1. Kent Hovind's Doctoral Dissertation

Comment #440943 by Calilasseia on December 11, 2009 at 1:55 am

I have yet to read this turgid example of supernaturalist intellectual faeces, though I have downloaded it for later reading at my leisure, and already I am beginning to wonder who I should file a claim against for the lost hours of my life, if I embark upon the task of reading this suppuratingly gangrenous and encephalitic little screed.

I have known for some time that Hovind is rampantly dishonest, indeed that he was so even before his laughable attempt to stick the middle finger to the tax authorities and the subsequent jail sentence for tax fraud. I have suspected for some time that he is also recrudescently vulgar and barbarous beneath the thin veneer of entirely synthetic 'respectability' with which he has painted himself, and that he chose the easy route of securing a so-called "Ph.D" from a diploma mill not only because he was too indolent to engage in any genuine academic hard work, but also because at bottom, he actively despises genuine intellectual effort out of spite and envy - indeed, the entire railing against valid science by creationists I have characterised in the past as intellectual penis envy writ large. But until encountering the reviews of this sordid little document by people who have seen its fulminatingly dreadful contents first hand, I never really thought that the man could be a genuine, diagnosable paranoid schizophrenic. A fantasist on an epic scale, certainly, but then quite a few sane people fall into that category, quite a few professional politicians among them. However, if he is genuinely deranged enough to believe any of the categorical statements he has erected in that shabby little piece of typewritten toilet paper, let alone all of them, then I suspect he is truly certifiable.

Once again, the words of Lord Vansittart spring to mind: "A ponderous lightweight".

2. Dembski Exam

Comment #403869 by Calilasseia on August 9, 2009 at 9:49 am

Why does it not surprise me that Dembski force-feeds his students with these tired old canards? And trains them to be yet more pieces of ideological cannon fodder, in his war to see mythology anachronistically re-asserted over valid, evidence-based science?

I've long suspected that this is his revenge for being incompetent in the world of real science. It's all a huge hissy fit arising from intellectual penis envy.

3. Trials Loom for Parents Who Embraced Faith Over Medicine

Comment #325541 by Calilasseia on January 22, 2009 at 5:41 am

Reading all of this, I'm reminded of something that might be apposite.

"Superior orders" was erected by defendants in war crimes trials (including Nuremberg), and that defence was roundly rejected. I therefore contend that a case can be made making the pastor an accessory by virtue of having, in effect, issued orders to the parents that they obeyed unconditionally out of misplaced duty. This does not absolve the parents of responsibility, as they should have known that the 'orders' dispensed were likely to have catastrophic consequences in this instance, but it also provides for a means of extending justice to include what one might think of as a religious version of 'corporate responsibility'. After all, if people can be prosecuted for inflicting financial damage whilst running a corporation, surely this can be extended in the above described manner to religious cults that brainwash their adherents to the point of those adherents committing grossly negligent actions resulting in human deaths?

4. PLEASE WRITE IN SUPPORT OF PZ MYERS

Comment #208177 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 5:05 pm

Here is my contribution, just sent via E-Mail:

Dear Sir,

It has recently been brought to my attention that various individuals have been waging a hate campaign against Professor PZ Myers, tenured at your establishment, all because Professor Myers happened to make remarks on his weblog regarding a wafer biscuit.

Whilst Professor Myers has been robust and resolute in his rejection of the more florid manifestations of doctrine-inspired absurdity, and this naturally has brought him to be regarded as a target figure in the demonology of adherents of doctrine, the latest campaign launched against him is not only utterly vindictive, and says more about the prejudices of those pursuing it than it does about Professor Myers, it demonstrates once again that adherents of doctrine appear to regard themselves as being in the privileged position of being able to shut down freedom of speech whenever someone dares to do other than genuflect before their metaphysical presuppositions, or dares to criticise the absurdities that arise therefrom. This campaign, needless to say, should be treated with the scorn and derision that it manifestly deserves, as it is a blatant attempt to resurrect Inquisitional repression of free speech and free thought, by individuals who apparently see no inconsistency in preaching a religion whose central figure espoused tolerance and pluralism, yet decide on the basis of this religion that they possess the right to suppress the very pluralism purportedly inherent in their beliefs.

By contrast, Professor Myers has been a valuable source of in-depth information, including information on current scientific research in the life sciences, for a wide audience including lay persons spanning across whole continents, writing with a lucid, compelling narrative style that many of his readers would consider to aspire to the same elevated standards of clarity and inspirational exposition of the fascinating nature of the scientific endeavour last seen deployed by Carl Sagan. There are a considerable number of individuals among his large audience, eager for scientific information as seen from the inside, who regard Professor Myers as a worthy successor to that well-known and cherished legacy. He is, for this reason alone, someone that your institution should regard not as a candidate for removal of tenure, but as an asset of immeasurable value with respect not only to the promulgation of valid science, and defence thereof against mendacious and duplicitous attack by individuals with anti-science, anti-progress, anti-learning and anti-knowledge agendas, but with respect to its teaching within the walls of your establishment. If he can write on topics of considerable technical intricacy, in such a manner as to render them not only comprehensible to an international lay audience, but present them as exciting and utterly awe-inspiring reading, then surely his pedagogical value within your establishment is if anything magnified many fold, for how many tenured professors can you name who are thought of in the same light?

I would urge you to dismiss this entirely scurrilous campaign and its anachronistic revival of the mentality that doubtless surrounded the hounding of Galileo 375 years ago, which has no place in the 21st century, and certainly not in a nation that contains explicit statements of separation of church and state in its Constitution.

Yours sincerely,



[real name withheld from the RDF front page]

Hopefully that should suffice. :)

5. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #208062 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 2:37 pm

Sadly most atheists DO NOT want to sincerely and objectively know what the truth is

Total crap.

It is precisely because we don't accept uncriticially the unsupported assertions of worthless doctrines that we are better equipped to find the truth than any number of propagandists for reality-denial masturbation fantasies.

because science has clearly revealed God

Total bollocks.

Science has done no such thing. In fact, if you understood any physics, science has made your invisible magic man superfluous to requirements. But then you don't know any real science, do you, because you've been too busy filling your head with masturbation-fantasy garbage.

and so has His Final revelation the Qu'ran 1400 years ago

Crap. Your worthless book containing the diseased ramblings of a kiddy fiddler is about as scientifically literate as the shit pumped out by AiG and ICR. The only way in which any claims of scientific legitmacy can be made for your book of diseased ramblings is if one engages in apologetic force-fitting of valid science to your doctrine and its presuppositions. Your book of nonsense still puts forward the story of Adam being formed, fully adult, with fully formed adult cognition and fully formed adult language capability, out of a ball of dirt. Scientific fact says something rather different. Or hadn't you noticed this whilst inserting your head into your own rectum and inhaling the stench of doctrine?

and yet they still resist, ignore and not accept the manifest truth - why?

Any idea that the diseased ramblings of a kiddy fiddler who lived before science in its current form even existed constitutes "the manifest truth" is something only the terminally doctrine-addled could assert. Did your kiddy fiddler prophet know about the Navier-Stokes Equations? Did he know about tensor analysis? Did he know about 4D effective theory and its linkage to M-theory? No? Why does that not surprise me in the least?

They have chosen to submit to their own vain and wishful thinking whims and desires.

Total bollocks. We have chosen to listen to REALITY instead of the diseased ramblings of a doctrine.

SCIENCEISLAM.COM

Is a pile of horseshit. It consists of a circle-jerk of apologists constructing convoluted semantic jsutifications for presuppositions that are wholly unsupported by observational reality. What part of "scientific theories are based upon correspondence with observational reality" are you too stupid to understand again?

To Calillasseia,

I am not hitting on anyone

Blatant and manifest lie. Propositioning a female poster constitutes the definition of hitting upon her. What part of this elementary notion are you too stupid to understand again, creep?

but just making a sincere offer to her provided she is not married.

I have news for you. She has better taste. Chances are she considers a seven inch piece of plastic and two 1.5 volt batteries to be a superior choice to you.

Are you jeolous or somethin?!

Jealous of an idiot who is incapable of addressing even the most elementary points put to him?

Jealous of a propagandist for doctrine who demonstrates time and again in his posts that he is scietifically illiterate, ignorant, boorish, palsied and too busy hypnotising himself to the music of the spheres of his own verbal diarrhoea whilst staring glassy-eyed at the doctrinal hologram in his head to be aware of the real world and what it is telling him?

You're fantasising again. Asking if I'm jealous of you is like asking if I'm jealous of someone who emerged from the clap clinic with a positive diagnosis.

I will not let you off the hook, so..

So you're going to post your worthless website again. Yawn. Got anything scientifically valid to post, such as the actual scientific papers that I've posted in the past? Or is your literacy level still too far below crayon to understand their contents?

SCIENCEISLAM.COM

Youre website is a pile of steaming intellectual faeces of the most putrid order. It comprises nothing more than assorted wank-break circle-jerk apologists erecting convoluted semantic justifications for doctrinal presuppositions and retroactively force-fitting valid science to those doctrinal presuppositions. It's about as scientifically valid as Grimm's Fairy Tales.

DO NOT FORGET THAT IT WAS THE MUSLIMS WHO TOOK EUROPE OUT OF THEIR DARK AGES AND ORIGINATED THE SCIENCES

Bollocks. All that the early muslims did was preserve the earlier works of Classical Greek civilisation.

Then, the muslim world disappeared up its own doctrinal rectum when it decided that conformity to a doctrine mattered more than correspondence with observational reality. Which is why islamic nations today are backward shit holes, several of which are only propped up by oil money, and without which, they would have reverted to the primeval slime years ago.

AND HOW IT WAS THE BOOK OF GOD , THE QU'RAN THAT INSPIRED IT ALL

Bollocks. Your diseased book of kiddy fiddler ramblings inspired only one thing - the abandonment of appreciation of reality in favour of conformity to doctrine based upon myth and fantasy. Which is why islamic nations are backward shit holes.

But just like the false teaching of evolution in academia you were deliberately not told about it.

Actually my history classes dealt a fair amount with the early years of the muslim world, and listed the contributions it made at a time when it had the courage to listen to reality. Unfortunately, it stopped listening to reality and instead turned to conformity to doctrine, and disappeared up its own rectal passage as a consequence.

Plus, since evolution is an OBSERVED FACT, and I have posted scientific papers that document the observations of evolution taking place in real world living organisms including speciation events observed in the laboratory, all of which refute your masturbatory bullshit above about evolution, none of which you have bothered to read or attempt to understand because you are so convinced that your doctrinal blinkers are the last word in "truth", and all of which are accepted as valid evidence by real scientists (you know, the people who spend decades of their life studying and researching the subject intensively, as opposed to posting pompous, bombastic fuckwittery on the Internet about it based upon rampant and wilful ignorance), your above statement is beneath deserving of a point of view.

So, once again, here is the challenge that Joe Morreale will chicken out of again when I post it:

PROVIDE A CITATION TO THE EXACT SURA IN THE KORAN THAT CONTAINS A DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS.

After all Joe, YOU are the one who is asserting that your kiddy fiddler's book of ramblings is a valid scientific text, so I'm giving you the chance to put your money where your mouth is. Capable of doing that? Or are we going to see yet more evasion and apologetic bleating, accompanied by repeat spamming of the pages with the URL of your worthless website, composed of the output of circle-jerk practitioners of apologetics for a masturbation fantasy of a doctrine?

6. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207804 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 7:29 am

To Kiki,

...

Why do you not become a Muslim and i will ask you to marry me and take care of you?

Showing your true colours now Joe?

Anyone else here regard this blatant hitting on a female poster as creepy and offensive?

7. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207798 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 7:26 am

lickin sardines is a way of saying that you are bitter and devastated.

In your dreams.

If your book of myths is so scientifically wonderful, how come most islamic nations are backward shit holes, several of which have only been rescued from descending into the primeval slime because they were lucky enough to have lots of oil underneath them?

Most islamic countries can't even make a working ballpoint pen themselves. They have to buy the expertise in from the West with oil money. That's going to come to an end the moment we develop oil-independent energy technologies, and then we'll see how backward these nations really are when the funds that prop them up come to an end.

The Qu'ran mentions dozens of Scientific facts

Funny how you can't point to a specific one that I asked for.

which are SUFFICIENT to prove that it is from God

Still hypnotising yourself with the music of the spheres of your own verbal diarrhoea whilst staring glassy eyed at the doctrinal hologram inside your head? Only thus far, you haven't provided anything that even remotely meets the definition of evidence. Where are your valid scientific paper citations? Where are your expositions of the content thereof? You have none. All you have is blind assertion and apologetic bluster.

like the admissions of non-muslims scientists on SCIENCEISLAM.COM testify

Your worthless website consists of apologists force-fitting valid science to presupposition. It is about as scientifically valid as Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Your verbal acrobatics

Pot, kettle, black.

The only one engaging in apologetic evasion here is you.

When are you going to be man enough to meet the SPECIFIC CHALLENGE that I put to you? Or are you an intellectual chicken?

are powerless to do anything about it.

The REAL SCIENTISTS of the world aren't listening to blowhards like you. They're getting on with the business of understanding reality without the need for your worthless doctrine or your non-existent invisible magic man.

Your opinion and that of anyone else on this site is worthless by comparison.

Spare me your impotent display of puerile indignation. The critical thinkers here bothered to become educated, which is more than you manifestly bothered to do. What part of "uncritical acceptance of the unsupported assertions of a doctrine" constitutes an intellectually valid stance in any logically consistent universe?

COME TO TERMS WITH THE FACT THAT IT IS ALL OVER and as we say in sicilian-style: non fare il lupo!

Yes, it's all over for your doctrinal masturbation fantasies ...

which is a term that is used against a person who knows but ignores or pretends not to but it is futile as the person knows it

You're really good at projection aren't you?

8. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207736 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 6:24 am

To Calilasseia

How you doin with those sardines your lickin?!

What is this bilge supposed to mean?

Do you have anything even remotely resembling a constructive coment here instead of your usual blind assertion and apologetic bluster?

IT SO EASY TO PROVE MY POINT:

ATLAS OF CREATION AND....

SCIENCEISLAM.COM

Repeatedly parroting these two disreputable and wholly discredited sources as though they are scientifically valid isn't good enough. Harun Yahya's book is the work of a CHARLATAN. Your "scienceislam" apologists are doing nothing other than force-fitting valid science to the presuppositions of a doctrine.

So are you going to take that challenge I gave above Joe? Are you man enough to attempt it, or are you too much of an intellectual chicken to face it?

Here's the challenge again:

PROVIDE A CITATION TO THE EXACT SURA IN WHICH THE KORAN DESCRIBES THE NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS IN DETAIL.

After all, YOU are the one asserting that this book is a valid science text. Let's see if it is courtesy of this challenge, shall we? Or are you going to chicken out of even touching this one?

9. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207709 by Calilasseia on July 10, 2008 at 5:55 am

LET US START WITH A BANG!

Given that we all arise from sexual intercourse, this hardly needs stating explicitly ...

21:30 "DO NOT THE UNBELIEVERS SEET THAT THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH WERE JOINE TOGETHER, BEFORE WE CLOVED THEM ASUNDER? WE MADE EVERY LIVING THING OUT OF WATER. WILL THEY TEN NOT BELIEVE?"

Ah, mindless proselytising in CAPS LOCK mode.

Joe, posting your worthless drivel in CAPS LOCK mode doesn't stop it from being drivel.

Plus, your turgid and worthless holy book talks about Adam being formed, fully adult and fully conscious, with fully adult cognition, from a ball of dirt. So your worthless old tome cannot even maintain consistency with respect to the basics.

LET ME ASK YOU, HOW CAN YOU STILL NOT BELIEVE?!

Easy. We take off the doctrinal blinkers and look at the real world as it actually is instead of through your distorting ideological prisms.

As always when a person is truly on a mission to seek truth SINCERETY and OBJECTIVITY are key, otherwise he is in reality following/worshipping
HIS OWN WHIMS AND DESIRES even though he knows inside that it is in vain.

Nice revelation of your own motives and the motives of every other adherent of doctrine there. In other words, a combination of the need to conform allied to rampant narcissism.

This becomes clear when solid evidence is presented and it is still not accepted.

You've been doing plenty of summary dismissal of actual evidence thus far. Have you even bothered to read the citations for those scientific papers I presented, let alone the actual papers themseslves?

Again go and view the stunning example of admissions of non-muslim scientists on SCIENCEISLAM.COM which leave no room for a A SUCCESSFULL REFUTATION.

Bullshit. Those scientific papers I cited blow your collection of doctrinal apologists out of the water with nuclear depth charges. Because that is what those individuals are engaging in - doctrinal apologetics. Which is worthless in genuine intellectual circles, because apologetics consists of nothing more than the erection of convoluted semantic justifications for presuppositions. Science, on the other hand, is in the business of testing presuppositions to destruction.

All that your worthless apologists are doing is walking up to the scientific bullet holes and drawing apologetic bullseyes around them. They're engaging in nothing more than retroactive force-fitting of science to the presuppositions of a doctrine. A well-known logical fallacy, which, speaking of cowboys, is known as the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

THE QU'RAN PROVES CONCLUSIVELY THAT IT IS INDEED FROM GOD.

Circular argument. Therefore worthless.

WHEN MANY PEOPLE FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD INCLUDING SCIENTISTS ARE INCREASINGLY COMING TO ISLAM, OF WHAT WORTH ARE YOUR LIES AND DISTORTIONS?

I love the way that propagandists for reality-denial masturbation-fantasy doctrines invert reality in this fashion, and claim that looking at the real world as it is and drawing appropriate conclusions therefrom constitutes "lies and distortions", whilst uncritical acceptance of the unsupported assertions of their doctrine is held up by them as The Truth™. The blinkers they wear are such that they cannot see the absurdity of this.

Sincere people who learned Arabic before commiting and confirming the inevitable fact that the Qu'ran is from God.

Ask yourself, Joe, why are all the other religions false? Then when you have answered that, you'll know why we think yours is false, because the same principles apply. To state otherwise consists of merely asserting that your doctrine possesses a privileged status over and above all the others, which of course is a well-known part of the aetiology of the doctrine centred mindset.

YOUR TRYING TO CAST DOUBT BY YOUR LIES AND ACROBATIC DISTORTING OF THE ARABIC.

I haven't mentioned any Arabic at all. I have, on the other hand, presented numerous scientific papers which you have ignored and summarily dismissed because those papers fail to genuflect before your masturbation fantasy of a doctrine.

WHAT YOU PRESENT HAS BEEN REFUTED LIVE ON MANY LECTURES AND DEBATES ALL OVER THE WORLD BY DR ZAKIR NAIK.

Who?

Should I know this individual at all? What is his claim to fame, other than as an apologist for doctrine? Because if that is his only claim to fame, I suspect that this is all I need to know about him, because anything he says as a consequence of being an apologist for doctrine will be intellectually superfical, shallow, worthless and vacuous.

At the end of his lectures the same stuff that you allege as mistakes are swatted in his long question and answer sessions.

If by this you mean that he erects apologetic word salad in order to sound big and clever, then I have to inform you that genuine refutation of canards takes rather more in the way of learning than this. As you are discovering here, if only you had sufficient functioning brain cells to remove your doctrinal blinkers.

Why do you not go to one of his lectures/debates when he is nearby and present yourself with your distortions and see how you would be exposed I as a fool and liar!

I've a better idea. How about your supposedly "world famous" apologist come here if he's hard enough? We need some new chew toys.

IF YOU HAVE SEEN THIS GUY IN ACTION YOU KNOW HE WOULD ABSOLUTELY HUMILIATE YOU

I suspect the only humiliation I would suffer at his hands would be due to my pissing myself laughing at his inadequacies.

As for this:

The Atlas does have a few mistakes (not many like you say) which in all probability were sincere ones.

This is demonstrable nonsense. Harun Yahya ripped off the work of someone with far less wealth than him in the form of Graham Owen, whose fishing lure artwork was stolen for Harun Yahya's worthless and absurd book of pretentious masturbatory garbage, and in doing so, demonstrated to the world his own rmpant scientific ignorance and incompetence. What part of "only an idiot would mistake a fishing lure with a bloody big metal hook sticking out of its arse end for a real Caddis Fly" are you too stupid to understand?

Nevertheless the rest of the book is solid

Only with respect to its mass. Its content, on the other hand, is droolingly encephalitic nonsense that the average 12 year old in the UK would laugh at for its rampant stupidity.

as can be testified by the fact that the secular establishment are running scared of it.

I love it when propagandists for masturbation-fantasy doctrines don't bother looking beyond the televisions inside their heads.

What part of "we're parading its absurdities worldwide and laughing at them" equates to "running scared" in any logically consistent universe?

Which, in case you hadn't worked this out, we're doing in order to counter the insidious, pernicious and utterly poisonous view that Harun Yahya, you and other doctrinal fantasists are peddling, namely that when reality and doctrine differ, reality is wrong and doctrine is right.

It is obvious that a few fishing lures are not enough to discredit it!

This utterly palsied nonsense can only be written by someone whose mind is so addled by doctrinal conformity at all costs that the denial of reality has transcended the pathological.

What part of "only an IDIOT and a CHARLATAN would mistake a FISHING LURE for a LIVING INSECT" are you too stupid to understand again?

There, I can use CAPS LOCK too. :)

When will people realise that evolution is a deception kept "alive" by propaganda and that anything that is pointed to as so-called evidence never goes beyond the speculation and hypothesies stage?

Bullshit.

Have you studied those scientific papers I have cited in previous posts? No? Then you don't know what you are talking about. The only "propaganda" being peddled here is that being peddled by doctrinal masturbation fantasists like you.

What part of direct experimental test of evolutionary concepts to determine their validity are you too stupid to understand?

Evolution has been refuted from the Molecuar to the Paleontology with many admissions of evolutionists themselves.

Bullshit.

All that has happened is that the words of scientists have been DISHONESTLY QUOTE MINED by mendacious and duplicitous propagandists for doctrine such as you.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SINCERELY BELIEVE IN IT ANY LONGER - IT IS ALL OVER.

As succinct a description of your creationist masturbation fantasies as one could wish for.

YES I HAVE READ THE ENTIRE BOOK

You have yet to establish that your literacy level extends beyond crayon.

AS I PROUDLY POSSESS ONE AND A FEW FISHING LURES DOES IS INSIGNIFICANT AS COMPARED TO THE REST OF THE EXAMPLES

Only a complete scientific ignoramus could post such gibberish.

What part of "any book purporting to be a scientific text, that mistakes fishing lures for living insects, is worth less than toilet paper" are you too stupid to understand here.

(HUNDREDS) OF FOSSILS WHICH CLEARLY SHOW PHYSICAL EVIDENCE THAT EVOLUTION NEVER TOOK PLACE.

Only in the television inside your head. Keep watching that flickering screen and deluding yourself with that pretty doctrinal hologram of yours.

Once again, did you even bother to read the citations I provided to the scientific papers I presented, let alone their contents?

What a waste of oxygen you are.

THE FACT THAT THE BOOK CONTAINS MANY ADMISSIONS OF ITS INVALIDITIES AND THE FACT THE MASSES ARE NOT TOLD THIS, AT LEAST NOT ON THE MAINSTREAM TELLS WHAT IS GOING ON.

What is this syntactically atrocious word salad supposed to mean again?

SERIOUSLY WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE.

REAL SCIENTISTS did just that 150 years ago when they flushed your creationist masturbation fantasies down the toilet.

I do not believe the Bible in its entirety is the Word of God as it is well-known and established that it contains many errors including scientific ones.

And cue the apologetic assertion in the next sentence ...

BUT the same cannot be labeled at The Qu'ran which is infallible

Bullshit. Mere blind assertion on your part. Which, apart from apologetic bluster, is virtually all you have presented.

as witnessed by many people who are more and more learning of its scientic compatability with ESTABLISHED modern scientific findings

Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Mere retroactive force-fitting of scientific reality to conform to doctrinal presuppositions. All that is happening is that propagandists for your worthless doctrine are drawing apologetic bullseyes around the scientific bullet holes.

Take a look at what non-Muslim scientists have admitted on SCIENCEISLAM.COM and then tell me what you think

I've just described what they're doing above. How many times does this need to be repeated before it sinks into the concrete inside your skull?

These people and many others learned the Arabic before confirming that it is indeed of Divine Origin.

Bullshit. They merely accepted uncritically the unsupported assertions of a doctrine.

Surely their word counts more over the liars and cowboys that engage in dishonesty on this site?

Nice admission of your own status here in that sentence above. Because your refusal even to acknowlege the existence of those scientific papers I cited earlier is DISHONESTY ON YOUR PART WRIT LARGE.

The reason why you cannot post or blog on Muslim sites is because there are sadly many cowboys who engage in insults on Prophet and foul language.

Translation: those sites are afraid of having their nonsense refuted wholesale. Excuses, excuses.

We let you come here and post your drivel. We're not afraid to let you vomit forth your droolingly encephalitic nonsense, because we can pound it into its constituent quarks without drawing breath. Why are your wonderful muslim sites afraid to let us visit them? RUNNING SCARED are they?

You are not deluded into thinking that we are scared are you?!

The EVIDENCE speaks for itself. We let you come here and vomit your nonsense because we're not afraid of you and your duplicitous fellow propagandists for masturbation-fantasy doctrine in the least. Your doctrinal fantasy web sites, on the other hand, are shit scared that we will eviscerate their pretensions, their presuppositions and their scientific ignorance.

Going to read any of those scientific papers I cited are you? Assuming of course that you can acquire a literacy level beyond the crayon stage?

People like Adnan Oktar are propagating the truth lies and charlatanism for FREE on the internet and go to many public fossil exhibitions.

There, fixed it for you.

Dr Zakir Naik has done over 1000 public lectures all over the world with long questions and answer sessions where he has always comprehensively dealt with everything that has come his way.

Tell your worthless apologist for doctrine to come here if he thinks he's hard enough.

Those who are actually running scared are the secularists as can be seen by the reaction to the Atlas.

Keep tugging your pudding whilst staring glassy eyed at that pretty doctrinal hologram in the television inside your head. You're talking horseshit. What part of "parading the absurdities of the work of your useless charlatan and laughing at them" equates to "running scared" in any logically consistent universe?

it is GAME OVER

For your masturbation-fantasy world view, it is.

The reasons for doing so? Obvious. It is the manifest truth.

Horseshit. Your book of diseased ramblings from your kiddy fiddler prophet is about as "truthful" as kent Hovind's tax returns.

It is the only scripture as testified by an increasing number of people to be scientifically compatable with modern established science.

Total bullshit. All that is happening is that apologists for doctrine are force-fitting valid science to conform to doctrinal presuppositions.

Tell you what, if your book of kiddy fiddler ramblings is such a wonderful scientific text, point to the part where it discusses the Navier-Stokes Equations. I want you to point to the precise sura that describes them in detail.

That's a challenge you'll never meet. Quite a few people here will probably put serious money on that one.

All that a person needs is sincerety and objectivity when in search for the truth

And what part of "uncritical acceptance of the unsupported assertions of doctrine" equates to "sincerity and objectivity in pursuit of the truth" in any logically consistent universe?

It is clear that such an insincere disposition from a person in that case is not worthy or deserving of GUIDANCE from God who will just leave that person wandering blindly in his ignorance.

I love the way that "ignorance" is defined by this masturbation fantasist as "failure to accept uncritically the unsupported assertions of my doctrine". A definition no dictionary on the planet would accept.

There are many pschological barriers that can be obstacles on the path to the truth such as:

Family tradition/culture
Social pressure
Pride/arrogance and rebellion
Difficulty in abandoning a certain life-style etc

You forgot to mention "unwillingness to discard doctrinal blinkers".

Now if a person does not make the effort in realising that surely God is more important than anything, that person even if shown the truth will not see it or simply ignore.

Provide substantive evidence that your invisible magic man actually exists, in accordance with proper evidential standards as opposed to the standards of your worthless apologetics, and we'll listen. Until then, if all you have to offer is blind assertion and apologetic bluster, we'll treat your wibblings with the scorn and derision they deserve.

So, here's the challenge that I predict Joe Morreale will NEVER meet. Namely:

POINT TO THE EXACT SURA IN THE KORAN THAT DESCRIBES IN DETAIL THE NAVIER-STOKES EQUATIONS.

After all, if the Koran is a valid science text, it should be easy to do this, shouldn't it?

10. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207400 by Calilasseia on July 9, 2008 at 4:51 pm

Vinelectric, the following page should prove highly enlightening in this respect:

The Authoritarians by Bob Altmeyer

11. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207355 by Calilasseia on July 9, 2008 at 3:04 pm

Time to deal with some of Joe Morreale's droolingly encephalitic nonsense and inability to use his CAPS LOCK key properly ...

WHY DO THEY NOT ALLOW THE POSSIBILITY OF A SUPERNATURAL EXPLANATION TO THE PHENOMENA OF THE UNIVERSE?

Because supernatural entities are by definition not subject to reliable and repeatable empricial test. Whereas natural phenomena are. What part of this elementary concept are you incapable of understanding?

SIR FRED HOYLE:
"Indeed, such a theory (that life was assembled by an intelligence) is so OBVIOUS that one wonders why it is not widely accepted as being self-evident. The REASONS ARE PSYCHOLOGICAL RATHER THAN SCIENTIFIC."

Fred Hoyle wasn't a biologist. Plus, his remarks demonstrate an ignorance of the subject, such as his use of bad probability calculations based upon absurd notions (biologists don't claim that living things arose "by chance", but as a consequence of well defined and testable processes) and stupid analogies (Dawkins himself dealt with the "747" nonsense in TGD, which is just a repackaged version of Paley's "watchmaker" argument that was demolished by Darwin 150 years ago). He also made mistakes in his own field of astrophysics. Of course, there was much that he was right about, including stellar nucleosynthesis, so we can forgive him some of his other errors, which he made whilst genuinely striving to understand the operation of the universe, as opposed to the parroting of canards by propagandists for doctrine that pollute the comments section of this page. Unfortunately, some of Hoyle's ideas were blind alleys, and he made the mistake of being too wedded to those blind alleys to change his views. This does not in the least diminish his contributions in those areas where he was right of course.

Here's a tip for you: what is the difference between a 747 and a living organism? answer this correctly and you'll understand why the "747" argument is total tosh.

RICHARD C LEWONTIN of Harvard Uni
"It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a MATERIAL EXPLANATION of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that WE ARE FORCED BY OUR PRIORI ADHERENCE TO MATERIAL CAUSES to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, n o matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. MOREOVER, THAT MATERIALISM IS ABSOLUTE, SO WE CANNOT ALLOW A DIVINE FOOT IN THE DOOR."

Which he said because "allowing a divine foot in the door" is a guaranteed way of leading to bad science. Look at organisations such as AiG, ICR and the Discovery Institute, which all provide evidence for this phenomenon. None of them practise real science, instead they practise religious apologetics dressed up in scientific sounding language.

Science depends upon being able to perform repeatable and reliable empirical tests of its ideas. Because ONLY by performing such empirical tests can we determine whether or not the ideas being tested are in accord with observational reality. Supernatural entites are untestable. Therefore they cannot be admitted because they are scientifically useless.

Again, what part of this elementary concept are you incapable of understanding?

The above exposes and makes clear the false and deliberately imposed deception that Religion and Science cannot co-exist.

They can co-exist so long as religion does not arrogantly assume that it has the right to tell scientists what to think and how to conduct their research. The moment it does that, it becomes a pestilence. Again, what part of this elementary concept are you incapable of understanding?

More and more people are becoming aware of what is going on and abandon belief in this sinister fairy tale.
It is clear that those who stubbornly cling to it are only doing so out of vain wishful-thinking.

Your doctrine IS a fairy tale. Unfortunately for fetishistic adherents of masturbation-fantasy, reality-denial world views such as the one you are propagandising for, evolution is massively supported by evidence from observational reality. I don't suppose you bothered to check out any of the large number of scientific papers I have cited in previous posts that contain some of that evidence, have you? But then the aetiology of doctrine-addled creationists is all too familiar to the critical thinkers here: ignore any evidence that contradicts their masturbation fantasies and pretend that it doesn't exist.

It is an utter mockery of democracy the fact that both Creationism and darwinism are not taught alongside eachother as two possible explanations for the universe.

You appear to be wholly ignorant of a basic notion. Namely that scientific theories are NOT a "popularity contest" or the subject of public opinion. The ONLY criterion that matters is whether or not those theories are in accord with observational reality. Theories that are not thus in accord, like phlogiston, are discarded. Creationism is discarded for the same reason - namely it is flatly contradicted by observational reality. Again, what part of this elementary concept are you incapable of understanding?

THE SECULAR ESTABLISHMENT KNOW AND RIGHTLY FEAR THE RESULTS - THEY HAVE SEEN THE IMPACT THE ATLAS HAS HAD ON SINCERE AND OBJECTIVE STUDENTS IN US AND EUROPE AND HENCE THE ATTEMPT TO BAN IT!

Total bullshit.

We don't need to ban this stupid book, we can let its absurdities speak for themselves.

Why shoud we bother to ban this book when its own manifest stupidity is the best weapon we could possibly have? A book that contains pictures of fishing lures and presents them as real living creatures? A better advertisement for the intellectual vacuity and bankruptcy of creationist masturbation fantasies we could not wish for!

It is a pointer to your own blinkered stupidity that you not only do not realise this, but also do not realise that any reasonably educated five year old can see that picture of the "Caddis Fly" with the bloody great metal hook sticking out of its arse end and realise that this book is a pathetic joke. Care to point me to any real, living insects that possess large metal hooks sticking out of their arse ends? Only in my years spent studying entomology, I never encountered any. I wonder why that is?

THE FEW SINCERE MISTAKES FROM THE ATLAS OF CREATION DO NOT IN ANY WAY CANCEL OUT THE REST OF THE WORK WHICH UTTERLY EXPOSES, REFUTES AND RUINS THE FAIRY TALE CALLED EVOLUTION.

This is just apologetic wankery to distract from the fact that Harun Yahya is a charlatan whose ignorance of basic biology would be an embarrassment to secondary school children here in the UK. The only fairy tales being spun around here are the ones being spun by fetishistic adherents of masturbation-fantasy doctrines such as creationism. The idea that this ridiculous book, filled with basic errors that a twelve year old in a UK school would wet himself laughing at, somehoe "refutes" the untold millions of man-hours of patient observation, experiment and analysis that provide the massive evidential support for evolution is possibly the most pathetic joke you have told thus far. But then what else can one expect from an intellectual clown but pathetic jokes masquerading as serious comment, a category that so many of your worthless eructations fall into so neatly?

or find them spread about on youtube where as ever the Truth is mixed and surrounded by cowboys.

Yes we've seen plenty of creationist cowboys on YouTube. All of them classic examples of the mental retardation that results from inbreeding.

I HAVE PROVEN SCIENTIFICALLY THE FOLLOWING:

That evolution is a deception only kept "alive" by propaganda

The only thing you have proven is that you're a doctrine-addled masturbation fantasist. Don't suppose you bothered to read any of those scientific papers I cited in earlier posts that make a mockery of your arrogant pretensions to know better about biology than the world's biologists?

Modern Science has clearly shown that God exists.

Total crap. Where does it say this in any of the critically robust peer reviewed scientific literature again? Do you have a CITATION for this? Put up or shut up, big mouth.

The Qu'ran is indeed the word of God and also shows that He exists.

Your book consists of nothing but the diseased and psychotic ramblings of a kiddy fiddler. Your book is worthless as a scientific document, and worth even less as a guide to morality. In short, your holy book is something I wouldn't allow near any children of mine lest they end up needing psychiatric treatment from the shock of reading its barbaric contents.

IN ANYCASE TRUTH STANDS FIRM AGAINST FALSEHOOD AS MANY PEOPLE ARE BEGINNING TO SEE.

Which is why science REJECTED CREATIONIST MASTURBATION FANTASIES 150 YEARS AGO.

See, I can use CAPS LOCK as well.

ADNAN OKTAR HAS RUINED THE FALSE HOPES OF THOSE WHO WERE COMFORTABLE WITH THEIR WORLD VIEW.

The only thing Oktar has ruined is the integrity of his rectum as a result of being sentenced to prison. What part of "Oktar is a moron who published a book presenting fishing lures as real living insects" are you too stupid to understand here?

Meanwhile ....

Oh look, ertu is back with his nonsense.

Let's take a look at this pathetic pile of steaming intellectual excrement shall we?

The Fossil Record:
No Sign of Intermediate Forms

Total bullshit.

I can list no less than fifteen species of transitional theropod that have been discovered by scientists with respect to the transition between reptiles and birds alone. All of them extensively documented in the scientific literature. Here's the list (in no particular order):

Sinosauropteryx
Protarchaeopteryx
Caudipteryx
Shuvuuia
Sinornithosaurus
Beipiaosaurus
Microraptor
Epidendrosaurus
Cryptovolans
Scansoriopteryx
Yixianosaurus
Dilong
Pedopenna
Jinfengopteryx
Sinocalliopteryx

Then there's the list of tetrapods in the series from Rhipidistian fishes to Temnospondyl amphibians. Here's a representative list (again in no particular order):

Eusthenopteron
Metaxygnathus
Obruchevichthys
Elginerpeton
Sinostega
Hynerpeton
Tulerpeton
Densignathus
Jacubsonia
Panderichthys
Tiktaalik
Ventastega (newly discovered in 2008)
Acanthostega
Ichthyostega

I happen to have been in receipt of the original scientific paper by Per Ahlberg et al on the subject of Ventastega, which is a relatively complete fossil and which has been described in full in the following paper:

Ventastega curonica And The Origin Of Tetrapod Morphology by Per E. Ahlberg, Jennifer A. Clack, Ervïns Lukševičs, Henning Blom, & Ivars Zupiņs, Nature, 453:1199-1204 (26th June 2008)

I'll quote the abstract here:

The gap in our understanding of the evolutionary transition from fish to tetrapod is beginning to close thanks to the discovery of new intermediate forms such as Tiktaalik roseae. Here we narrow it further by presenting the skull, exceptionally preserved braincase, shoulder girdle and partial pelvis of Ventastega curonica from the Late Devonian of Latvia, a transitional intermediate form between the 'elpistostegids' Panderichthys and Tiktaalik and the Devonian tetrapods (limbed vertebrates) Acanthostega and Ichthyostega. Ventastega is the most primitive Devonian tetrapod represented by extensive remains, and casts light on a part of the phylogeny otherwise only represented by fragmentary taxa: it illuminates the origin of principal tetrapod structures and the extent of morphological diversity among the transitional forms.

So, there's one scientific paper (published less than two weeks ago no less) that blows this canard out of the water.

I also refer the critical thinkers (because the creationist propagandists for masturbation-fantasy doctrines will doubtless ignore any evidence that fails to genuflect before their fantasies) to the following images:

Phylogeny of Tiktaalik roseae and its relation to other organisms in the series

Comparative anatomy of the forelimbs of Tiktaalik and selected organisms in the tetrapod phylogeny

Moreover, here is another paper from Per Ahlberg and Jennifer Clack, who are widely regarded being among the foremost experts in the field of tetrapod palaeontology and phylogeny:

Original PDF document of Ahlberg & Clack paper from which the original images above were taken

This paper is:

A Firm Step From Water To Land by Per E. Ahlberg and Jennifer A. Clack, Nature, 440: 747-749 (6th April 2006)

I quote from this paper:

A project designed to discover fossils that illuminate the transition between fishes and land vertebrates has delivered the goods. At a stroke, our picture of that transition is greatly improved.

The concept of 'missing links' has a powerful grasp on the imagination: the rare transitional fossils that apparently capture the origins of major groups of organisms are uniquely evocative. But the concept has become freighted with unfounded notions of evolutionary 'progress' and with a mistaken emphasis on the single intermediate fossil as the key to understanding evolutionary transitions. Much of the importance of transitional fossils actually lies in how they resemble and differ from their nearest neighbours in the phylogenetic tree, and in the picture of change that emerges from this pattern.

We raise these points because on pages 757 and 764 of this issue^1,2 are reports of just such an intermediate: Tiktaalik roseae, a link between fishes and land vertebrates that might in time become as much of an evolutionary icon as the proto-bird Archaeopteryx. Several specimens have been found in Late Devonian river sediments on Ellesmere Island in Nunavut, Arctic Canada. They show a flattened, superficially crocodile-like animal, with a skull some 20 centimetres in length. The body is covered in rhombic bony scales, and the pectoral fins are almost-but-not-quite forelimbs; these contain robust internal skeletons, but are fringed with fin rays rather than digits. Tiktaalik goes a long way �" but not quite the whole way �" towards filling a major gap in the picture of the vertebrate transition from water to land.

It has long been clear that limbed vertebrates (tetrapods) evolved from osteolepiform lobefinned fishes³, but until recently the morphological gap between the two groups remained frustratingly wide. The gap was bounded at the top by primitive Devonian tetrapods such as Ichthyostega and Acanthostega from Greenland, and at the bottom by Panderichthys, a
tetrapod-like predatory fish from the latest Middle Devonian of Latvia (Fig. 1). Ichthyostega and Acanthostega⁵ retain true fish tails with fin rays but are nevertheless unambiguous tetrapods with limbs that bear digits⁶. Panderichthys⁷ is vaguely crocodile-shaped and, unlike the rather conventional osteolepiform fishes farther down the tree, looks like a fish�"tetrapod transitional form. The shape of the pectoral fin skeleton and shoulder girdle are intermediate between those of osteolepiforms and tetrapods, suggesting that Panderichthys was beginning to 'walk', but perhaps in shallow water rather than on land⁸.

Panderichthys lived about 385 million years ago at the end of the Middle Devonian; Ichthyostega and Acanthostega lived about 365 million years ago during the Late Devonian. However, the earliest fragmentary tetrapods from Scotland^9,10 and Latvia⁹ date back to perhaps 376 million years ago, so the morphological gap between fish and tetrapod corresponds to a time gap of under 10 million years.

Into this gap drops Tiktaalik. The fossils are earliest Late Devonian in age, making them at most 2 million or 3 million years younger than Panderichthys. With its crocodile-shaped skull, and paired fins with fin rays but strong internal limb skeletons, Tiktaalik also resembles Panderichthys quite closely. The closest match, however, is not to Panderichthys but to another animal, Elpistostege, from the early Late Devonian of Canada. Elpistostege is known only from two partial skulls and a length of backbone, but it has long been recognized as a fish�" tetrapod intermediate^11,12, probably closer to tetrapods than is Panderichthys. This impression is now confirmed: the authors^1,2 demonstrate convincingly that Elpistostege and Tiktaalik fall between Panderichthys and the earliest tetrapods on the phylogenetic tree.

So, that's the "no transitional forms" canard busted by two recent scientific papers at least, along with the evidence from the fossil record. Oh, and Tiktaalik was predicted to exist before it was found: not only was it predicted to possess a specific morphology, but was also predicted to be most likely to be found in a particular geographical location and in a particular stratum. When the scientists went looking for it, they found it exactly in the predicted location and it manifested the predicted morphology. In other words, transitional forms are not only real, but in the case of Tiktaalik, was predicted to exist before it was found, and when found, matched the scientists' predictions.

Now, returning to ertu's masturbatory nonsense:

The clearest evidence that the scenario suggested by the theory of evolution did not take place is the fossil record.
According to this theory, every living species has sprung from a predecessor. A previously existing species turned into something else over time and all species have come into being in this way. In other words, this transformation proceeds gradually over millions of years.
Had this been the case, numerous intermediary species should have existed and lived within this long transformation period.

Those scientific papers above say that they did. Now who are the critical thinkers going to believe here? Two of the world's foremost scientific experts on tetrapod palaeontology and phylogeny, and their publicly presented evidence in the critically robust peer reviewed scientific literature, or some joker who thinks that he knows more than all the world's scientists just because he has an old holy book full of diseased rmblings inserted into his rectum?

For instance, some half-fish/half-reptiles should have lived in the past which had acquired some reptilian traits in addition to the fish traits they already had.

Wrong, you mean transitional forms between fishes and amphibians. And I've just presented two scientific papers containing those very animals. Game over.

Or there should have existed some reptile-birds, which acquired some bird traits in addition to the reptilian traits they already had.

Have you never seen an Archaeopteryx fossil? It has a beak like a bird, but teeth like a reptile. It has feathers like a bird, but a bony tail like a reptile. It has a wishbone like a bird, but no keeled breastbone, and moreover, its reptilian features correspond closely to those of a family of theropod dinosaurs known as the Dromaeosauridae.

So, before you spout nonsense about this not being a "transitional form", I suggest you learn some basic comparative anatomy.

Since these would be in a transitional phase, they should be disabled, defective, crippled living beings

Bullshit. Only a complete scientific ignoramus could make such a statement.

Those fifteen species of transitional theropod I listed above (which includes Archaeopteryx) weren't "disabled, defective, crippled living beings", they were fully functional living organisms that happened to possess the requisite transitional features. But then, like all other fetishists for masturbation-fantasy doctrines, you won't let the actual scientific facts get in the way of your proselytising for your worthless doctrine, will you?

Evolutionists refer to these imaginary creatures

Er, since scientists have found the requsite fossils and documented them in the scientific literature, they are all too real. The only thing "imaginary" here is your fantasises about the way the world operates.

which they believe to have lived in the past

We have the fossils. Science wins, you lose.

as "transitional forms."

Which even an elementary student of comparative anatomy can recognise as such. But then I don't suppose you ever learned any real science did you ertu?

If such animals ever really existed, there should be millions and even billions of them in number and variety.

Oh there were large numbers of them. However, not all of them fossilised. Palaeontologists have to make do with the samples that the real world chooses to give them. However, if these creatures were, as you say, "imaginary", then NONE should have existed. They plainly DID exist, as we have the fossils. Once again, game over.

More importantly, the remains of these strange creatures should be present in the fossil record.

See above. I've just presented two scientific papers containing them. Once again, game over.

In The Origin of Species, Darwin explained:
"If my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all of the species of the same group together must assuredly have existed... Consequently, evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains."

Oh look, it's DISHONEST QUOTE MINE TIME AGAIN. Why does this not surprise me in the least?

Let's see what Darwin said in FULL, shall we?

Lastly, looking not to any one time, but to all time, if my theory be true, numberless intermediate varieties, linking most closely all the species of the same group together, must assuredly have existed; but the very process of natural selection constantly tends, as has been so often remarked, to exterminate the parent forms and the intermediate links. Consequently evidence of their former existence could be found only amongst fossil remains, which are preserved, as we shall in a future chapter attempt to show, in an extremely imperfect and intermittent record.

Oh look what was missed off the end. Once again, a DISHONEST QUOTE MINE from our resident propagandist for masturbation-fantasy doctrine.

Oh, and ertu, no reputable scientist claims that evolution operates "by chance", so stop spouting that worthless and blatantly false canard once and for all will you, because every time you spout it, you present a spectacle of yourself as being an even bigger moron than previously.

12. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #207053 by Calilasseia on July 9, 2008 at 6:01 am

First of all, allow me to extend a hearty welcome to Kaph. Who provides welcome evidence that individuals capable of distinguishing reality from fantasy are present everywhere, even if local circumstances might make life difficult for them at times. :)

In reply to this:

@Fellows who have put up with BS by ertu et al.

Are you on tranquillizers or what? At least 300-400 comments after first trolling and excluding them, and you're still up and arguing? What kind of patience is that? Totally unbelievable. I take my hat off to you all. No racism, which Turks suffer heavily from on the web, despite repeated provocative attitude. Seriously. I would not have written anything here had it not been for an extraordinary patience on your part and the need I felt to thank Richard.

Well, I can only speak for myself, but my personal policy is that mendacious propaganda for a doctrine, the assorted lies and other instances of discoursive malfeasance that inevitably accompany it, and rampant scientific illiteracy should be confronted head on. The lies of propagandists for reality-denial doctrines should be exposed to the fullest extent whenever possible so that their lies can be seen by even the most causal of observers to be demonstrably and manifestly lies, the rampant stupidity and scientific illiteracy of such doctrines should be brought out into the open and exposed as such, and when patient explanation of the fallacies and errors inherent therein fails to dissuade the ideological warrior for doctrine from continuing along the same path of mindless proselytising, ridicule should inevitably follow, because ridicule is what such individuals plainly deserve. At times, the exercise of this process does take an inordinate amount of patience, but it requires less patience if one possesses a taste for debunking canards.

The simple fact is, that once we encounter an individual such as ertu, with the all too familiar aetiology of the doctrine addled mind, our purpose is not that of trying to educate the propagandist for doctrine, because such an individual is beyond education. Once a doctrine such as creationism takes hold in the mind, it distorts not only thought but perception itself, to the point where the adherent's very sensing of the real world is subject to doctrinal censorship. Such an individual is impervious to reason, to evidence, to any of the usual processes of discourse that you and I understand to be proper conduct with regard to the discussion of the validity of various postulates about the world. The critical thinkers here are not interested in any attempt at educating the hardcore ideological warriors for doctrine, because we know in advance that this is utterly futile. Our labours here can be thought of as a vaccination process - by exposing the fallacies, the errors, the mendacity and duplicity of the ideological warriors for doctrine, by making them manifest, we inoculate lurkers (such as you yourself were before your post above) against intellect-rotting doctrinal mind viruses. Reason, rational discourse, along with a healthy dose of ridicule of absurdities thus deserving of it, constitutes the vaccine that helps to reduce the incidence of infection by ideological pathogens, as you are doubtless aware. There are occasions when our labours take on the mantle of a thoroughly thankless task, but when an individual such as yourself emerges from the shadows to thank us for our efforts, we know that it has all been worthwhile. :)

13. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206668 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 4:14 pm

Well looks as if Ertu isn't going to address the fact that his ridiculous probability calculations are rendered null and void by my citation of the variation in insulin molecules in real living organisms, so I suppose I'm done here, as he's plainly nothing more than a cut-and paste troll who is manifestly wilfully ignorant and committed wholesale to being ideological cannon fodder for a masturbation fantasy of a doctrine. What a total waste of oxygen.

14. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206662 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 4:07 pm

Calilasseia who doesnt know anythinf about statistics and matemathics.

Well since I happen to have studied mathematics at university, and moreover can spell it properly, that's another of your assertions that is complete and utter horseshit.

I don't suppose you will ever address any of the outstanding questions will you Ertu? All you will continue doing here is spamming the comments section with your masturbatory nonsense and assorted cut and paste screeds from creationist websites because you're too incompetent to form thoughts of your own.

Tell me Ertu, why should I believe for one moment the ravings of someone who cannot tell a LIVING INSECT from a FISHING LURE? Or for that matter the ravings of someone who, like you, cannot even spell "mathematics", let alone practise it properly?

15. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206645 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 3:48 pm

Let's address some more Ertu nonsense shall we?

There are billions of different protein molecules in milions of species. Even a single protein to come into being by coincidences is impossible mathetatically and statistically. That diprove the Evolution at the very basic level Now I will prove you this scientifically:

No you won't because you're talking complete bollocks.

first of all, real scientists have never said that these molecules came about "by chance" or "by coincidence" or "at random". They posited well-defined mechanisms for the appearance of these molecules based upon well-known and well-documented mechanisms of reaction in organic chemistry, which you would know if you had bothered to study any real science instead of filling your head with religious bullshit.

Second, all the bad "probability" calculations eected by creationists FAIL because [1] the probability of an event that has already happened is 1, [2] even if one winds the clock back 3.5 billion years, to when these probability calculations would have been appropriate, they are ALL based upon ex recto assertions that are either left unstated (thus making it impossible to check their veracity) or else, if the creationist makes the mistake of stating the assumptions upon which the calculations are based, they are usually manifestly FALSE assumptions (which is why they are usually omitted), and [3] the calculations are usually based upon the Serial Trials Fallacy, which is a well-known creationist fallacy that falls flat on its face the moment one considers how real world systems operate.

So much for the cell, but the theory of evolution fails even to account for the building-blocks of a cell. The formation, under natural conditions, of just one single protein out of the thousands of complex protein molecules making up the cell is impossible.

Complete twaddle. Scientists have documented it taking place in the laboratory. Try reading some of those scientific papers I cited in an earlier post instead of the tripe spread about like so much intellectual excrement by charlatans and fraudsters such as Harun Yahya.

Proteins are giant molecules consisting of smaller units called "amino acids" that are arranged in a particular sequence in certain quantities and structures.

You obviously didn't read my earlier post where I documented the different insulin proteins in different organisms. What is selected for is not a specific sequence, but any sequence that produces a working protein. Of course, if you'd actually READ my earlier post, you would have known better than to erect the One True Sequence™ fallacy, especially as I posted that material on Insulin specifically to pre-empt that fallacy being erected. Congratulations upon demonstrating once again that you don't bother reading anything that dares not to genuflect before your worthless doctrine, and that you are only here to spam the comments section and proselytise for your useless masturbation-fantasy world view.

These units constitute the building blocks of a living protein. The simplest protein is composed of 50 amino acids, but there are some that contain thousands.

Since this is a statement of yours that isn't actually wrong, where did you cut and paste it from? Only the evidence thus far is that when you post any original thoughts of your own (the few of these that exist), you are inevitably wrong.

The crucial point is this. The absence, addition, or replacement of a single amino acid in the structure of a protein causes the protein to become a useless molecular heap.

Wrong. My reference to the insulin molecules of various living organisms dismisses this bullshit at a stroke. Notice that the insulin molecule of the Zebra Fish is not even the same length as the human insulin molecule, but it still works as an insulin molecule, and indeed, in an emergency, if enough of it was collected, it could be used as a stop-gap treatment for a diabetic human patient until human insulin became available. So, your assertion above is total crap as per usual.

Every amino acid has to be in the right place and in the right order.

Wrong. This is the One True Sequence™ fallacy that I specifically covered insulin in my earlier post to debunk. Look at those insulin sequences again. Most of them are not even the same length. You're talking horseshit.

The theory of evolution, which claims that life emerged as a result of chance

This is total bullshit. Evolution does NOT claim that "life emerged as a result of chance", and if you had ever bothered to read a biology textbook you would know this. Evolution states that the moment the first cells came into existence, the existence of dissemination of variation across generations, for which we have evidence (evidence even you can understand in this case - are you identical to your mother?) and the fact that some of that variation will predispose the organisms inheriting that variation to possess differential reproductive fitness with respect to the other organisms of its own species will result in a selection process taking place, that removes those variations reducing reproductive fitness, and increases the proportion of those organisms with increased reproductive fitness in future generations. And, the only reason that the mutations involved in the process of generating the substrate upon which selection acts is described as a "random" process (more properly, a stochastic one) is because we lack the ability to track the behaviour of every last atom in an ecocystem to arbitrary precision. If we had that capability, those mutations would no longer be "random" but predictable, and the result would be that the process would become amenable to quantitiative analysis to an extent that is currently not possible.

is quite helpless in the face of this order, since it is too wondrous to be explained by coincidence.

Except that scientists don't explain it by "coincidence", they explain it by the application of well-documented mechanisms of reaction in organic chemistry. Once again, you FAIL.

(Furthermore the theory cannot even substantiate the claim of the accidental formation of proteins, as will be discussed later.)

Total crap. I listed several scientific papers above on de novo genes appearing in real living organisms and documented to do so in the laboratory. Once again, you FAIL.

The fact that it is quite impossible for the functional structure of proteins to come about by chance can easily be observed even by simple probability calculations that anybody can understand.

Oh here we go, bad probability calculations based upon the One True Sequence™ fallacy (already debunked above) and the Serial Trials Fallacy. yawn, we've seen this crap before, try producing something original here.

For instance, an average-sized protein molecule composed of 288 amino acids, and contains twelve different types of amino acids can be arranged in 10300 different ways. (This is an astronomically huge number, consisting of 1 followed by 300 zeros.)

Except that proteins don't arise by chance. They arise courtesy of well-documented mechanisms of reaction in organic chemistry. Which means that your specious probability calculations are a complete waste of time.

Of all these possible sequences, only one forms the desired protein molecule.

Bullshit. See those insulin molecules I covered above? They're different from each other, in most cases not even the same length, yet they ALL WORK. One True Sequence™ is a fallacy, and you've just committed it.

he rest of them are amino-acid chains that are either totally useless or else potentially harmful to living things.

Those insulin molecules I listed above say you're talking out of your arse.

In other words, the probability of the formation of only one protein molecule is "1 in 10300".

Total crap. See above.

Oh, by the way, can't you even manage superscripts? Didn't you mean "1 in 10³⁰⁰?"

Try becoming educated before coming here to post, because until you become educated, all you will do is prove your ignorance and vomit forth intellectual excrement of the most putrid, stinking order.

The probability of this "1" to occur is practically nil. (In practice, probabilities smaller than 1 over 1050 are thought of as "zero probability").

Wrong. No mathematician would equate a non-zero probability, no matter how small, to zero. Try learning some real science and some real mathematics.

Meanwhile ... with respect to your long cut-and-paste nonsense on left handed proteins, here's some more scientific papers that debunk your creationist tripe:

A possible prebiotic synthesis of purine, adenine, cytosine, and 4(3H)-pyrimidinone from formamide implications for the origin of life by Raffaelle Saladino, Claudia Crestini, Giovanna Costanzo, Rodolfo Negri and Ernesto di Mauro, Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry, 9(5): 1249-1253 (May 2001)

A Self-Replicating Ligase Ribozyme by Natasha Paul & Gerald F. Joyce, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA., 99(20): 12733-12740, 1st October 2002

A Self Replicating System by T. Tjiviuka, P.Ballester and J. Rebek jr., Journal of the American Chemical Society, 112: 1249-1250 (1990)

An Efficient Prebiotic Synthesis Of Cytosine And Uracil by Michael P. Robertson & Stanley L. Miller, Nature,375: 772-774 (29th June 1995)

Carbonyl Sulphide Mediated Prebiotic Formation of Peptides by Luke Leman, Leslie Orgel and M. Reza Ghadiri, Science, Vol 306, pp 283-286, 8 October 2004

Homochiral selection in the montmorillonite-catalyzed and uncatalyzed Prebiotic synthesis of RNA by Prakash C. Joshi, Stefan Pitsch and James P. Ferris, Chemical Communications of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 2497-2498

Nucelotide Synthetase Ribozymes May Have Emerged First In The RNA World by Wentao Ma, Chunwu Yu, Wentao Zhang and Jiming Hu, The RNA Journal, 13: 2012-2019, 18th September 2007

Prebiotic Amino Acids As Asymmetric Catalysts by Sandra Pizzarello and Arthur L. Weber, Science, 303: 1151, 20 February 2004

Prebiotic Synthesis Of Nucleotides by G. Zubay and T. Mui, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 31(1-2): 87-102, February-April 2001:

RNA-Catalysed Nucleotide Synthesis by Peter J. Unrau & David P. Bartel, Nature, 395: 260-263, 17th September 1998

RNA-Catalysed RNA Polymerisation: Accurate And General RNA-Templated Primer Extension by Wendy K. Johnston, Peter J. Unrau, Michael S. Lawrence, Margaret E. Glasner and David P. Bartel, Science 292: 1319-1325 (18 May 2001)

RNA-Directed Amino Acid Homochirality by J. Martyn Bailey, J. Fed. Amer. Socs. Exp. Biol., 12(6): 503-507

These papers cover, among other topics, asymmetric catalysis and homochirality and demonstrate that preferential chiral catalysis of the formation of left handed amino acids is possible, but can be reproduced in the laboratory in conditions similar to those found on a prebiotic Earth

I have given you very powerful evidences and destroyed Darwinism.

Hahahaha .... bullshit.

All you have done is regurgitate cut and paste screeds from discredited creationist websites devoted to bad apologetics for theological pornography. You know NOTHING about REAL SCIENCE. The above scientific papers I have cited destroy your hubristic and ignorant pretensions to know better than the world's actual scientists.

Instead of trying to respond scientifically (yıu can't of course). you cry, scerami curse and insult.

Got an answer for any of those scientific papers I cited above? Which specifically refute your cut and paste nonsense about chirality in amino acids by demonstrating the existence of mechanisms for chiral catalysis that can be reproduced again and again in the laboratory?

That is very poor quality.

Your ignorant nonsense is.

You are not scientists. that is ok.

Actually, some of us are. Some of us have probably forgotten more science than you will ever be capable of learning.

But your situation is worst. I dont feel sorry about you because of your style.

We are completely indifferent to your view of us. What we are concerned with is the venomous nonsense you have chosen to believe in, and which has manifestly addled your mind.

If one protein can not emerge coincidentally, how could millions of species, tte universe. Etc. It is so silly to defend darwinism nonsense. Dont you get it?

Those insulin sequences say you are talking horseshit. You've already shown that you're incapable of recognising why the One True Sequence™ fallacy is a fallacy, even when I provided the source material. Consequently, your hubristic and ignorant assertions that you know better than the world's scientists about such topics are demonstrated to be so much hot air.

Dont u understand what kid of situation you are?

Try repeating that in syntactically correct English. Then perhaps we'll answer.

16. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206170 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 6:36 am

Well look like evolins are in trouble with scientific facts

The only one having trouble here, Wooter, is you. Including in your case trouble with basic English.

Or didn't you bother reading my post where I presented numerous scientific papers from evolutionary biologists and other scientists that make a mockery of your worthless fantasies and droolingly encephalitic theological pornography?

Wonder if unityisfact bothered to read that too? Or did he do what mendacious and duplicitous propagandists for reality-denial doctrines usually do, namely dismiss summarily anything that fails to genuflect before doctrine? Classic case of creo-blinkers if ever I saw one.

Plus, is anyone else here developing the suspicion that Ertu, unityisfact and the newcomer Mertd are all sock puppets erected by the same individual? Especially as they contain the same drivel, the same bad English spelling, syntax and grammar (except for the copy-pastes from discredited creationist websites and copy-paste quote mines) and the same wilful ignorance?

Oh, and Adnan Oktar is a charlatan, a fraudster and a moron. He's doing well-deserved jail time precisely because of this, just like another charlatan, fraudster and moron called Kent Hovind.

17. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206121 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 5:52 am

I notice that unityisfact totally ignored my large list of scientific papers that refute his masturbation-fantasy creationist doctrine. Why does this not surprise me in the least?

After all, he's only here to troll the comments section proselytising for his worthless doctrine, which was worthless even before the ink was dry on the parchment however long ago his particular version of this droolingly encephalitic fantasy about invisible magic men in the sky was written.

18. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #206103 by Calilasseia on July 8, 2008 at 5:31 am

Oh dear. First Ertu and his witterings inspired by the diseased ramblings of a paedophile, now we have unityisfact trolling the comments section.

Evolution did not happen, eh?

I have a nice list of scientific papers that says you are wrong.

Here they are, broken into convenient sections:

[1] De novo generation of genes:

A New Nylon Oligomer Degradation Gene (nylC) on Plasmid pOAD2 from a Flavobacterium sp. by Seiji Negoro, Shinji Kakudo, Itaru Urabe, and Hirosuke Okada, Journal of Bacteriology, Dec. 1992, p. 7948-7953

Birth of a unique enzyme from an alternative reading frame of the pre-existed, internally repetitious coding sequence by Susumu Ohno, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 81, pp. 2421-2425, April 1984

De Novo Origination of a New Protein-Coding Gene in Saccharomyces cerevisiae by Jing Cai, Ruoping Zhao, Huifeng Jiang and Wen Wang, Genetics, 179: 487-496 (May 2008)

DNA-DNA Hybridization Analysis of Nylon Oligomer-Degradative Plasmid pOAD2: Identification of the DNA Region Analogous to the Nylon Oligomer Degradation Gene by Seiji Negoro, Shunichi Nakamua and Hirosuke Okada, Journal of Bacteriology, 158(2): 419-424

Evolution of hydra, a Recently Evolved Testis-Expressed Gene with Nine Alternative First Exons in Drosophila melanogaster by Shou-Tao Chen, Hsin-Chien Cheng, Daniel A. Barbash and Hsiao-Pei Yang, PLoS Genetics, 3(7): 1131-1143 (July 2007)

Insertion Sequence IS6100 on Plasmid pOAD2, which degrades Nylon Oligomers by Ko Kato, Kinya Ohtsuki, Hiroyuki Mitsuda, Tetsuya Yomo, Seiji Negoro and Itaru Urabe, Journal of Bacteriology, 176(4): 1197-1200 (Feb 1994)

Nylon Oligomer Degradation Gene, nylC, on Plasmid pOAD2 from a Flavobacterium Strain Encodes Endo-Type 6-Aminohexanoate Oligomer Hydrolase: Purification and Characterization of the nylC Gene Product by Shinji Kakudo, Seiji Negoro, Itaru Urabe and Hirosuke Okada, Applied & Environmental Microbiology, 59(11): 3978-3980 (November 1993)

Novel genes derived from noncoding DNA in Drosophila melanogaster are frequently X-linked and exhibit testis-biased expression by Mia T. Levine, Corbin D. Jones, Andrew D. Kern, Heather A. Lindfors, and David J. Begun, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 103(26): 9935-9939 (27th June 2006)

Recently Evolved Genes Identified From Drosophila yakuba and D. erecta Accessory Gland Expressed Sequence Tags by David J. Begun, Heather A. Lindfors, Melissa E. Thompson and Alisha K. Holloway, Genetics, 172: 1675-1681 (March 2006)

[2] Antifreeze Glycoproteins in Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes:

Convergent Evolution of Antifreeze Glycoproteins in Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes and Arctic Cod by Liangbiao Chen, Arthur L. deVries and Chi-Hing C. Cheng, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 94, pp 3817-3822, 1997

Evolution of an Antifreeze Glycoprotein by Liangbiao Chen and Chi-Hing C. Cheng, Nature, vol 401, pp 443-444, 1999

Evolution of Antifreeze Glycoprotein Gene from a Trypsinogen Gene in Antarctic Notothenioid Fishes by Liangbiao Chen, Arthur L. deVries and Chi-Hing C. Cheng, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 94, pp 3811-3816, 1997

Functional Antifreeze Glycoprotein Genes in Temperate-Water New Zealand Nototheniid Fishes Infer An Antarctic Evolutionary Origin by Chi-Hing C Cheng, Liangbiao Chen, Thomas J Near and Yumi Jin, Journal of Molecular and Biological Evolution, Vol 20, no 11, pp 1897-1908, 2003

Nonhepatic Origin of Notothenioid Antifreeze Reveals Pancreatic Synthesis As Common Mechanism in Polar Fish Freezing Avoidance by Chi-Hing C Cheng, Paul A. Cziko and Clive W. Evans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 103, pp 10491-10496, 2006

[3] Speciation Events : Cichlid Fishes

Adaptive Evolution And Explosive Speciation: The Cichlid Fish Model by Thomas D. Kocher, Nature Reviews: Genetics, 5: 288-298 (April 2004)

Cichlid Species Flocks of the Past and Present by A. Meyer, Heredity vol 95, 419-420, 20 July 2005

Fractious Phylogenies by Thomas D Kocher, Nature, Vol 423, pp 489-490, 29 May 2003

Hybridisation and Contemporary Evolution in an introduced Cichlid Fish from Lake Malawi National Park by J. Todd Streelman, S.L. Gymrek, M.R. Kidd, C. Kidd, R.L. Robinson, E. Hert, A.J. Ambali and T.D. Kocher, Molecular Ecology, vol 13, pp 2471-2479, 21 April 2004

Major Histocompatibility Complex Variation In Two Species Of Cichlid Fishes From Lake Malawi by Hideki Ono, Colm O'hUigin, Herbert Tichy and Jan Klein, Molecular and Evolutionary Biology, 10(5): 1060-1072 (1993)

Mitochondrial Phylogeny of the Endemic Mouthbrooding Lineages of Cichlid Fishes from Lake Tanganyika in Eastern Africa by Christian Sturmbauer and Axel Meyer, Journal of Molecular and Biological Evolution, Vol 10, No. 4, pp 751-768, 1993

Multilocus Phylogeny of Cichlid Fishes (Pisces: Perciformes) : Evolutionary Comparison of Microsatellite and Single-Copy Nuclear Loci by J. Todd Streelman, Rafael Zardoya, Axel Meyer and Stephen A Karl, Journal of Molecular and Biological Evolution, Vol 15, No 7, pp 798-808, 1998

Origin of the Superflock of Cichlid Fishes from Lake Victoria, East Africa by Erik Verheyen, Walter Salzburger, Jos Snoeks and Axel Meyer, Science, vol 300, pp 325-329, 11 April 2003

Phylogeny of African Cichlid Fishes as Revealed By Molecular Markers by Werner E. Mayer, Herbert Tichy and Jan Klein., Heredity, vol 80, pp 702-714, 1998

The Species Flocks of East African Cichlid Fishes: Recent Advances in Molecular Phylogenetics and Population Genetics by Walter Salzburger and Axel Mayer, Naturwissenschaft, vol 91, pp 277-290, 20 April 2004

[4] Speciation Events Observed In The Laboratory:

Evidence for rapid speciation following a founder event in the laboratory by J.R. Weinberg V. R. Starczak and P. Jora, Evolution vol 46, pp 1214-1220, 1992

Experimentally Created Incipient Species of Drosophila by Theodosius Dobzhansky & Olga Pavlovsky, Nature 230, pp 289 - 292 (02 April 1971)

Founder-flush speciation in Drosophila pseudoobscura: a large scale experiment by A. Galiana, A. Moya and F. J. Alaya, Evolution vol 47, pp 432-444, 1993

Sexual isolation caused by selection for positive and negative phototaxis and geotaxis in Drosophila pseudoobscura by E. del Solar, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, vol 56, pp 484-487, 1966

So, that's 28 scientific papers containing evidence for evolution. These are just a tiny fraction of the papers published on the subject. In 2007 alone, over eighteen thousand critically robust peer reviewed scientific papers were published in the field of evolutionary biology. I therefore contend that unityisfact is, like all other propagandists for reality-denial masturbation-fantasy doctrines, talking out of an orifice more usually associated with a more solid form of waste.

Meanwhile, let's take a look at this:

THERE IS NO PLACE FOR RANDOMNESS IN THE DNA
RANDOMNESS IS THE BASIC PILLAR OF EVOLUTION
THERE IS NO PLACE FOR EVOLUTION

Oh look, the scientifically illiterate propagandist for masturbation-fantasy doctrine forgot selection. Why do creotards ALWAYS neglect to mention selection? Could it be because selection blows their strawman canards out of the water?

Meanwhile:

EVOLUTION CREATIONISM IS A FAIRY TALE, A STORY TOLD FROM ONE GENERATION TO ANOTHER, THAT HAS CAUSED MILLIONS TO GET INTO THE DEEP SLEEP OF IGNORANCE.

There, fixed that for you.

Oh, and by the way, with respect to insulin genes, how come insulin genes differ across various organisms in precisely the manner that would be expected from common descent with modification?. Here's some sample insulin genes and their corresponding protein sequences:

[1] Human insulin gene on Chromosome 11, which is as follows:

atg gcc ctg tgg atg cgc ctc ctg ccc ctg ctg gcg ctg ctg gcc ctc tgg gga cct gac
cca gcc gca gcc ttt gtg aac caa cac ctg tgc ggc tca cac ctg gtg gaa gct ctc tac
cta gtg tgc ggg gaa cga ggc ttc ttc tac aca ccc aag acc cgc cgg gag gca gag gac
ctg cag gtg ggg cag gtg gag ctg ggc ggg ggc cct ggt gca ggc agc ctg cag ccc ttg
gcc ctg gag ggg tcc ctg cag aag cgt ggc att gtg gaa caa tgc tgt acc agc atc tgc
tcc ctc tac cag ctg gag aac tac tgc aac tag

which codes for the following protein sequence (using the standard single letter mnemonics for individual amino acids:

MALWMRLLPLLALLALWGPDPAAAFVNQHLCGSHLVEALYLVCGERGFFYTPKT
RREAEDLQVGQVELGGGPGAGSLQPLALEGSLQ]KR
GIVEQCCTSICSLYQLENYCN

Now, I refer everyone to this data, which is the coding sequence for insulin in the Lowland Gorilla (differences are highlighted in boldface):

atg gcc ctg tgg atg cgc ctc ctg ccc ctg ctg gcg ctg ctg gcc ctc tgg gga cct gac
cca gcc gcg gcc ttt gtg aac caa cac ctg tgc ggc tcc cac ctg gtg gaa gct ctc tac
cta gtg tgc ggg gaa cga ggc ttc ttc tac aca ccc aag acc cgc cgg gag gca gag gac
ctg cag gtg ggg cag gtg gag ctg ggc ggg ggc cct ggt gca ggc agc ctg cag ccc ttg
gcc ctg gag ggg tcc ctg cag aag cgt ggc atc gtg gaa cag tgc tgt acc agc atc tgc
tcc ctc tac cag ctg gag aac tac tgc aac tag

this codes for the protein sequence:

MALWMRLLPLLALLALWGPDPAAAFVNQHLCGSHLVEALYLVCGERGFFYTPKT
RREAEDLQVGQVELGGGPGAGSLQPLALEGSLQKR
GIVEQCCTSICSLYQLENYCN

which so happens to be the same precursor protein. However, Gorillas are closely related to humans. Let's move a little further away, to the domestic cow, Bos taurus (whose sequence is found here):

atg gcc ctg tgg aca cgc ctg cgg ccc ctg ctg gcc ctg ctg gcg ctc tgg ccc ccc ccc
ccg gcc cgc gcc ttc gtc aac cag cat ctg tgt ggc tcc cac ctg gtg gag gcg ctg tac
ctg gtg tgc gga gag cgc ggc ttc ttc tac acg ccc aag gcc cgc cgg gag gtg gag ggc
ccg cag gtg ggg gcg ctg gag ctg gcc gga ggc ccg ggc gcg ggc ggc ctg gag ggg ccc
ccg cag aag cgt ggc atc gtg gag cag tgc tgt gcc agc gtc tgc tcg ctc tac cag ctg
gag aac tac tgt aac tag

Already this is a smaller sequence - 318 codons instead of 333 - so we KNOW we're going to get a different insulin molecule with this species ... which is as follows:

MALWTRLRPLLALLALWPPPPARAFVNQHLCGSHLVEALYLVCGERGFFYTPK
ARREVEGPQVGALELAGGPGAGGLEGPPQKRGIVE
QCCASVCSLYQLENYCN

clearly a different protein, but one which still functions as an insulin precursor and results in a mature insulin molecule in cows, one which differs in exact sequence from that in humans.

Moving on again, we have a different coding sequence from the tropical Zebrafish, Danio rerio, (sequence to be found here) which is as follows:

atg gca gtg tgg ctt cag gct ggt gct ctg ttg gtc ctg ttg gtc gtg tcc agt gta agc
act aac cca ggc aca ccg cag cac ctg tgt gga tct cat ctg gtc gat gcc ctt tat ctg
gtc tgt ggc cca aca ggc ttc ttc tac aac ccc aag aga gac gtt gag ccc ctt ctg ggt
ttc ctt cct cct aaa tct gcc cag gaa act gag gtg gct gac ttt gca ttt aaa gat cat
gcc gag ctg ata agg aag aga ggc att gta gag cag tgc tgc cac aaa ccc tgc agc atc
ttt gag ctg cag aac tac tgt aac tga

And this sequence codes for the following protein:

MAVWLQAGALLVLLVVSSVSTNPGTPQHLCGSHLVDALYLVCGPTFTGFFYNP
KRDVEPLLGFLPPKSAQETEVADFAFKDHAELIRK
RGIVEQCCHKPCSIFELQNYCN

so again we have a different insulin precursor protein that is ultimately converted into a different insulin molecule within the Zebra Fish.

So, let's nail the One True Sequence™ fallacy before it is even erected, shall we?

What is selected for is function. ANY protein sequence that functions properly will be selected for. And this is precisely what has happened in the case of the insulin gene. The fun part being, of course, that these insulin molecules ALL work, and indeed can be used in different species. Bovine insulin was used for many years to treat human diabetes until the recombinant technology to manufacture pure human insulin was devised.

Oh and I see "Clearmind", aka Wooter, has joined the tardfest. They're crawling out of the woodwork tonight aren't they?

Oh by the way, with respect to the mind, neuroscientists are increasingly alighting upon evidence that the mind is an emergent property of the brain. But since unityisfact is too busy filling his head with masturbation-fantasy creationist garbage, he probably wouldn't recognise the valid science if it piloted an AH-64D Longbow Apache gunship and shot a Hellfire missile at his testicles.

Oh, and the tard about speciation being unable to happen that unityisfact posted thus:

However, no matter how long this process goes on, it will not transform those deer into another species. The weak deer are eliminated, the strong survive, but, since no alteration in their genetic data takes place, no transformation of a species occurs. Despite the continuous processes of selection, deer continue to exist as deer.

Is directly refuted by the existence of documented speciation events in the scientific literature including speciation events observed in the laboratory. Game over.

Oh, and as for the Cambrian Explosion nonsense, let's look at some more scientific papers shall we?

Can fast early rates reconcile molecular dates with the Cambrian explosion? by L.D. Bromham & M.D. Hendry, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 267: 1041-1047 (2000)

Estimating Metazoan Divergence Times With A Molecular Clock by Kevin J. Peterson, Jessica B. Lyons, Kristin S. Nowak, Carter M. Takacs, Matthew J. Wargo & Mark A. McPeek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, April 2004, 101, 17, 6536-6541

Evolution of Amino Acid Frequencies in Proteins Over Deep Time: Inferred Order of Introduction of Amino Acids into the Genetic Code by Dawn J. Brooks, Jacques R. Fresco, Arthur M. Lesk, and Mona Singh, Molecular Biology and Evolution 19: 1645-1655 (2002)

Fossils, Molecules And Embryos: New Perspectives On The Cambrian Explosion by J.W. Valentine, D. Jablonski & D.H. Erwin, Development, February 1998, 126(5): 851-859

Inferring The Historical Patterns Of Biological Evolution by Mark Pagel, Nature, 401: 877-884 (28 October 1999)

Interpreting the Earliest Metazoan Fossils: What Can We Learn? by Ben Waggoner, Amer. Zool., 38: 975-982

Molecular Phylogeny of Arthropods and the Significance of the Cambrian "Explosion" for Molecular Systematics by Jerome C. Regier & Jeffrey W. Schultz, AMER. ZOOL., 38: 918-928 (1998)

Precambrian Sponges with Cellular Structures by Chia-Wen Li, Jun-Yan Chen and Tzu-En Hua, SCIENCE 279(6) February 1998

Quality of the fossil record thorugh time by M.J. Benton, M.A. Wills and R. Hitchin, Nature, 403: 534-537 (3 Feb 2000)

Sr and C isotopes in Lower Cambrian carbonates from the Siberian craton: A paleoenvironmental record during the 'Cambrian explosion' by L.A. Derry, M.D. Brasier, R. M. Corfield, A. Yu. Rozanov & A. Yu. Zhuralev, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 128: 671-681 (1994)

Taxonomic Congruence Versus Total Evidence, and Amniote Phylogeny Inferred from Fossils, Molecules and Morphology by Douglas J. Eernisse and Arnold G. Kluge, Molecular Biology & Evolution, 10(6): 1170-1195 (1993)

Testing the Cambrian explosion hypothesis by using a molecular dating technique by Lindell Bromham, Andrew Rambaut, Richard Fortey, Alan Cooper and David Penny, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, October 1998, 95: 12386-12389

The Cambrian "Explosion": Slow Fuse Or Megatonnage? by Simon Conway Morris, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, April 2000, 97(9): 4426-4429

The Ediacaran Biotas in Space and Time by Ben Waggoner, Integrative & Comparative Biology, 43: 104-113 (2003)

The Timing Of Eukaryotic Evolution: Does A Relaxed Molecular Clock Reconcile Proteins And fossils? by Emmanuel J.P. Douzery, Elizabeth A. Snell, Eric Bapteste, Frédéric Delsuc & Hervé Philiipe, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, October 2004, 101, 43, 15386-15391

First of all, the minimum time scale posited for this event is 18 to 23 million years. This is before we take account of the fact that there exist Precambrian fossils that extend the timeline of phylogenesis considerably. One of these fossils I covered here, which is, wait for it, a multicellular eukaryote that is 1,200 million years old and therefore predates the Cambrian by 700 million years. The paper describing it is this one:

Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen., n. sp.: implications for the evolution of sex, multicellularity, and the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes by Nicholas J. Butterfield, Palaeobiology, 26(3): 386-404, September 2000

The abstract can be found here, and I shall quote it in full below:

Multicellular filaments from the ca. 1200-Ma Hunting Formation (Somerset Island, arctic Canada) are identified as bangiacean red algae on the basis of diagnostic cell-division patterns. As the oldest taxonomically resolved eukaryote on record Bangiomorpha pubescens n. gen. n. sp. provides a key datum point for constraining protistan phylogeny. Combined with an increasingly resolved record of other Proterozoic eukaryotes, these fossils mark the onset of a major protistan radiation near the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic boundary.

Differential spore/gamete formation shows Bangiomorpha pubescens to have been sexually reproducing, the oldest reported occurrence in the fossil record. Sex was critical for the subsequent success of eukaryotes, not so much for the advantages of genetic recombination, but because it allowed for complex multicellularity. The selective advantages of complex multicellularity are considered sufficient for it to have arisen immediately following the appearance of sexual reproduction. As such, the most reliable proxy for the first appearance of sex will be the first stratigraphic occurrence of complex multicellularity.

Bangiomorpha pubescens is the first occurrence of complex multicellularity in the fossil record. A differentiated basal holdfast structure allowed for positive substrate attachment and thus the selective advantages of vertical orientation; i.e., an early example of ecological tiering. More generally, eukaryotic multicellularity is the innovation that established organismal morphology as a significant factor in the evolutionary process. As complex eukaryotes modified, and created entirely novel, environments, their inherent capacity for reciprocal morphological adaptation, gave rise to the "biological environment" of directional evolution and "progress." The evolution of sex, as a proximal cause of complex multicellularity, may thus account for the Mesoproterozoic/Neoproterozoic radiation of eukaryotes.

So already we're pushing back the time scale for various steps along the process. Looks like it's canard busting time once again.

Plus, as this page mentions, scientists have in their possession no less than eighteen excellent specimens of a Precambrian chordate. Here's a picture of one of the fossils:

Ediacaran Chordate

Here's a photo showing some of the sketches produced by the scientists reconstructing the original animal:

Reconstruction Work

Oddly enough, the Panda's Thumb article I've just cited also references the scientific paper by Douzery et al (2004) above that I included in my list of papers. Here's the abstract:

The use of nucleotide and amino acid sequences allows improved understanding of the timing of evolutionary events of life on earth. Molecular estimates of divergence times are, however, controversial and are generally much more ancient than suggested by the fossil record. The limited number of genes and species explored and pervasive variations in evolutionary rates are the most likely sources of such discrepancies. Here we compared concatenated amino acid sequences of 129 proteins from 36 eukaryotes to determine the divergence times of several major clades, including animals, fungi, plants, and various protists. Due to significant variations in their evolutionary rates, and to handle the uncertainty of the fossil record, we used a Bayesian relaxed molecular clock simultaneously calibrated by six paleontological constraints. We show that, according to 95% credibility intervals, the eukaryotic kingdoms diversified 950�"1,259 million years ago (Mya), animals diverged from choanoflagellates 761�"957 Mya, and the debated age of the split between protostomes and deuterostomes occurred 642�"761 Mya. The divergence times appeared to be robust with respect to prior assumptions and paleontological calibrations. Interestingly, these relaxed clock time estimates are much more recent than those obtained under the assumption of a global molecular clock, yet bilaterian diversification appears to be ~100 million years more ancient than the Cambrian boundary.

Oh, and that paper also cites how the authors subjected their Bayesian analysis to a reliability test in order to reinforce the robustness of their conclusions. :)

I think I'm done here for the day. :)

19. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205876 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:39 pm

So evolution cannot explain the Bombardier beetle?

Oh look. Scientific papers exist on that very subject.

Here's one I just found:

Spray mechanism of the most primitive bombardier beetle (Metrius contractus) by T Eisner, DJ Aneshansley, M Eisner, AB Attygalle, DW Alsop and J Meinwald, Journal of Experimental Biology, 203: 1265-1275, 2000

Here's the abstract:

The bombardier beetle Metrius contractus discharges its defensive secretion as a froth that clings to its body. When attacked from the rear, it allows the froth to build up over the gland openings near the abdominal tip; when attacked from the front, it conveys the secretion forwards along special elytral tracks. M. contractus has two-chambered defensive glands typical of bombardier beetles, and its secretion, like that of other bombardiers, is quinonoid and hot. Its frothing mechanism, however, is unique for bombardiers and possibly illustrative of the ancestral glandular discharge mechanism of these beetles. M. contractus, thus, could be the least derived of extant bombardiers.

Oh look. A primitive Bombardier beetle illustrating one of the intermediate stages.

Real science wins again.

Oh, Ertu, since it's obvious that you're completely ignorant of REAL SCIENCE, just answer that simple question again. Why should I believe some moron who cannot tell a living insect apart from a fishing lure?

20. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205857 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:24 pm

Going to answer that question I posed Ertu?

Namely why should I believe someone who can't tell the difference between a LIVING INSECT and a FISHING LURE?

Or are you going to spam this comments page with yet more worthless blind assertion borne of scientific ignorance and a complete inability to recognise that your beloved doctrine is nothing more than a masturbation fantasy? And, for good measure, post DISHONEST QUOTE MINES such as the one you posted above from Charles Darwin, which I've just EXPOSED as a dishonest quote mine?

21. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205849 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:17 pm

OI! ERTU!

WHY SHOULD I BELIEVE SOMEONE WHO CAN'T TELL THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A LIVING INSECT AND A FISHING LURE?

22. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205844 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:13 pm

Oh look - QUOTE MINE TIME!

Here's what Darwin said in full from that passage. Notice the large chunk of text that was missing from Ertu's BLATANTLY DISHONEST QUOTE MINE ...

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. How a nerve comes to be sensitive to light, hardly concerns us more than how life itself originated; but I may remark that, as some of the lowest organisms, in which nerves cannot be detected, are capable of perceiving light, it does not seem impossible that certain sensitive elements in their sarcode should become aggregated and developed into nerves, endowed with this special sensibility.

Boldface emphasis in above mine.

So, Ertu, care to answer that question I posed above?

Namely, why should we consider a theory promulgated by a man who posts pictures of FISHING LURES and labels them as REAL LIVING ORGANISMS, to be anything other than a worthless masturbation fantasy?

23. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205830 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:06 pm

Ertu, take a look at this:

http://forbiddenmusic.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/yahya_lure.jpg

This is a photo from Harun Yahya's worthless book. Notice the BLOODY HUGE HOOK STICKING OUT OF THE ARSE END?

Harun Yahya claimed that this was a REAL CADDIS FLY.

Tell me, where on the planet can I find LIVING CADDIS FLIES with METAL HOOKS STICKING OUT OF THEIR ARSE ENDS?

Now, if this is the sort of nonsense that is associated with creationism, why should anyone with a minimum of ten functioning brain cells regard creationism as anything other than a masturbation fantasy?

24. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205825 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 8:02 pm

Ertu, if your Allah is so powerful, why did your Allah arrange for Harun Yahya to be such an incompetent moron when disseminating this tome of his? You know, such as using a photograph of a fishing lure with a bloody great metal hook sticking out of its arse end and claiming that it was a real Caddis Fly?

Your Allah fucked up regally there didn't he?

Just as it seems he fucked up regally arranging for all the people with functioning brain cells to be people who accepted the validity of evolutionary science, while all the retarded dickheads believe in creationist masturbation fantasies.

25. [UPDATED] Venomous Snakes, Slippery Eels and Harun Yahya

Comment #205801 by Calilasseia on July 7, 2008 at 7:44 pm

Ah, the infamous Harun Yahya.

I don't suppose any of the recipients of this tome, who are currently using it as an elaborate doorstop, would care to send one to me? Only I really love the idea of having a copy with the fishing lures to show to people, especially the image of the Caddis Fly with a bloody huge metal hook sticking out of its arse end ...

26. We Urgently Need Your Help Now!!

Comment #196284 by Calilasseia on June 19, 2008 at 3:25 pm

To all concerned Louisiana citizens ... here's a message you can send. I edited it slightly to remove a remark about creationists that might cause it to be diverted into the spam bin, but otherwise, it's almost a verbatim copy of the letter I provided for use in the forums. Letter follows after the line of asterisks.

*************************************************

Dear Governor Jindal,

You have before you a bill, which if you do not veto, will make Louisiana an educational laughing stock throughout the developed world, and which will set a dangerous precedent for your nation.

But there are plenty of people outside the USA who want you to ratify that bill. Want to know why?

Because if you do, you will remove future generations of Americans from being competitive with respect to the scientific labour market. You will ensure that they receive a Third World education, rendering them unfit to be anything other than burger flippers and grass cutters. While all those Indian and Chinese children who receive a proper scientific education will be taking the high-salary, high-prestige jobs that will haemorrhage out of the USA at a rate of knots if this backdoor attempt to introduce creationism in science classes isn't tossed into the bin where it belongs.

You might not care too much about Americans winning the Nobel Prize for physiology or medicine. You might not care too much about Americans rising to prominence in the world of the the life sciences. That's perfectly all right with India and China, because they do care about their children doing just that, and will happily take over once American education is flushed down the toilet in order to appease assorted purveyors of doctrine who care more about Pharisaic declarations of piety and enforcing their narrow, theocratic world view upon other people than they do about the things that matter, such as developing the next generation of therapies for diseases that are serious public health issues. But then if this bill isn't tossed into the bin, you won't have to worry about not being at the forefront of research into Parkinsonism, Alzheimer's or Huntington's Chorea, because the USA will end up becoming Burkina Faso with stealth bombers. Whereupon your major worries will include the re-emergence of famine, malnutrition and infectious diseases, because you allowed the education system to be destroyed in order to appease sanctimonious panhandlers who care more about their fantasies of turning the USA into 13th Century Europe Mark II than they do about the consequences this will have if ever those fantasies are realised. Whereupon your country will end up becoming a vassal of India or China, if it isn't fortunate enough to have the European Union step in and rescue it from the mess.

Do you want to be the person who set the historical precedent that led to the USA becoming an educational and scientific basket case? No? Then kill that duplicitous bill forthwith.

Yours sincerely,


Someone who wants his children to be something other than burger flippers.

27. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #196276 by Calilasseia on June 19, 2008 at 3:11 pm

Your post is extremely verbose

Translation: "Oh dear, this post contains a complete rebuttal of my canards with cited references including scientific papers".

Be advised. I don't do "dumbed down" for anyone. If you can't live with it, tough.

and unfortunately I don't have the time to respond to it now.

Translation: "Oh dear, responding to this will divert me from propagandising for my doctrine using off the cuff one liners and cartoon strawman caricatures".

I will make the effort soon.

I'm tempted to reprise an old computer advertisement from here in the UK at this point (past Spectrum owners will recognise this one):

"Coming soon - the Microdrive".

But try to me more succinct and to the point next time.

And what part of the development of the background to Nietzsche's thinking that I provided above wasn't to the point, given that it came from my own personal copy of Beyond Good and Evil, which I cited giving the ISBN number so that it could be checked independently?

No use quoting all that stuff.

In order to debunk your simplistic canards, it was of great utility value.

It would have sufficed to give a short, concise explanation of what you think, supported by some statements by Nietzsche.

Considering that direct quotes from Nietzsche's own words were contained in the above, and quotes that were carefully chosen with respect to the development of his own argument, as opposed to what I happened to think his argument was, which was the strawman caricature you erected above in order to deliver yet another boringly familiar creationist cheap shot at Darwin and evolution, I contend here that my post was both apposite and of utility value. It seems you are the only dissenting voice here so far.

Now, you have a nice raft of unanswered questions from other posters to attend to. I suggest you make a start on those, as some of those questions are extremely pertinent and strike right at the heart of your canards. It will be enjoyable seeing you do this, because then I shall have some inkling as to whether you are likely to address my post with anything of substance. Given the precedents you have set thus far, I shall not be overly disappointed if your responses to the other posters are, as anticipated in advance, beneath the minimum standards of basic discourse.

28. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #196171 by Calilasseia on June 19, 2008 at 11:58 am

Let's take a look at what Nietzsche actually said, shall we, as opposed to what Schmeezers thinks Nietzsche said in order to erect cartoon strawman caricatures of "Darwinian" thought ...

It's a while since I thumbed through my copy of Beyond good and Evil, but the introduction performs an excellent Baedecker tour of Nietzsche's reasoning before we embark upon the work proper. So it is from that introduction that I shall quote, at length. The book in question is the Penguin Classics version of Beyond Good and Evil, translated by R. J. Hollingdale, ISBN 0 14 044513 7, and I am indebted to Michael Tanner for the words that follow in the large quote below.

This [a previously referred to observation that Nietzsche's favourite activity was celebration - see Also Sprach Zarathrustra for more on this] may all seem to be rather distant from the experience of reading BGE, at least with respect to the first two parts, 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers' and 'The Free Spirit'. But in fact the prejudices of philosophers turn out to be ones that we all share. Or perhaps it is fairer to say that Nietzsche regards us all, insofar as we subscribe to a system of values, as being philosophers. Nietzsche immediately raises a series of questions concerning values that we hold so deeply that we are not aware of having them as values at all. 'What really is it in us that wants "the truth"?' he asks, thereby immediately establishing a distance between himself and other philosophers. He is, as so often, interested in asking a question prior to any it would normally occur to us to ask. As philosophers, that is, 'lovers of wisdom', how could we want anything other than the truth? We could hardly go out consciously looking for untruth. As it stands, this first question seems provokingly silly, and it is only when we realise that with it Nietzsche is launching on a series of questions that we are made to feel genuinely uneasy. To want truth and begin searching for it we need to have confidence in our capacity to find it; to recognise it when we encounter it. What gives us this confidence? Nietzsche claims in Section 2, 'the faith in antithetical values', that it is the 'fundamental faith of the metaphysicians'. We operate, in the most natural way, with a series of opposites, of which truth-falsity is the most obvious and fundamental. Indeed, it is hard to see how we could avoid working in this way, and one might feel inclined to ask Nietzsche, before he succeeds in dazzling us with a series of increasingly alarming doubts, whether he doesn't operate with this dichotomy too.And it very soon turns out that he does. The original query is, to a large extent, one of those effects which Nietzsche the melodramatist of the inner life is betrayed into making when he lapses from his role as 'the tragic philosopher'. The issues he is most valuably concerned with in these heady opening sections are all closely related to the first one, but not identical with it. His real anxieties have to do with our readiness to take as truth things that for him manifestly aren't, thereby displaying the lack of refinement in our sense of truth. In addition, he is irritated by the dogmatism that insists that between the poles of truth-falsity, good-bad and so on, there can be no fruitful connections. And perhaps crucially, he claims (and I quote the whole of Section 4):

The falseness of a judgement is to us not necessarily an objection to a judgement; it is here that our new language perhaps sounds strangest. The question is to what extent is it life-advancing, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps even species-breeding; and our fundamental tendency is to assert that the falsest judgements (to which synthetic judgements a priori belong) are the most indispensable to us, that without granting as true the functions of logic, without measuring reality against the purely invented world of the unconditional and self-identical, without a continual falsification of the world by means of numbers, mankind could not live - that to renounce false judgements would be to renounce life, would be to deny life. To recognise untruth as a condition of life: that, to be sure, means to resist customary value-sentiments in a dangerous fashion; and a philosophy which ventures to do so places itself, by that act alone, beyond good and evil.

This remarkable passage, besides being perplexing, may very well be true. To make it clearer it is necessary to run the risk that besets all commentators on Nietzsche - that of seeming to be painfully prosaic. However, to offer my interpretation: Nietzsche is not claiming that we do, or should, embrace judgements that we know to be false - it is not even clear that such a suggestion makes sense. His point is rather that many of the judgements to which we subscribe most firmly may, in fact, be false, but that it is better that we should not discover this, or that it may be better. We should, that is, be very careful about where our philosophers are leading us. Actually he would have made his point more effectively if he had spoken of scientists rather than philosophers, for the latter have not been notably successful in uncovering any concrete truths, palatable or the reverse, at any stage in the history of the subject. But the search for truth at any cost, though it is inspired by a philosophy, has been carried through with terrifying success by scientists; admittedly more so in the century since Nietzsche wrote that passage than in all preceding times. It may well be the case that it is more important that a judgement be 'life-advancing, life-preserving' etc., than it is to be true. But one can't decide to believe in something because it ministers to life, though one thinks that it is false, because one can't decide to believe. Nietzsche is aware of this, to the extent that he has a 'Hands off!' attitude toward knowledge-seekers. As he puts it in the preface to the second edition of The Gay Science, written later in the year that BGE was published, ' "Is it true that God is present everywhere?" a little girl asked her mother; "I think that's indecent" - a hint for philosophers! One should have more respect for the bashfulness with which Nature has hidden behind riddles and iridescent uncertainties'. But surely Nietzsche would have done better to speak of scientists - the secrets of nature seem to be safe from philosophers. It must be the case that he was so concerned with the drive to truth, which philosophers ceaselessly boast of possessing to a supreme degree, that he overlooked what ought to have been for him their gratifying failure-rate. Or, more sympathetically to him, one might say it was the whole nexus of science-inspired-by-philosophy-inspired-by-religion that really concerned him. For, as he had argued in The Gay Science and was to argue again at greater length in The Genealogy of Morals, it was the self-destructive urge of Christianity, intent on exploring to its furthest recesses the glory of god's world, that led to the discovery that explanations of natural phenomena could continue indefinitely without ever needing to call upon divine assistance.

But this makes it sound as if Nietzsche regretted the erosion of Christian belief and value by advancing science, whereas if there is one widely held view about him that is true, it is that he was passionately anti-Christian. So if there is one good thing about Christianity, mustn't this be its inherent tendency to autodestruct? This is where Nietzsche's passion for intellectual cleanliness asserts itself. For although we think of Christianity as primarily a religion, it is, like all systems of religious belief, based on a set of views about the way things are, in other words a metaphysic. And as soon as he hears that word, Nietzsche pounces. He puts his case in Section 6, which begins:

It has gradually become clear to me what every great philosophy has hitherto been: a confession on the part of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir; moreover, that the moral (or immoral) intentions in every philosophy have every time constituted the real germ of life out of which the entire plant has grown. To explain how a philosopher's most remote metaphysical assertions have actually been arrived at, it is always well (and wise) to ask oneself first: what morality does this (does he - ) aim at? I accordingly do not believe a 'drive to knowledge' to be the father of philosophy, but that another drive has, here as elsewhere, only employed knowledge (and false knowledge) as a tool.

So in the course of four pages, Nietzsche has performed a volte face. Having called into question the value of the urge to knowledge, he now denies that it is ever the basic urge, for we always pursue knowledge, so-called, in the interests of supporting a moral order, which is a dressed-up version of how we want things to be, or how we want them to be forced to be.

So, it would appear that that Nietzsche's primary attack in this work was upon those philosophers who erect grand systems of metaphysics in order to impose an ethics upon the world, when there is no reason to suppose that any ethics are valid to impose upon the world to begin with. But then Schmeezers, in his eagerness to erect his cartoon strawman caricatures for the purpose of propagandising for his doctrine, which is a prime example of the very process Nietzsche is criticising, namely the erection of a metaphysic to impose an ethic, and in Schmeezers' case an amateurish attempt that speaks loudly of delusions of adequacy, totally missed the target as is his usual wont. But then should any of the critical thinkers here be surprised at this?

Plus, what Nietzsche asserted as far back as Also Sprach Zarathrustra, and which Beyond Good And Evil as, as Tanner stated, in effect Nietzsche's own Cliff Notes with respect thereto, is that our systems of ethics are our inventions, and that it is our responsibility to erect systems of ethics that fulfil their goals in a competent fashion, an exercise involving a great deal more intellectual labour than offloading the burden onto some mythical magic man. In this, he is at least partially Existentialist as I understand the term, but far more subversively, in my view, he is in effect introducing the notion of ethics as an experimental discipline, a notion that should terrify all but the most intellectually valiant. he is, in effect, saying that ethical systems require the same careful attention to detail and intellectual rigour as scientific endeavours, precisely because ethical systems are our inventions and not an innate part of the universe. But then, what ethical system could possibly be an innate part of the universe, when the evidence before us is that the only beings capable of operating within ethical parameters (i.e., us) have only existed for a tiny fraction of the amount of time that said universe has existed? What "morality" was "innate" to the first unicellular life forms 3.5 billion years ago? What "morality" was "innate" to Cambrian trilobites, or Devonian tetrapods, or the Archosaurs prior to the impact of that 10Km diameter bolide that wiped them out? The very question is meaningless, utterly meaningless.

As to where we derive our capacity for ethical thought, well a look at our fellow primates, as well as neuroscience, is once again illuminating where religion merely spreads fog. First of all, the fact that our fellow primates depend upon social cohesion within groups in order to enhance their survival advantages leads to co-operative behaviour being positively selected for, which at a stroke nails the "strong vanquishing the weak" strawman caricature of evolution that Schmeezers characteristically erects above in order to propagandise for his assertion-laden, evidence-free doctrine. Indeed, the capacity for empathy for our fellow members of our species is amply demonstrated in other primates, and indeed extensible beyond the species barrier. Humans are not alone in doing so - a particularly excellent demonstration of this occurring in other primates is provided by a female gorilla called Binti Jua, who became newsworthy courtesy of her response to an incident in which a small boy fell 24 feet into her zoo enclosure. Binti Jua carefully cradled the stricken child, and carried him to safety to be retrieved by zoo personnel and thence to an ambulance, all the time simultaneously nursing her own infant. I think it most unlikely that Binti Jua has ever read that 3,000 year old book of Bronze Age ramblings so beloved by adherents of doctrine such as Schmeezers, and consequently has absolutely no notion whatsoever of the invisible magic man contained therein. So where did she obtain the impulse to care for that stricken child if, as individuals such as Schmeezers repeatedly and tiresomely assert without ever providing substantive support for this assertion, that their magic man is a vital necessity in all matter ethical, and that without this magic man, chaos on a galactic scale would reign? On the other hand, the idea of ethics as an emergent property of positively selected social cohesion provides a more than adequate explanation for Binti Jua's actions: again, no superfluous supernatural input needed. Moreover, neuroscientists have identified the particular part of the anatomy of the brain that is associated with ethical behaviour - namely the ventromedial pre-frontal cortex - and it has been demonstrated on numerous occasions that damage to this area impairs ethical behaviour in those affected. This is associated with other decision making deficits, including preference for short-term over long-term gains, and related phenomena. Apposite papers include:

Characterisation of the Decision-Making Deficit of Patients with Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Lesions by Antoine Bechara, Daniel Tranel and Hanna Damasio, Brain, 123: 2189-2202 (2000)

Insensitivity to Future Consequences Following Damage to Human Prefrontal Cortex by Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Antonio R. Damasio and Steven W. Anderson, Cognition, 50(1-3): 7-15 (Apr-Jun 1994)

Characterization of Empathy Deficits Following Prefrontal Brain Damage: the Role of the Right Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex by S.G. Shamay-Tsoory, R. Tomer, B. D. Berger and J. Aharon-Peretz, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 15(3): 324-337 (1st April 2003)

Visual Recognition Impairment Follows Ventromedial But Not Dorsolateral Prefrontal Lesions in Monkeys by J. Bachevalier and M. Mishkin, Behavioural Brain Research, 20(3): 249-261 (June 1986)

Decision-Making Heterogeneity in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Function Predicts Different Treatment Outcomes by P. Cavedini, G. Riboldi, A. D'Annucci, P. Belotti, M. Cisima and L. Bellodi, Neuropsychologia, 40(2): 205-211 (2002)

Impairment Of Social And Moral Behaviour Related To Early Damage In Human Prefrontal Cortex by Steven W. Anderson, Antoine Bechara, Hanna Damasio, Daniel Tranel and Antonio R. Damasio, Nature Neuroscience, 2(11): 1032-1037 (November 1999)

The latter paper, unusually for a paper from Nature, is downloadable in full from here:

http://residenttraining.ucsd.edu/pgy-I didactics/prefrontsocialmmoral.pdf">

So, its beginning to look as if once again, the evidence from reality is flushing Schmeezers' assorted assertions down the toilet. But is anyone surprised at this?

29. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #195903 by Calilasseia on June 19, 2008 at 2:42 am

Let's take a look at this shall we?

Well, I suppose people will believe what they will believe.

You're providing plenty of evidence of that.

Humans have contructed these scientific theories to try and take control of nature.

Wrong. Humans have constructed scientific theories in order to understand how reality works, as opposed to accepting uncritically the unsupported assertions of an evidence-free, scientifically illiterate doctrine that makes all manner of assertions about the real world that are flatly contradicted by the evidence from that same real world.

You have all fallen into it.

I love the way that propagandists for assertion-laden, evidence-free doctrines describe those who demand evidence supporting postulates and who accept postulates that are robustly supported by evidence as somehow having "fallen" for something, whilst uncritical acceptance of the unsupported assertions of their doctrine somehow counts as intellectually valid. More reality inversion and projection at work.

Just remember that none of you will have any excuse, because God's attributes are clearly demonstrated in front of you everyday.

I don't suppose you have any substantive evidence capable of withstanding intense critical scrutiny that this entity you are so attached to actually exists, do you?

And concerning Nietzsche, what he understood is that without God, there could be no binding, objective morality.

Actually, if you had ever bothered to read anything other than your error-laden 3,000 year old book of fairy tales, you would know that Immanuel Kant attempted to place the concept of an "objective morality" on a rigorous analytical basis. Moreover, he tried to do so as part of the exercise of upholding a world view not dissimilar to yours. Guess what? He failed. Now if a genius of Kant's stature was unable to achieve this, what makes someone like you, who has repeatedly demonstrated woeful ignorance about elementary topics, think that you can do better? Kant launched this exercise before Nietzsche was born, by the way.

That was my point. And objective morality makes complete sense.

Unfortunately, it doesn't. Which is why we have complex systems of jurisprudence in place among other things, because life isn't that simple.

Take "thou shalt not kill" for example. At first glance, it seems as though it should be a universal ethical precept, and indeed one of the fundamental axioms of Kantian philosophy was "act only upon that maxim which, if you could will it so to be, would become a universal law". Just one problem here - it is possible to construct appropriate ethical dilemmas where adhering to this maxim would have fatal consequences for oneself. For example, you're a teenage girl, and you wake up one morning to find Ted Bundy standing over your bed with a baseball bat. Do you just lie there and let him beat you to death for kicks, or do you reach for the gun under your pillow and shoot him? Bear in mind here that Ted Bundy came to historical prominence as a notorious serial killer who butchered women for kicks, so it's very likely that the unfortunate teenage girl in the above scenario would have to kill him in order to save her own life. Suddenly, "objective morality" looks a little less rigorous, doesn't it?

For example - the statement that everyone has inalienable rights (to life, to a fair trial, to express their beliefs). Just remember that you atheists got your chance to express your views precisely because theists decided to conceive of the right to freedom of expressions as absolute.

Ah, historical revisionism in pursuit of doctrinal propagandising. Actually, if you bothered to read real history instead of the bastardised version vomited forth on creationist websites, you would know that, for example, Jacques Rousseau, one of the seminal contributors to the modern concept of human rights courtesy of The Social Contract, explicitly made the statement in that work that "true followers of jesus would not make good citizens". Voltaire, another crucial Entlightenment thinker, explicitly rejected religion. Yet another, David Hume, was explicitly atheist. Thomas Paine was principally a deist and rejected religious orthodoxy wholesale, The Age of Reason being a particular work of his that contains much that ires the ideological warriors for doctrine to this day. But then I don't suppose you will let ignorance of elementary fact get in the way of your propagandising for your doctrine.

Had they not, your nonsense would have been stopped long ago.

What a chilling phrase. How indicative of the doctrine centred mind set - "conform or else".

Which is precisely the policy that theists have been implementing wherever they wield power for 2,000 years, and continue to try and do so. Forgotten Galileo and his brush with the Inquisition have you?

(And look at what it has brought us...multiple universes, life arising on it's own...ugh. Whatever.)

A typical response from someone whose entire stance consists of one long hissy fit because reality doesn't genuflect before his doctrine. Not that the existence of thousands of critically robust peer reviewed scientific papers supporting the ideas that have arisen since the intelligent among us rejected doctrine and accepted reality will doubtless make the slightest impression upon your doctrine-addled mind.

Objective morality is the basis of our rights in this society, and the moral claims that we make.

Wrong. The basis of our rights is treatment of our fellow humans as if certain principles were absolute, whilst allowing for the inevitable exceptions that arise. Hence the complex nature of modern systems of jurisprudence. Funny how propagandists for doctrine are seeking to remove those rights from those whom are deemed to be 'inferior' because they fail to genuflect before doctrine.

It is surprising that this is not obvious.

What is not surprising in the least is your manifest inability to grasp elementary concepts without distorting them through your doctrinal prism.

Anyhow. Carry on in your self-delusion. By all means.

One can only assume that you were addressing this comment to yourself in the light of the above.

And as to the arrogance debate, I still think you guys are talking nonsense.

Strange how the critical thinkers here are able to provide evidential support for their postulates, whilst all you are able to provide is blind assertion and apologetic bluster.

Your desire to explain life using strictly materialistic theories is premised on arrogance.

Total bullshit.

It is premised upon the fact that doing so demonstrably works. Unless of course you'd like to point to where the Bronze Age goat herders who wrote your error-laden 3,000 year old book of fairy tales built particle accelerators, manned spacecraft and developed vaccines. Oh, of course, they didn't - we had to wait until intelligent people came along who accepted reality and evidence therefrom instead of the unsupported assertions of doctrine.

It is not so much that God' existence is not manifest (which it most certianly is)

And your evidence for this again? only I see no evidence supporting your absurd postulate that your invisible magic man in the sky exists. On the other hand, the close on 500 scientific papers I have on my hard drive on evolutionary biology alone provide me with ample evidence that evolution is valid. But then propagandists for doctrine only read scientific papers to quote mine them for mendacious apologetic purposes.

but you choose to rule it out from the beginning - by assuming a strict materialism.

Actually, science rules out that which is not observable and testable. Bye bye magic man.

YOU ARE THE ARROGANT ONES.

Ah, more reality inversion and projection. I love the way that propagandists for doctrine describe the process of demanding evidence from observational reality to support postulates about the world as "arrogant", whilst blind assertion that the world conforms to doctrine and was made specially for adherents of said doctrine by their fetishistically adored magic man somehow isn't.

But this falls on deaf ears, because criticism is shunned by atheists.

Ah, more reality inversion and projection. What part of "demanding evidence to support a world view" equates to "shunning criticism" in any logically consistent universe? Once again, you are emitting utterances from an orifice more usually associated with a more solid form of waste.

How about you heed your own advice and read some books from the "other side".

Since many here are ex-theists, they have. And as a consequence can point out the manifest errors in your worthless apologetics.

Oh wait, you guys are just too damned smart, coming up with all those theories and stuff.

Strange how scientific theories are founded upon evidence instead of unsupported doctrinal assertions, and unlike religious theories, they demonstrably work.

Yeah, no one should question you, because you have all the answers. Talk about arrogance...

And once again the doctrine centred kettle is calling the critical pot for failure to exhibit chrome plated lustre. How boringly and tediously familiar.

The fun part is that the critical thinkers don't claim to have all the answers. Unlike propagandists for religious doctrine, who claim that their error-laden 3,000 year old book of fairy tales is the last word in knowledge, and that as a consequence, all the world's physicists, chemists, biologists, astronomers and geologists are all wrong despite untold millions of man-hours of patient observation, analysis, experimental testing and rigorous verification of hypotheses. A process which is noticeably absent from religion.

So, do you have anything substantive to contribute here, or are you here merely to engage in more droolingly encephalitic wibbling on behalf of your worthless doctrine and its epic level of fail with respect to reality?

30. Lying for Jesus?

Comment #194025 by Calilasseia on June 16, 2008 at 9:44 am

Hang on, txpiper is regurgitating that "ice canopy" nonsense here?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

It isn't even original ... that one was the product of, wait for it, Kent Hovind. You know, everyone's favourite creationist tax fraud?

This is nonsense from a multiplicity of angles, but the problem that is the real killer is maintaining the stability of this structure with respect to its height above the Earth's surface. Because it would have to be very carefully shaped to match the Earth's overall shape (the Earth isn't a perfect sphere by any stretch of the imagination) so that the total sum of all gravitational forces acting upon this entity courtesy of the Earth was zero. Even a tiny deviation from true position would result in one side being subject to greater gravitational attraction than the other side, whereupon the effect would be self-magnifying, and the whole edifice would end up crashing to Earth on one side at any rate, resulting in one truly stupendous impact event. After all, to produce the water needed for Ye Olde Fludde™, the putative "ice canopy" would have to be of the order of 9,000 metres thick, which means that this ice canopy would pack a fair amount of mass.

Oh, and then of course there's the little problem of how the ice canopy on the daytime side of the Earth allows heat and light to pass through to the Earth's surface without any attenuation whatsoever, because even a small degree of attenuation would result in the ice warming up and melting. Which means that in order to forestall this, the ice canopy would also have to be rotating at a fair speed, thought this wouldn't stop the ice at either pole melting at different times of the year because it would be facing the Sun constantly (hint: axial tilt).

I love it when propagandists for creationist masturbation fantasies erect drivel like this to justify their denial of scientifically valid theories and observational reality.

31. Louisiana's latest creationism bill moves to House floor

Comment #192755 by Calilasseia on June 14, 2008 at 12:35 am

Let's render the discussion a tad more simple.

Why should we dumb down valid science just because creationists are ignorant? The onus is on them to use their brains, not the rest of us to stop using ours.

Here is the argument. We observe natural phenomena. That is the role of science. It is to observe and make theories that can make predictions.

So tell creationists to stop interfering in the process because they want to inject their invisible magic man into everything.

This is admitedly the problem with invoking the existence of an intelligent designer - It does not (according to the traditional conception of It) conform to natual laws, and so is out of our grasp.

That depends upon what category of "designer" one wishes to invoke. The above only applies to invisible magic men in the sky.

Ok. I am not advocating a position whereby we relinquish our curiosity about natural phenomena - for example, claiming simply that the cell works by the constant intervention by God. No, the cell is self-sufficient, and science has done a superb job at figuring this out.

You should pass that memo on to Michael Behe. Who seems to think otherwise.

However, then come the leaps of faith.

Ah, canard time. I wondered when this would arrive.

Take the multiple universes philosophy - which tries to circumvent the improbability of life arising on its own by positing something which is, by all accounts, extremely preposterous (can you give me evidence for any universe beyond our own?).

You obviously haven't read the relevant scientific literature. Niel Turok, who took over Hawking's old job at Cambridge, has written papers that not only place the multiverse hypothesis on a solid footing, but provide in the process a mechanism for the instantiation of our own universe by entirely naturalistic processes, which has testable consequences within our own universe and is therefore subject to empirical verification. That's right, the physicists have extended our remit to time before the Big Bang.

The first paper in question is this one:

Colliding Branes In Heterotic M-theory by Jean-Luc Jehners, Paul McFadden and Neil Turok, arXiv.org, 12 February 2007.

Here is the abstract:

We study the collision of two flat, parallel end-of-the-world branes in heterotic M-theory. By insisting that there is no divergence in the Riemann curvature as the collision approaches, we are able to single out a unique solution possessing the local geometry of (2d compactified Milne)/Z₂ × R³, times a finite-volume Calabi-Yau manifold in the vicinity of the collision. At a finite time before and after the collision, a second type of singularity appears momentarily on the negative-tension brane, representing its bouncing off a zero of the bulk warp factor. We find this singularity to be remarkably mild and easily regularised. The various different cosmological solutions to heterotic M-theory previously found by other authors are shown to merely represent different portions of a unique flat cosmological solution to heterotic M-theory.

The paper goes on to state as its conclusions:

We have presented a cosmological solution describing the collision of the two flat boundary branes in heterotic M-theory. This solution is a significant step towards our goal of describing the cosmic singularity as a brane collision within the well-motivated framework of Horava-Witten theory. Requiring the collision to be the 'least singular' possible, i.e., that the metric tends towards (2d compactified Milne)/Z₂ × R₃ times a finite-volume Calabi-Yau, has two important consequences. First, it selects a single solution to the equations of motion. Second, it shifts the singularity in the Calabi-Yau volume that one might have naively expected at the brane collision to two spacetime events before and after the brane collision. We have shown these two events to be very mild singularities, which are easily removed by including an arbitrarily small amount of matter (for example scalar field kinetic energy) on the negative-tension brane. Before the initial bounce of the negative-tension brane, and after the final bounce, the solution presented here can be identified with that described by Chen et al. [11].

When the branes move at a small velocity, we expect to be able to accurately describe the solution using a four-dimensional effective theory (see e.g. [18�"22] and also [12]). We shall present such a description in a companion publication [23]. If our colliding brane solution is to successfully describe the universe, we must also add potentials capable of stabilising the moduli; in particular the volume of the Calabi-Yau manifold, which determines the value of gauge couplings, and the distance between the branes, which determines Newton's constant of gravitation. These potentials also permit us to generate an interesting spectrum of cosmological perturbations. Although the required potentials cannot yet be derived from first principles, we can study the consequences of various simple assumed forms. The results will be presented elsewhere [24].

The paper cited as reference [24], listed as "to appear" is this subsequent paper:

Generating Ekpyrotic Curvature Perturbations Before the Big Bang by Jean-Luc Lehners, Paul McFadden, Neil Turok and Paul J. Steinhardt, arXiv.org, 19 February 2007.

This paper opens with the following:

We analyze a general mechanism for producing a nearly scale-invariant spectrum of cosmological curvature perturbations during a contracting phase preceding a big bang, that can be entirely described using 4d effective field theory. The mechanism, based on first producing entropic perturbations and then converting them to curvature perturbations, can be naturally incorporated in cyclic and ekpyrotic models in which the big bang is modelled as a brane collision, as well as other types of cosmological models with a pre-big bang phase. We show that the correct perturbation amplitude can be obtained and that the spectral tilt n_s tends to range from slightly blue to red, with 0.97 < n_s < 1.02 for the simplest models, a range compatible with current observations but shifted by a few per cent towards the blue compared to the prediction of the simplest, large-field inflationary models.

The conclusions of this paper are as follows:

The entropic mechanism for generating approximately scale-invariant curvature perturbations in a contracting universe has two appealing features. First, it can be analyzed entirely within the context of 4d effective theory. For those who were skeptical about the ekpyrotic and cyclic models because of their apparent reliance on 5d effects to create curvature perturbations, this work shows that there is another, more prosaic mechanism that can be totally understood in familiar terms. This should terminate the debate on whether it is possible, in principle, to generate curvature perturbations in a pre-big bang phase.

The second attractive feature is that the essential elements occur quite naturally in extra-dimensional theories like string and M-theory. There is no shortage of scalar field moduli, and, quite generically, these fields can possess negative and steeply decreasing potentials of the ekpyrotic form. In this situation, approximate scaling solutions exist in which several fields undergo ekpyrosis simultaneously so that nearly scale-invariant entropy perturbations are naturally generated. Furthermore, if the relevant scalar field trajectory encounters a boundary in moduli space (like that described in Ref. [15]), then as the trajectory reflects off the boundary, entropy perturbations are naturally converted into curvature perturbations with the identical large-scale power spectrum. We hasten to add that, although we have only presented here the concrete example of heterotic M-theory, it is clear that the present formalism is generic and can be applied to other types of pre-big bang models, including those that do not rely on there being extra dimensions.

We have also seen that the entropic mechanism has an interesting signature. Because of the gravitational contribution to the spectral tilt of the entropically-induced perturbations, the spectrum is typically a few per cent bluer than the time-delay (Newtonian potential) perturbations or the density perturbation in inflation. To push the inflationary perturbations into this bluer range requires adding extra degrees of otherwise unnecessary fine-tuning, as delineated in Ref. [21]. In particular, Ref. [21] shows that the natural range for inflationary models is 0.93 < n_s < 0.97, whereas entropically-induced spectra tend to lie in a range that is a few per cent bluer, roughly 0.97 < n_s < 1.02 by our estimates. Hence, a highly precise measure of the spectral tilt at the one per cent level or better could serve as an indicator of which mechanism is responsible. For example, a value of n_s = 0.99 is awkward to obtain with inflation but right in the middle of the predicted range for pre-big bang entropically-induced perturbations.

So, we not only have a mechanism for the instantiation of our universe that requires no superfluous supernatural input, and is consistent with known physics, but which allows other universes to be instantiated by the same process. In other words, there now exists an empirically testable mechanism by which the multiverse can come into being. Therefore it isn't a "philosophy", it's part of rigorous physics.

In any case, it's a leap of faith.

The two scientific papers I have cited above make a nonsense of your assertion.

And this is precisely it. We are confined to making leaps of faith.

Wrong. Turok et al didn't need to invoke any superfluous supernatural entities. They merely had to perform the requisite mathematics.

The only difference between you guys and religious people is that your leaps of faith confine themselves to the empirical realm.

The above scientific papers alone render your assertion nonsense. This is before any other papers are introduced.

But they are still leaps of faith - assertions that cannot be demonstrated strictly on the basis of empirical evidence.

WRONG.

The above papers provide an empirical test of their veracity. One that can be performed within this universe. Namely, examination of the spectra of gravity waves passing through the metric of spacetime. A spectrum that is shifted preferentially toward shorter wavelengths will provide confirmation of Turok's work. Plus, Torok's work solves elegantly problems that were previously considered intractable, such as the singularity problem, which disappears in his solution.

Take evolution for example. We observe evolution; species adapt.

We have also observed speciation taking place, including in the laboratory.

So, although the fossil record is scant

Do you know how many fossils have been dug up by palaeontologists? Millions of them. More than enough to provide an evidential basis for the requisite conclusions.

and although we have problems like the Cambrian explosion

An entirely synthetic problem. Time to cite some more scientific papers:

Can fast early rates reconcile molecular dates with the Cambrian explosion? by L.D. Bromham & M.D. Hendry, Proc. R. Soc. Lond. B 267: 1041-1047 (2000)

Estimating Metazoan Divergence Times With A Molecular Clock by Kevin J. Peterson, Jessica B. Lyons, Kristin S. Nowak, Carter M. Takacs, Matthew J. Wargo & Mark A. McPeek, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, April 2004, 101, 17, 6536-6541

Fossils, Molecules And Embryos: New Perspectives On The Cambrian Explosion by J.W. Valentine, D. Jablonski & D.H. Erwin, Development, February 1998, 126(5): 851-859

Interpreting the Earliest Metazoan Fossils: What Can We Learn? by Ben Waggoner, Amer. Zool., 38: 975-982

Molecular Phylogeny of Arthropods and the Significance of the Cambrian "Explosion" for Molecular Systematics by Jerome C. Regier & Jeffrey W. Schultz, AMER. ZOOL., 38: 918-928 (1998)

Precambrian Sponges with Cellular Structures by Chia-Wen Li, Jun-Yan Chen and Tzu-En Hua, SCIENCE 279(6): February 1998

Quality of the fossil record thorugh time by M.J. Benton, M.A. Wills and R. Hitchin, Nature, 403: 534-537 (3 Feb 2000)

Sr and C isotopes in Lower Cambrian carbonates from the Siberian craton: A paleoenvironmental record during the 'Cambrian explosion' by L.A. Derry, M.D. Brasier, R. M. Corfield, A. Yu. Rozanov & A. Yu. Zhuralev, Earth and Planetary Science Letters 128: 671-681 (1994)

Taxonomic Congruence Versus Total Evidence, and Amniote Phylogeny Inferred from Fossils, Molecules and Morphology by Douglas J. Eernisse and Arnold G. Kluge, Molecular Biology & Evolution, 10(6): 1170-1195 (1993)

Testing the Cambrian explosion hypothesis by using a molecular dating technique by Lindell Bromham, Andrew Rambaut, Richard Fortey, Alan Cooper and David Penny, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 95: 12386-12389, October 1998

The Cambrian "Explosion": Slow Fuse Or Megatonnage? by Simon Conway Morris, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 97(9): 4426-4429, April 2000

The Ediacaran Biotas in Space and Time by Ben Waggoner, Integrative & Comparative Biology, 43: 104-113 (2003)

The Timing Of Eukaryotic Evolution: Does A Relaxed Molecular Clock Reconcile Proteins And fossils? by Emmanuel J.P. Douzery, Elizabeth A. Snell, Eric Bapteste, Frédéric Delsuc & Hervé Philiipe, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of America, 101(43):, 15386-15391, October 2004

So, apparently not a problem for the scientists who wrote those papers. But then I'm reminded of the following quote: "Unanswered questions lead to the advancement of science, while unquestioned answers lead to the advancement of religion".

More to the point, the idea that the "Cambrian Explosion" poses a problem for evolution becomes utter nonsense in the light of the facts. Namely that the above papers posit a time scale of several million years for this event to take place, which means it hardly happened overnight (indeed, one of those papers cites a time frame of 18 to 23 million years) and the fact that we have Precambrian fossils including a Precambrian chordate that extends the time frame for the emergence of important phyla still further. Problem? Not to those of us who study the real world assiduously instead of wasting our time studying an assertion-laden, evidence-free doctrine.

we suppose - using our rational capabilities - that everything must have evolved from one organism.

Well since inheritance of characteristics from ancestors is the only mechanism for which we have direct evidence, what other mechanism would you propose here?

We rationally extend the process of micro-evolution to encompass all biological organisms existent(maco-evolution).

Ah, the "micro" versus "macro" canard.

There is no distinction between them in real science in terms of the operating processes. "Macro" is simply cumulative instances of "micro" building upon the past over sufficient time. Denial of this is akin to accepting that stairs can exist, but a staircase cannot.

That is a leap of faith

Wrong. Since we have observed speciation, including instances of speciation in the laboratory, we have ample evidence for the appearance of novel features by entirely naturalistic processes. No superfluous magic men required.

because the evidence, against the arrogant assertions of Dawkins ("Anyone who does not believe in evolution is either stupid, ignorant, or whatever..." What pomp!), is far from compelling.

The scientific papers above merely demonstrate that the only one making arrogant assertions here is you.

Why don't you guys just admit it, though? Why pretend like you make no leaps?

There's a world of difference between making extrapolations on the basis of actual evidence supporting them and wild apologetic fantasising based upon the entirely unsupported assertion that an invisible magic man in the sky exists.

Listen, I understand you don't like the idea of God. NEither do most people. But have the decency to admit it, already.

Ah, the "you're denying god/you hate god" canard. Tell me, how can we hate something whose existence has never been demonstrated via critically robust evidence?

On another note, simply because you cannot prove th existence of God by natural means (I concede this) does not mean He does not exist.

It doesn't mean that he does either. So the above is merely a smokescreen to detract from the woeful inability of adherents of doctrine to provide anything even remotely resembling critically robust evidential support for their assertions.

Can you prove to me, using strictly natural means, that using natural means is the only way to ascertain truth?

What evidence do you have that there even exists any other means? You're the one making the assertions here, the onus is on you to back them up. We're not required to do your homework for you.

I'd like to see it.

First, we'd like to see something other than assertion and apologetic bluster from the adherents of doctrine. I've presented enough scientific papers above to support my arguments, now provide a similar level of upport for yours.

Perhaps you did not read my post properly. I never advocated the abolition of scientific inquiry. Science has existed alongside religion for centuries.

Oh, how tempting it is to mention Galileo and the Inquisition here ...

My problem is the dogmatic adherence that our mdoern scientific establishment has to Darwinian evolution, despite its (not scant) shortcomings.

Funny how all of those alleged "shortcomings" turn out to be entirely synthetic fabrications on the part of adherents of reality-denial doctrines. I don't suppose you have any valid scientific references covering these alleged "shortcomings", do you, as opposed to links to discredited creationist websites?

Oh, by the way, evolutionary biology has moved on in the 150 years since Darwin. So the critical thinkers here would prefer it if you stopped using specious discoursive elisions such as "Darwinian" and "Darwinist" whose sole purpose is to erect the specious notion that valid evidence-based science is on the same footing as assertion-laden doctrine.

Isn't science supposed to be dispassionate and unbiased? This doesn't seem to be the case.

And arbitrarily introducing superfluous supernatural entities with no rigorous justification, just because it makes a lot of ignorant people happy, is "unbiased"?

Kirkland. You say such a claim is not worth your time. Others, however, would beg to differ. Take, for example, a paper published in 2007 by Eugene Koonin, of the National Center for Biotechnolofy Information at the National Institutes of Health, entitled "The Biological Big Bang Model for the Major Transitions in Evolution." What does he say? Nothing less than that "The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution."

I smell a quote mine in the offing.

First of all, the paper does not appear in the first twenty pages of Google Scholar returns for this author. Plenty of papers on molecular systematics, genome analyses, relationships between protein folding and genome data, homologies between signalling genes between Eukaryotes and Archaea, for example, but this paper doesn't appear. However, I found the paper on PubMed, and it appears that the above text is simply a quote mine

ABSTRACT: BACKGROUND: Major transitions in biological evolution show the same pattern of sudden emergence of diverse forms at a new level of complexity. The relationships between major groups within an emergent new class of biological entities are hard to decipher and do not seem to fit the tree pattern that, following Darwin's original proposal, remains the dominant description of biological evolution. The cases in point include the origin of complex RNA molecules and protein folds; major groups of viruses; archaea and bacteria, and the principal lineages within each of these prokaryotic domains; eukaryotic supergroups; and animal phyla. In each of these pivotal nexuses in life's history, the principal "types" seem to appear rapidly and fully equipped with the signature features of the respective new level of biological organization. No intermediate "grades" or intermediate forms between different types are detectable. Usually, this pattern is attributed to cladogenesis compressed in time, combined with the inevitable erosion of the phylogenetic signal. HYPOTHESIS: I propose that most or all major evolutionary transitions that show the "explosive" pattern of emergence of new types of biological entities correspond to a boundary between two qualitatively distinct evolutionary phases. The first, inflationary phase is characterized by extremely rapid evolution driven by various processes of genetic information exchange, such as horizontal gene transfer, recombination, fusion, fission, and spread of mobile elements. These processes give rise to a vast diversity of forms from which the main classes of entities at the new level of complexity emerge independently, through a sampling process. In the second phase, evolution dramatically slows down, the respective process of genetic information exchange tapers off, and multiple lineages of the new type of entities emerge, each of them evolving in a tree-like fashion from that point on. This biphasic model of evolution incorporates the previously developed concepts of the emergence of protein folds by recombination of small structural units and origin of viruses and cells from a pre-cellular compartmentalized pool of recombining genetic elements. The model is extended to encompass other major transitions. It is proposed that bacterial and archaeal phyla emerged independently from two distinct populations of primordial cells that, originally, possessed leaky membranes, which made the cells prone to rampant gene exchange; and that the eukaryotic supergroups emerged through distinct, secondary endosymbiotic events (as opposed to the primary, mitochondrial endosymbiosis). This biphasic model of evolution is substantially analogous to the scenario of the origin of universes in the eternal inflation version of modern cosmology. Under this model, universes like ours emerge in the infinite multiverse when the eternal process of exponential expansion, known as inflation, ceases in a particular region as a result of false vacuum decay, a first order phase transition process. The result is the nucleation of a new universe, which is traditionally denoted Big Bang, although this scenario is radically different from the Big Bang of the traditional model of an expanding universe. Hence I denote the phase transitions at the end of each inflationary epoch in the history of life Biological Big Bangs (BBB). CONCLUSION: A Biological Big Bang (BBB) model is proposed for the major transitions in life's evolution. According to this model, each transition is a BBB such that new classes of biological entities emerge at the end of a rapid phase of evolution (inflation) that is characterized by extensive exchange of genetic information which takes distinct forms for different BBBs. The major types of new forms emerge independently, via a sampling process, from the pool of recombining entities of the preceding generation. This process is envisaged as being qualitatively different from tree-pattern cladogenesis. REVIEWERS: This article was reviewed by William Martin, Sergei Maslov, and Leonid Mirny.

Oh dear. Looks as if the author was not rejecting evolution, but proposing a new evolutionary hypothesis. See the parts above I emphasise in boldface.

You see, that's the trouble with quote mines. They end up being exposed.

The point is not settled, and your comment - that it is not worth your time - betrays an arrogance that is misplaced in the context of scientific investigation.

Ah, the infamous "you can't plot the world history of every quark to arbitrary precision right back to the beginning of the universe, therefore you'll never find the answers to my questions, therefore my invisible magic man did it all" canard. A transparent and specious attempt at apologetics.

What part of "multiple scientific papers presented above flush your assertions down the toilet" do you not understand again?

On another point, I have a question to pose concerning Dawkins' doctrine of the selfish genes, and I pose it in all honesty, desiring an honest response.

The very fact that you describe it as a "doctrine", together with your exposed quote mine above, lead the critical thinkers here to doubt your protestations of honesty.

He writes, in The Selfish Gene, that we, along with all other survival machines, are products of our genes. How then can we fight against them (a claim that Dawkins does make in his book)? How are we able to liberate ourselves from our selfish genes? Are not our brains, and our thought patterns, the product of our selfish genes? Are we then to liberate ourselves from ourselves, or is this claim of liberation simply an allusion brought on by our genes? Does this claim by Dawkins betray the existence of an entity that exists APART from our material selves?

Ah, another transparently obvious attempt to twist science in the service of apologetics. So much for your bleating about honesty.

Evolution provided us with large brains capable of complex abstract thought. Those of us that bother to use them can apply those brains to the analysis of our own biology, determine where our genes might potentially act as constraints that are no longer advantageous, and we can choose by our behaviour to override whatever behaviours might have been advantageously selected for in the past. No invisible magic men in the sky required, or any other superfluous entities of this ilk.

And what is the logical denouement of materialism?

Ah, more apologetics about to be erected. Quelle surprise.

Let's take the moral precept that dictates that it is wrong to kill. Please provide a strictly natural proof to me that it is wrong to kill. Oops, you can't. Does that mean it is not wrong to kill?

How about this.

As creatures that evolved to be socially cohesive animals, behaviour that destroys that social cohesion is disadvantageous from the standpoint of the species. Since wanton killing of other members of our species destroys that social cohesion, it is 'wrong' in that sense. This, incidentally, is something that workers in the field of primate biology have been observing amongst other primates for a long time.

You might answer that these are simply things we came up with to live peacefully in societies.

Well since we have empirical evidence that societies that forbid killing are better than those that do not, I would suggest that your intended apologetic line of argument is again woefully specious.

Ok. Then whence the moral superiority adopted by avowed atheists like Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris?

And what "moral superiority" are these people adopting here? Provide some citations to back your assertions or shut up.

Whence do they find their justification? What can they appeal to?

Reasoned thought and evidence?

Those two entities that tend to be absent from apologetics?

41. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #172894 by Calilasseia on April 30, 2008 at 6:45 am

I decided to engage in a little trawling of the scientific papers on Silkworms, and the first paper to emerge in my search was very interesting. Namely:

A Draft Sequence For The Genome Of The Domesticated Silkworm (Bombyx mori) by the Biology Analysis Group: QingYou Xia, Zheyang Zhou, Cheng Lu, Daojun Cheng, Bin Li, Ping Zhao, Xingfu Zha, Tingcai Cheng, Chunli Chai, Guoqing Pan, Jinshan Xu, Chun Liu, Ying Lin, Jifeng Qian, Yong Hou, Zengli Wu, Guanrong Li, Minhui Pan, Chunfeng Li, Yihong Shen, Xiqian Lan, Lianwei Yuan, Hanfu Xi, Guangwei Yang, Yongji Wan, Yong Zhu, Maode Yu, Weide Shen, Dayang Wu, Zhonghuai Xiang. Genome analysis group: Jun Yu, Jun Wang, Ruiqiang Li, Jianping Shi, Heng Li, Guangyuan Li, Jianning Su, Xiaoling Wang, Guoqing Li, Zengjin Zhang, Qingfa Wu, Jun Li, Qingpeng Zhang, Ning Wei, Jianzhe Xu, Haibo Sun, Le Dong, Dongyuan Liu, Shengli Zhao, Xiaolan Zhao, Qingshun Meng, Fengdi Lan, Xiangang Huang, Yuanzhe Li, Lin Fang, Changfeng Li, Dawei Li, Yongqiao Sun, Zhenpeng Zhang, Zheng Yang, Yanqing Huang, Yan Xi, Qiuhui Qi, Dandan He, Haiyan Huang, Xiaowei Zhang, Zhiqiang Wang, Wenjie Li, Yuzhu Cao, Yingpu Yu, Hong Yu, Jinhong Li, Jiehua Ye, Huan Chen, Yan Zhou, Bin Liu, Jing Wang, Jia Ye, Hai Ji, Shengting Li, Peixiang Ni, Jianguo Zhang, Yong Zhang, Hongkun Zheng, Bingyu Mao, Wen Wang, Chen Ye, Songgang Li, Jian Wang, Gane Ka-Shu Wong, Huanming Yang, Science, 306: 1937-1940, 10th December 2004.

That probably counts as the longest citation I have ever typed out, but that's of minor importance. :)

The paper begins as follows:

We report a draft sequence for the genome of the domesticated silkworm (Bombyx mori), covering 90.9% of all known silkworm genes. Our estimated gene count is 18,510, which exceeds the 13,379 genes reported for Drosophila melanogaster. Comparative analyses to fruitfly, mosquito, spider, and butterfly reveal both similarities and differences in gene content.

Silk fibers are derived from the cocoon of the silkworm Bombyx mori, which was domesticated over the past 5000 years from the wild progenitor Bombyx mandarina (1). Silkworms are second only to fruitfly as a model for insect genetics, owing to their ease of rearing, the availability of mutants from genetically homogeneous inbred lines, and the existence of a large body of information on their biology (2). There are about 400 visible phenotypes, and ~200 of these are assigned to linkage groups (3). Silkworms can also be used as a bioreactor for proteinaceous drugs and as a source of biomaterials. Here, we present a draft sequence of the silkworm genome with 5.9× coverage.

B. mori has 28 chromosomes. More than 1000 genetic markers have been mapped at an average spacing of 2 cM (~500 kb) (4). A physical map is being constructed through the fingerprinting and end sequencing of bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones (5). Many expressed sequence tags (ESTs) have been produced (6), and a 3× draft sequence has just been announced by the International Lepidopteran Genome Project (7). Our project is independent of, but complementary to, that of the consortium. Our sequence has been submitted to the DNA Data Bank of Japan/European Molecular Biology Laboratory/GenBank (project accession number AADK00000000, version AADK01000000) and is also accessible from our Web site (http://silkworm.genomics.org.cn) (8). ESTs discussed in this Report can be found at GenBank (accession numbers CK484630 to CK565104).

The detailed findings of this paper are very interesting.

First of all, the gene count for the Silkworm is 18,510 genes, which exceed the count of 13m379 for Drosophila melanogaster and the genes are larger due to the increased presence of inserted transposable elements (TEs) in introns. For example, the calcineurin B gene cnb was 12 times larger in B. mori than in D. melanogaaster. The genome sizes are: B. mori, 428.8 Mb, D. melanogaster, 116.8 Mb. Silkworm genes also exhibited more exons than those of the fruit fly.

The TE annotations yield the result that most of the genome size increase in B. mori is relatively recent. Of the 21.1% of the genome that is recognisable as being of TE origins, 50.7% is from a single gypsy-Ty3 like retrotransposon. Mean sequence divergence is 4.4%, which dates the initial appearance of this TE to 4.9 million years ago, using the measure obtained from the D. melanogaster neutral substitution rate of 1.56 × 10^-9 substitutions per year. Most other TEs are comparatively recent in origin. GC-rich regions of the genome contain a higher density of TEs, particularly LINEs (Long Interspersed Nuclear Elements) which is the exact opposite of what is reported for human and mouse genomes.

The Lepidoptera (to which B. mori belongs) diverged from other insect Orders around 280-350 million years ago. Comparison of the B. mori genome with that of the Dipterans D. melanogaster and the Malaria Mosquito Anopheles gambiae resulted in domain clustering results as follows:

8,974 groups
2,565 shared with other insects
1,793 unique to B. mori

Consistent with the observed TE expansions, domains such as reverse transcriptase, integrase and transposase are particularly prevalent in B. mori.

The silk gland has been determined to be, in effect, a modified salivary gland, and a set of 1,874 genes were identified via silk gland ESTs (expressed sequence tags), only 45 of which were previously known. Several hormone-processing enzymes are active in the silk gland according to the genes identified, which is of interest because hormones participate in the regulation of silk protein genes. Genes found only in the silk gland include:

JHE : Juvenile Hormone Esterase
EO : Ecdysone Oxidase
JHI-1 : Juvenile Hormone Inducible Protein 1

The enzyme Ecdysteroid Uridine-5'-Diphosphate Glucosyl Transferase (EUDPGT) is found in silk gland, testis and ovary. Fibroin forms the bulk of the cocoon mass upon pupation, and this has two important components, a heavy chain component (350 kD) and a light component chain (25 kD). While no less than 1,126 ESTs were found for the light chain, only 4 were found for the heavy chain, which suggests that the 1:1 ratio of light and heavy chains is maintained at the post-transcription level by other regulatory means. A complete tRNA gene set was also detected, including 41 Gly-tRNA and 41 Ala-tRNA genes, twice as many as in the two other insects and consistent with fibroin production.

Of the silk glad genes, no less than 107 of these were homologous with those found in silk-producing chelicerates (web-spinning spiders), including 4 counterparts in B. mori for the spider enzyme Major Ampullate Peroxidase, which is involved in silk fibre production in these chelicerates.

In the classes of genes responsible for neuropeptide hormones, hormone receptors and hormone-regulation genes, the counts were as follows:

B. mori : 87
D. melanogaster : 101
A. gambiae : 73

Of the 87 B. mori genes, 52 were previously unknown, and 35 others were previously reported. Ecdysone Oxidase and EUDPGT are implicated in ecdysone metabolism (ecdysone is the hormone that regulates the process of ecdysis, whereby one larval instar sheds its outer integument and emerges with a new, initially plastic outer integument in the next instar, which then inflates to accommodate the larval growth before hardening). 20 EUDPGT genes were classified into 5 major clades, similar to the 34 similar genes analysed for D. melanogaster. Juvenile Hormone (JH), Ecdysone Hormone (EH), and Prothoracicotropic Hormone (PTTH) work in coordination of ecdysis and metamorphosis. Other neuropeptide genes found included Diapause Hormone (DH), Pheromone Biosynthesis Activating Neuruopeptide (PBAN), Adipokinetic Hormone (AKH), Eclosion Hormone (EcH) and Bombyxin (4K-PTTH). Among the more unusual finds was the presence of a homologue to the neuropeptide Y precursor hormone of the mollusc Lymnaea stagnalis, a gene with pancreatic activity that had not been detected previously in D. melanogaster or other insects and may therefore be new to B. mori.

Gene homologues from D. melanogaster that were not detected in B. mori were:

oskar (assembles germ plasm - an anterior/posterior determinant regulating embryonic development)
swallow (prefertilisation oocyte polarity control gene)
trunk (ligand for torso - crucial for establishment of anterior and posterior cell identity of the embryo)
fs(1)k10 (function yet to be determined)
gurken (TGFß homolog - EGF-R ligand - required for dorsoventral patterning in the egg and embryo)
tube (cofactor with pelle to activate Dorsal - involved in dorsal/ventral polarity during early development)

swallow and trunk likewise have no homologues in A. gambiae.

This is consistent with a high degree of conservation of the maternal gene system in insects (the genes responsible for oocyte formation and the generation of ova). fs(1)k10 is hypothesised at this stage to be a negative regulator of gurken translation.

Among the Lepidopteran wing patterning genes found were a number of homologues with those found in the butterfly species Junonia coenia. These included:

distal-less (Homeodomain gene affecting eyespot number, position and size)
ubx (function in Lepidoptera to be determined, but in D. melanogaster suppresses distal-less expression and leads to haltere formation)
Hh, Ci, En & Ptc genes (important signalling genes responsible for eyespot focus formation)
Wg (plays a role in band formation)
EcR (expressed in prospective eyespots and is coexpressed with distal-less)

These genes are also found in D. melanogaster, but in some cases have different expressions as a result of the different thoracic bauplan of Diptera (see the comment above on haltere formation in D. melanogaster instead of the formation of a second pair of wings). Of the 323 wing development genes found in D. melanogaster, 300 are found in B. mori, and in some cases are redirected to perform different functions consonant with the anatomical differences between Lepidoptera and Diptera.

As B. mori sex determination is female-heterogametic (male is ZZ, female is ZW), the determination of sex in B. mori is centred upon a dominant feminising factor on the W chromosome. A homologue of the D. melanogaster sex determinant gene dsx has been found in B. mori, namely Bmdsx, but while splice sites and structural features are conserved, regulatory mechanisms differ. The splicing regulator tra found in D. melanogaster is absent in B. mori, and the TRA/TRA2 binding site for Bmdax is absent, suggesting a different upstream sex-determination cascade.

Homologues for most other D. melanogaster sex-determination genes can be found, however. These include:

daughterless (transcription factor - basic HLH - proneural gene that is also involved in sex determination)
hermaphrodite (C₂H₂ zinc finger transcription factor - plays a permissive role in sex determination and differentiation - required for female sexual differentiation)
emc (extra machrochaetae - transcription factor - HLH non basic - antagonist of proneural genes)
groucho (transcription factor - WD40 domain - E(spl) complex - partners transcriptional repressors by functioning as a co-repressor)
sisterless A (part of the mechanism that establishes the sex chromosome:autosome ratio along with daughterless, deadpan, ovo, runt, scute and sex lethal)
scute (see above)
deadpan (see above)
runt (see above)
outstretched (a novel ligand - potential activator of JAK/STAT signaling pathway - mutation results in the stripe-specific loss of expression of even-skipped, fushi tarazu, and runt)

As D. melanogaster is known to require dosage compensation genes in order to ensure that transcription of key genes on sex chromosomes is equalised between sexes, and the genes msl-1, msl-2, msl-3, mse, mof and JIL-1 are required, homologues for these were searched for in the B. mori genome. Homologues of mle, mof and msl-3 were found, even though there is growing evidence for absence of Z-linked dosage compensation in B. mori.

Humoral immune factors including wound healing, homeostasis and adaptive humoral immune response genes were also detected. 69 such genes are known to be present in B. mori as of this determination, including 34 antibacterial genes, of which 23 appear to be newly identified by science. These perform such functions as encoding the innate immune factors synthesised in fat bodies and haemocytes, which act as bactericides upon pathogens by permeabilising the bacterial membranes, allowing bacterial contents to leak and other immune agents to enter. One of these immune factors is moricin, a high-pH antibacterial peptide that was originally isolated from this species, and 8 new moricin genes have been found in a gene cluster. Gram-Positive bacterial specific defensins were found, as were cercropins, including a previously unknown class of the latter. Other immune defence genes include genes coding for lysozymes, haemolin, lectins (29 found inB. mori, compared to 35 in D. melanogaster and 22 in A. gambiae) and prophenoloxidases (three of these were found, two previously known, one new).

Finally, the paper winds up with this:

Lepidoptera are unusual because they have holocentric chromosomes with diffuse kinetochores. This characteristic is a potential driver of evolution because of the ability to retain chromosome fragments through many cell divisions. The nematode also has diffuse kinetochores, and five key chromosomal proteins are known (32, 33): hcp-1, hcp-2, hcp-3, hcp-4, and hcp-6. (The prefix hcp stands for "holocentric protein.") Hcp-3 is detected in all eukaryotic centromeres, similar to histone H3 in its histone-fold domain, but dissimilar in its N-terminal region. It is also known as Cse4p in yeast, Cid in fruitfly, and CENP-A in human. Their proteins are highly diverged. The putative homolog in silkworm has only 23% identity to the histone-fold domain of hcp-3, but their lengths are similar: 268 amino acids for silkworm and 288 amino acids for nematode. There are many homologs of hcp-1 and hcp-2 (18 and 72, to be specific) making it difficult to determine which ones might be the true orthologs. We could not find a homolog for hcp-4, but we did identify a homolog for a related gene that is known as CENP-C and was previously found in human, mouse, and chicken. Finally, we were not able to identify the silkworm homolog for hcp-6.

So, it looks as if we now know rather a lot about Silkworms, doesn't it?

Oh, by the way, the full paper can be downloaded from here:

Science Magazine Paper Download

Supplementary material is available on the Science magazine website here:

Science Magazine Supplementary Material

This includes tabulated data in the form of downloadable Adobe PDF files, and assorted data files in Excel spreadsheet format.

Of course, all of this will be completely wasted on wooter, who seems to think that all of this burgeoning knowledge that scientists are providing is worthless because he cleaves to a fantasy in which an error-laden 3,000 year old book containing the diseased ramblings of Bronze Age goat herders with febrile imaginations counts as the last word in knowledge. But I didn't post this for him, I posted it for the critical thinkers to enjoy. :)

42. Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Comment #172537 by Calilasseia on April 29, 2008 at 5:20 pm

Oh dear.

I see wooter is back with his inimitable brand of excremental garbage.

Let's take a look at this latest verminous and pestilential offering ...

You are here too. You know what? What stupidity mean is that millions of creatures with different structures just came from a worm that happened by luck and chances through amino acids that came out by chance again by getting in right(!)order by unexplained randomness and blind watchmaker and again amino acids dropped down by chemical rains from planets which we do not know how the planets came out. The story goes on like this and never ends.

Once again, we see the erection of a strawman caricature of real science arising from the fact that wooter's total scientific knowledge is eclipsed by that of the toenail clippings from my deceased budgerigar. Let's take a look at what real science actually says, shall we?

Real science, as opposed to the fantasy masturbation-fantasy erection of wooter's diseased imaginings, states that two separate scientific disciplines are required to confront the questions of [1] origins of life, and [2] diversity of life. For [1], we need to consider chemistry, because abiogenesis is a chemical process. For [2], we need to consider biology, because evolution is a biological process.

Now let us expand upon this. And in doing so, flush the tedious canards erected by the droolingly encephalitic wibblings of wooter down the toilet where they belong.

First of all, once the first chemical building blocks of life had been formed from non-life precursor molecules (a process which has been repeated experimentally in the laboratory numerous times), the process by which thos molecules gradually assembled into more and more complex molecules is the process of chemical reaction. Which, despite wooter's gibberings above, is a largely deterministic process that has been well understood by chemists for 200 years. Chemical reactions happen because they are favoured by the extant energy conditions in the reaction mixture, and numerous concepts that govern this process, such as enthalpy, Gibbs free energy and Helmholtz free energy, can be found in any standard chemistry textbook for anyone who is capable of taking the trouble to read from said chemistry textbook and learning from it. Which probably precludes wooter, whose eructations are almost certainly the product of a mind that has yet to graduate beyond crayon.

Now, once the requisite energy conditions are in place for those reactions, they take place. Formation of polypeptides, for example, is catalysed readily in aqueous solution by a chemical compound called carbonyl sulphide, which is produced naturally in quantity by volcanoes whenever they erupt. The chemical is, moreover, water soluble, being a polar molecule, and repeated experiments have demonstrated that polypeptide molecules will form with excellent yields in a mixed aqueous solution of amino acids when carbonyl sulphide is present to catalyse the polypeptide formation. The requisite scientific paper is:

Carbonyl Sulphide Mediated Prebiotic Formation of Peptides by Luke Leman, Leslie Orgel and M. Reza Ghadiri, Science, Vol 306, pp 283-286, 8 October 2004

To make matters even more interesting, the following paper:

Prebiotic Amino Acids As Aysmmetric Catalysts by Sandra Pizzarello and Arthur L. Weber, Science, vol 303, p. 1151, 20 February 2004

demonstrates that amino acids can catalyse the stabilisation of their own chirality in a reaction medium, and moreover that an intermediate nucleic acid known as TNA (because the sugar backbone molecule is composed of a sugar called threose) can be formed in the same reaction mixture.

As if this were not enough, the following paper:

Cations As Mediators Of The Adsorption Of Nucleic Acids On Clay Surfaces In Prebiotic Environments by Marco Franchi, James P. Ferris and Enzo Gallori, Origins of Life and Evolution of the Biosphere, 33: 1-16, 19th July 2002

demonstrated experimentally that Na⁺, Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ ions act as binder ions facilitating the adsorption of nucleic acids on various clay substrates such as montmorillonite, which has been studied for some time as a possible nucleic acid factory in a prebiotic environment.

Additionally, the paper:

The Antiquity Of RNA-Based Evolution by Gerald F. Joyce, Nature, 418: 214-221, 11th July 2002

covered the research extant with respect to the 'RNA world' hypothesised to be of importance before the first DNA-based life forms came into existence. This is backed up by other papers such as:

Ribozymes: Building The RNA World by Gerald F. Joyce, Current Biology 6(8): 965-967 (1996) which covers the formation of ribozymes, which are RNA molecules that are capable of catalysing their own replication, a topic further explored in the paper:

RNA-Catalysed RNA Polymerisation: Accurate And General RNA-Templated Primer Extension by Wendy K. Johnston, Peter J. Unrau, Michael S. Lawrence, Margaret E. Glasner and David P. Bartel, Science, 292: 1319-1325, 18 May 2001

in which a ribozyme was actually synthesised and tested, and in tests, had a replication fidelity of 1,088 replications in 1,100. So, once again, the evidence is present to support abiogenetic hypotheses, and that evidence again merely demonstrates that wooter's pathetic dumping of the contents of his soiled intellectual nappies on these pages is nothing more than a petulant reaction to the fact that other people dare to boast an IQ that is at least 10 times larger than his, and as a consequence refuse to pollute their minds with masturbation-fantasy delusions about superfluous and worthless supernatural entities.

43. Yoko Ono, Filmmakers Caught in 'Expelled' Flap

Comment #162636 by Calilasseia on April 17, 2008 at 6:53 am

Actually, at least one blog I've whizzed past whilst trying to find a WSJ link that worked in full claims that the official forums for The Killers contains numerous statements by the moderators to the effect that the band were not informed of the use of their music for Expelled. This could prove interesting if this is the case.

However, we now know that Yoko Ono didn't give permission for Imagine to be used by Mathis et al. What makes this even more interesting is that her lawyers are none other than these people:

Shukat Arrow Hafer Weber & Herbsman L.L.P

These are lawyers with serious firepower in the music business. They have global reach. A client base that stretches right across the planet, and presumably the legal expertise to deal with copyright infringements across national borders. Which means that these lawyers have awesome, fuck-with-us-at-your-peril firepower to rain down on the producers of Expelled.

The funny part about all of this is that the Expelled crew are trying to sue XVIVO pre-emptively over their legal notice to remove the plagiarised animation! Here's the submitted legal document that the Expelled crew posted in Texas. You're going to love this ... the document at the end contains the following:

WHEREFORE, plaintiffs, Premise Media Corporation, L.P., C&S Production, L.P., dba Rampant Films, and Premise Media Distribution L.P. will request that the Court enter a Declaratory Judgement under 28 USC para 2201 against Defendant XVIVO, L.L.C., declaring that (a) XVIVO does not own any copyright or intellectual property interest in the Inner Life video, (b) the documentary and its resource DVD does not infringe any of XVIVO's copyrights (if any) in the video "The Inner Life of a Cell" ...

So they're trying to say that XVIVO doesn't have any copyright or intellectual property rights in their own material? Wow. Anyone with US legal experience care to comment on that?