Now this is how to critique Ken Ham's creation “museum”

Nice video. Unfortunately he says, referring to the Ordovician: "Some of the very earliest life forms on Earth." That should make IDers if not YECs happy, because that's like saying that 1988 was one of the earliest years of the 1900s.

Class PZ.

One of the things I learned in geology at school was that there are no trilobite fossils anywhere on the island of Ireland at all.

Don't know how the YEC's can explain that one since, in a global flood scenario there should at least be some.

heh, I like the irony in the statement that it is the organization of the fossils from the sea communities that proves they were built up over time, while a flood deposit would've been randomized.

but i thought randomness was evolution and organization proved ID. Hopefully a few ID brains go into loopback over that.

There's random and then there's random. A good description of the difference is in a New Republic book review by Jerry Coyne titled 'The Great Mutator', a review of Behe's 'The Edge of Evolution' at http://tinyurl.com/2bmmq7

"ON THE BASIS of much evidence, scientists have concluded that mutations occur randomly. The term "random" here has a specific meaning that is often misunderstood, even by biologists. What we mean is that mutations occur irrespective of whether they would be useful to the organism. Mutations are simply errors in DNA replication. Most of them are harmful or neutral, but a few of them can turn out to be useful. And there is no known biological mechanism for jacking up the probability that a mutation will meet the current adaptive needs of the organism. Bears adapting to snowy terrain will not enjoy a higher probability of getting mutations producing lighter coats than will bears inhabiting non-snowy terrain.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful. Evolution by selection, then, is a combination of two steps: a "random" (or indifferent) step--mutation--that generates a panoply of genetic variants, both good and bad (in our example, a variety of new coat colors); and then a deterministic step--natural selection--that orders this variation, keeping the good and winnowing the bad (the retention of light-color genes at the expense of dark-color ones).

It is important to clarify these two steps because of the widespread misconception, promoted by creationists, that in evolution "everything happens by chance." Creationists equate the chance that evolution could produce a complex organism to the infinitesimal chance that a hurricane could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble the junk into a Boeing 747. But this analogy is specious. Evolution is manifestly not a chance process because of the order produced by natural selection--order that can, over vast periods of time, result in complex organisms looking as if they were designed to fit their environment. Humans, the product of non-random natural selection, are the biological equivalent of a 747, and in some ways they are even more complex. The explanation of seeming design by solely materialistic processes was Darwin's greatest achievement, and a major source of discomfort for those holding the view that nature was designed by God."

Superb. Thank you. It's a breath of fresh air to see kids out in the field, learning stuff that isn't garbage.
Has anyone ever seen a creationist looking for fossils?

someone should set up a minibus (staffed by clown geologists, for the kiddies) outside Ham's museum, offering to drive people around the local fossil sites explaining the way the "idiot" scientists see things

One of the things I learned in geology at school was that there are no trilobite fossils anywhere on the island of Ireland at all.

I´ll be in my bunk.

What we do not mean by "random" is that all genes are equally likely to mutate (some are more mutable than others) or that all mutations are equally likely (some types of DNA change are more common than others). It is more accurate, then, to call mutations "indifferent" rather than "random": the chance of a mutation happening is indifferent to whether it would be helpful or harmful.

One of the things I learned in geology at school was that there are no trilobite fossils anywhere on the island of Ireland at all.

— Peter Henderson

The 747 in a junkyard argument is actually perfectly congruous with evolution. We know that the tornado did not assemble the 747 because we know how 747's are assembled. The design does not imply a mysterious designer. Rather, the pattern fits with what we know. In the natural world, we ask the question "how could this come to be." We study it, discover multiple natural processes that produce the organism (or rock formation, or fairy ring, or moon craters). So now we see a bacterial flagellum, and we say it is a product of "natural selection" acting on a flexible, variable biological system, not a tornado. The design folks just can't seem to grasp the idea that their own example is counter to their model (or at the least irrelevant). Well, actually some of them probably do, but their goal is religious proselytizing, not science.

Maybe there needs to be some sort of permanent display just outside the museum asking Ken to come out and show us the millions of bunny rabbits and teleostean fish and snakes and lizards and dinosaurs and dolphins and oysters and lobsters and.....that mysteriously aren't present in the Ordovician sediments.

This is all very interesting, but it's all human reason. Sounds very compelling but half of the Creation Museum's exhibits argue that if human reason is contrary to the Bible, then human reason is wrong. End of story.

You can't argue effectively against blind faith. Even when it appears to be foolish.

Father Wolf wrote:

"Sounds very compelling but half of the Creation Museum's exhibits argue that if human reason is contrary to the Bible, then human reason is wrong."

Fine, so give people a choice. You can trust your senses, the evidence and your (supposedly God given) ability to reason. Or you can go with something contrary to all evidence and all reason. Just ask yourself, which approach has proven to be more successful in every aspect of human existence? Besides, if you condemn human reason, how can you reason that you are correct about anything?

then human reason is wrong. End of story.

Very cool. I used to live in Columbus, OH, and one day in my yard I found a rock that had a similar fossilized "seashell" as to what is shown in the video. I'm no geologist, but the rock I found looked more like sandstone than limestone to me. However, that can be caused by different sediments. Can anyone tell me if the ancient aquatic life in the present-day Cincinnati area was similar to the ancient aquatic life in the present-day Columbus area?

Or to put it in a more rigorous terminology, they are independent

Laser --- Try web trawling on the search term

Bedrock Geologic Map of Ohio.

Just ask yourself, which approach has proven to be more successful in every aspect of human existence?

Ham's advice to jettison human reasoning is flat out cult nonsense

The 747 in a junkyard argument is actually perfectly congruous with evolution.

— mplavcan

You can't argue effectively against blind faith. Even when it appears to be foolish.

However, not independent of one another - some mutations may predispose to other mutations.

Thanks, David--very intersting!

Torbjörn and harold regarding evolved evolvability --
There has been a lot of interesting research on this recently, particularly in microbes. You may remember that back in the mid- to late-90s, Cairns et.al. published some stuff suggesting that something like what harold described was happening. Their results indicated that somehow the bacteria were coming up with directed, adaptive mutations to solve the specific environmental stress they were experiencing. Of course, this would seem to require some improbable type of "knowledge" on the part of the bacteria or the environment or something to be able to understand the needs of the organisms and then alter their genes appropriately.

It later turned out that the bacteria were not so tightly directing their mutations to the gene(s) that would solve the problem. Instead, a subpopulation of cells within the colony increase their overall mutation rates during times of stress. The resulting mutations are blind in the neo-Darwinian sense, but by generating lots of extra diversity, the chances are raised that some hypermutating cells will hit upon a good solution before the colony dies out due to the stress. Thus, this seems to be an evolved response that increases the rate of evolution of the bacterial strain. Evolved evolvability.

There are also some examples of genes that can be turned on / off via regulated frameshift mutations. If I remember correctly, some parasitic microbes do this for the genes that produce their surface proteins. In so doing, they can keep dodging the host's immune system. This may not quite be the sort of evolved evolvability you are talking about, but it is an example of how an organism can change its nucleotide sequence in an adaptive way in response to its environment.

Raven wrote:

"But in the long run, blind faith and being wrong gets you nowhere."

Maybe, but in the short term it can make some people very powerful and wealthy.

I don't perceive active creationism of the Ken Ham/Bill Dembski variety as blind faith in a simple sense, but as an ideology that is grounded at least as much, if not more, in pragmatic, authoritarian social and political goals (eg promote legal discrimination against homosexuals), as in faith. The "literal" interpretation of the Bible that they promote is very cherry-picked indeed, and always "coincidentally" comes down in favor or harsh authoritarian rule by an elite.

— Harold

Mike Z -

That is extremely interesting stuff.

I've often sort of blandly agreed when people say that "mutations are not random".

Actually, that isn't strictly true. They are random, from the human perspective, to the degree that anything can be random.

What people mean to say is that different mutations may have very different probabilities of occurring, within different environmental contexts.

In some well-studied cell lineages, under controlled conditions, we can probably even assign a probability, based on observation, of some individual mutation event occurring at least once, per unit of time or per DNA replication cycle.

But it's a bit like knowing the frequency with which to expect a roll of "four" when you roll a six-sided die. It tells you how often four will come up in the long run, but it doesn't tell you which individual future rolls will be four. And we can't predict exactly where mutations can occur.

But the relative frequency of any type of mutation at any particular site may be greatly impacted by the effects of future mutations and interaction of the phenotype with the environment. However, that amounts to the equivalent of changing the number of fours printed on the die, or rolling multiple dice looking for at least one four. It changes the frequency distribution, but it doesn't make the event any less random.

From a human perspective, though, the most counterintuitive yet elegant thing is that individual mutations are effectively independent of the human-perceived needs of the organism. That's even true if the organism has, through prior mutation and natural selection, evolved a tendency to experience certain types of mutations more frequently in certain conditions.

But together with natural selection, random mutations independent of human perception of the parent organism's "needs" (but certainly not independent of the genetic history of the organism's lineage, nor of some elements of the interaction of its phenotype with the environment) leads to the emergence of highly adapted life.

In fact, it's possible that evolvability is far more common than we realize.

Because changes in the lengths of repeats can change the strength of promoters or shift the reading frame of genes, each of the genes associated with these repeats will have a range of activities within a population descended from essentially any individual with any one combination of repeat lengths (6, 118). For example, in Neisseria meningitidis, individuals with spacers of 11, 10, or 9 Gs between the ¡35 and ¡10 consensus motifs in its promoter have high, medium, or no detectable levels of expression of porA (119). Changes in the length of a repeat also may change how sensitive a gene is to being regulated by specific molecules in the environment. For example, in E. coli, as a tract of Ts that begins eight nucleotides from the promoter ¡10 region is shortened from seven to three, pyrimidine-mediated regulation of uracil phosphoribosyltransferase expression is reduced and then becomes undetectable (21). Lynn Helena Caporale 2003. Annu. Rev. Microbiol. 2003. 57:467---85 NATURAL SELECTION AND THE EMERGENCE OF A MUTATION PHENOTYPE: An Update of the Evolutionary Synthesis Considering Mechanisms that Affect Genome Variation

I meant to cover all of that with this statement -

However, not independent of one another - some mutations may predispose to other mutations.

Subsequent mutations are random events, but not independent, necessarily, of prior mutations. But still, the independence from the human-perceived "needs" of the organisms remains the fascinating part.

This may not quite be the sort of evolved evolvability you are talking about,

HEY. I AM NOT SURE WHERE TO POST THIS. CHECK THE LINK W. DEMBSKI HAS IN HIS LATEST POST IN UD.

Not unlike the classical system really, but the random outcome of the measurement makes it conceptually difficult anyway.

LINK

In Europe, technology --- and all the rest of human existence --- was stagnant as long as society was in the grip of official religion.

Dembski does not directly promote any interpretation, but rather "cherry picks" evidence, definitions and quotes only to instill unreasonable doubt about evolution. Dembski has clearly indicated personal belief in at least OEC, has not challenged Michael Behe's acceptance of common descent, yet has expressed greatest political sympathies toward YEC

I grew up fossil hunting in those very rocks with my father and my brother. Literally walking on that rich history still gets me excited whenever I go home. Thanks so much for this video. It sparked some great memories.

Brother Harold unable to conclude "[w]hy human beings support dystopian authoritarian regimes at all is a question I cannot answer," appears somewhat agitated.

earlier Shenda offered the following suggestion in response to a different observation which may be applicable: "Maybe, but in the short term it can make some people very powerful and wealthy."

The thing is, as long time posters here know, "ID" is mainly just a (failed) scheme to court-proof creationism in public schools.

— harold

In reply to comment #186505....

"heh, I like the irony in the statement that it is the organization of the fossils from the sea communities that proves they were built up over time, while a flood deposit would've been randomized.

but i thought randomness was evolution and organization proved ID. Hopefully a few ID brains go into loopback over that."

Not exactly. Evolution is natural selection, which is anything -but- random. Natural selection weeds out the bad morphologies and allows only for the survival of the good morphologies. Add to that the fact that different species only exist in certain spans of time, such as dinosaurs in the mesozoic, or trilobites in the paleozoic. What the person in the video is referencing is the fact that this is observable within these rocks, whereas were they all either deposited by the biblical flood or had they all been living together with organisms thought to be more recent, we would see them preserved with these recent specimens.

Classic creationists like Ham (YEC) and Hugh Ross (OEC) cherry-pick evidence to support their mutually contradictory "literal" interpretations, but Dembski does not directly promote any interpretation, but rather "cherry picks" evidence, definitions and quotes only to instill unreasonable doubt about evolution.

The new generation of ID-based activists must surely know that at least Behe, if not his "theistic evolutionist" critics, are correct on the details (whats, whens, hows). But admitting so much would alienate the very audience they are trying to placate.

I know this story has been posted for a while now, but I have to get my $0.02 in...

My family and I have just returned from Caesar Creek State Park, north of Cincinnati, where we specifically visited to go fossil hunting. We found some excellent examples of Brachiopods, Bryozoans, and even a Crinoid that was laying by itself. We saw a Criniod that appeared to have tunneled through a Brachiopod shell, but we were prevented by the rules of the park from removing it (you can't take anything that won't fit in your palm).

It's amazing, and more than a little humbling, to walk less than 100 meters from the road, look down, and see literally thousands of fossils that are millions of years old. It is a trip that our 6 year old will keep with her forever. I know my wife and I will.