosmos and Earth from nothing, or of a little garden where lived a man made from clay and a woman made from one of the man's ribs, then they were kicked out because they were convinced by a snake to eat an apple, then they somehow parented the entire world?

The same poll found that 18% of Americans believe in evolution that is, somehow, guided by an intelligent force (namely, the Christian god, whose rather unimaginative name is "God"). Thus, we have "Intelligent Design". Rationally, though, Intelligent Design is no different from outright Creationism, since neither can be tested using the scientific method. You cannot prove the existence of an intelligent creator any more than you can a god. And who created the creator? The leading advocate of Intelligent Design is the Discovery Institute, a politically-created organization with obvious neoconservative ideologies, whose main purpose seems to be to convince the general public that scientists are debating Evolution versus Intelligent Design and that this debate should be extended to our school children, when in fact you would be hard-pressed to find any scientists who buy into the Intelligent Design mumbo jumbo, and teaching this in public schools violates the separation of church and state. Recently, the Discovery Institute has funded another institute, the Biologic Institute, whose purpose is to try to skew scientific reasoning toward their wholly unscientific assertions by pursuing actual bench science. Sorry, but saying there is empirical evidence for a creator is no more plausible than saying a priest is a scientist simply because he puts on a lab coat.

Every year there are thousands of scientific studies that reaffirm the principles of natural selection which are at the heart of Evolution. It is so widely embraced by biology that it has progressed beyond a scientific "theory" to, in my mind and the mind of many others, a scientific "law." There are many researchers who have dedicated their entire lives to understanding Evolution. Yet those 42% of Americans who distrust the theory, the vast majority of whom never actually learned anything about it from an approved science text, are unwilling to listen to the biological professionals. Do they likewise disbelieve physicists about quantum mechanics? Or mathematicians about fractal geometry? Or astronomers about solar formation? Are they proficient enough in these areas to question them? I'm not, except for Evolution. If they aren't willing or able to educate themselves, then I suggest they defer to those who do.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go worship Nareau by placing a shell by a block of coral and calling forth my guardian spirits….