Category Archives: Debunking Creationism

Basics: Tautology (with a free bonus rant!)

Today’s bit of basics is inspired by that bastion of shitheaded ignorance, Dr. Michael Egnor. In part of his latest screed (a podcast with Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute), Egnor discusses antibiotic resistance, and along the way, asserts that the theory of evolution has no relevance to antibiotic resistance, because what evolution says about the subject is just
a tautology. (I’m deliberately not linking to the podcast; I will not help increase the hit-count that DI will use to promote it’s agenda of willful ignorance.)

So what is a tautology?

A tautology is a logical statement which is universally true, by nature of its fundamental structure. That is, even without knowing anything about what the statement means,
you can infer that it must be true.

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Sort-of Updating on George Shollenberger and His Book

So… Remember George Shollenberger? He’s the goofball who wrote a book allegedly containing the First Scientific Proof of God, which I dealt with here
and here.

Well, George has been continuing to babble away. He’s got his blog – and he continues to comment on a nearly daily basis on Amazon.com’s page for his book. In a particularly fascinating update, he speculates about why no one has posted any reviews of his book:

This book has now been on the market for six months. Its rank has oscillated monthly from a low rank to a popular rank. But, it has never been reviewed at Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble. Although I tried to simplify the contents, it seems apparent that the book’s unification of Science and Theology has made the book more difficult to understand. More recently, I have come to the conclusion that the absences of reviews are reflecting the awareness of the reader’s general acceptance of the book and their awareness of the potential major changes that could affect all humans, many business and industry, all governments, and the behavior of political and justice systems.

So, instead of sharing thoughts about the book through open reviews of the book on the Internet, I conclude that the thoughts of many readers about the book are being secured privately so that individuals and organizations can survive the potential changes. Clearly, the scientific proof of God will affect the whole world. This proof can expect to develop to a single worldwide religion, a virtual one-world government, and the worldwide sharing of natural resources. And, how will each individual handle the modern ideas of resurrection and reincarnation?

I also recognize that atheists are currently selling their best selling books For instance, the books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, etc. are currently bestsellers for the book market for people who do not believe in God. For this reason, the publishers of these books do not want to open up a debate on my book with the best selling atheistic books now. So, any debate between atheists and theists is being delayed until this atheistic market is served. But, as you see in my Amazon.com blog of my book, I am preparing for this debate. With this blogging effort, I expect to reduce the market of atheistic books drastically.

Since the way individuals and organizations might handle this book was not predictable by me, I believe that this book will be compared with science books and scriptures for years.

Via some Pandas Thumb folks, I just heard that there’s a free copy of his book available. It’s a discard from the library of congress. You see, the way that the LoC works is that they receive a huge number of books every year. Most publishers send the LoC a copy of any book they publish; and virtually all sleezy self-publishing agencies support their false claim to be legit publishers by talking about how their publications are included in the collection of the LoC. So the LoC gets millions of books every year, most of which are garbage. So they periodically go through the slag heap, junking some of the worthless crap to make room for more of the worthless crap that they’re receiving every day. Part of the way that they recognize the junk is: if the book is never removed from its shelf during the first year at the library, it goes in the trash.

George’s book – the book that that is, according to George, one of the most important things ever published – is being thrown in the trash by the LoC because since they received it, no one has removed it from the shelf. Not once.

The book that’s going to single-handedly diminish the market for “pro-atheist” books, that’s going to trigger the creation of a single world-wide universal religion, that’s going to reinvigorate every major field of study from mathematics to nutrition – has never been looked at since it was received by the Library of Congress, and so they’re throwing it into the trash.

I suppose that George can still hope for it to reinvigorate the science of waste disposal.

Mathematical proof that God Spoke Creation (if you buy his book)

One of my fellow SBers, Kevin over at Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge wrote a scathing article reviewing an incredibly bad anti-evolution blog. There’s no way that I can compete with Kevin’s writing on the topic – you should really check it out for a great example of just how to take a moronic creationist, and reduce him to a whimpering puddle of protoplasm.

But while looking at the site that Kevin shredded, I can across a link to another really, really bad site, and this one is clearly in my territory:
Science Proves Creation, a site set up by an individual named “Samuel J. Hunt”. Mr. Hunt claims to have developed mathematical proof that the universe was created by Gods words.

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Once again, Sal and Friends Butcher Information Theory

I haven’t taken a look at Uncommon Descent in a while; seeing the same nonsense
get endlessly rehashed, seeing anyone who dares to express disagreement with the
moderators get banned, well, it gets old. But then… Last week, DaveScott (which is, incidentally, a psueudonym!) decided to retaliate against my friend and fellow ScienceBlogger Orac, by “outing” him, and publishing his real name and employer.
Why? Because Orac had dared to criticize the way that a potential, untested
cancer treatment has been hyped recently
in numerous locations on the web, including UD.

While reading the message thread that led to DaveScott’s “outing” of Orac, I came
across a claim by Sal Cordova about a new paper that shows how Greg Chaitin’s work in
information theory demonstrates the impossibility of evolution. He even promoted it to
a top-level post on UD. I’m not going to provide a link to Sal’s introduction
of this paper; I refuse to send any more links UDs way. But you can find the paper at
this
site
.

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Giving IDists too much credit: the Pandas Thumb and CSI

Being a Nice Jewish BoyTM, Christmas is one of the most boring days of the
entire year. So yesterday, I was sitting with my laptop, looking for something interesting to read. I try to regularly read the [Panda’s Thumb][pt], but sometimes when I don’t have time, I just drop a bookmark in my “to read” folder; so on a boring Christmas afternoon, my PT backlog seemed like exactly what I needed.
[One of the articles in my backlog caught my interest.][pt-sc] (I turned out to be short enough that I should have just read it instead of dropping it into the backlog, but hey, that’s how things go sometimes!) The article was criticizing that genius of intelligent design, Sal Cordova, and [his article about Zebrafish and the genetics of regeneration
in some zebrafish species.][sc] I actually already addressed Sal’s argument [here][bm-sc].
[pt]: http://www.pandasthumb.org
[pt-sc]: http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2006/11/when_ignorance.html
[sc]: http://www.uncommondescent.com/archives/1781
[bm-sc]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/11/bad_news_for_uncommon_descent_1.php

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Creationists on Gene Variation

Fellow [SBer Tara from Aetiology][tara] pointed me at [this bit of inanity][loonytune], which I can’t resist mocking:
[tara]: http://www.scienceblogs.com/aetiology
[loonytune]: http://www.wdcmedia.com/newsArticle.php?ID=2306
>The mystery of the human genome has come into clearer focus as scientists have discovered that each
>individual person is at least ten times more different than another person than scientists
>previously thought, discounting even further the theory of evolution so widely taught around the
>world. A group of scientists from 13 different research centers in the United States and Britain
>published their findings in scientific journals earlier this week. The results: previous concepts
>that all humans were 99.9% alike were blown apart by the research conducted on 270 people of various
>races that confirmed that 2,900 genes could vary within people, making over a million combinations
>possible.
>
>This discovery means that of the nearly 30,000 genes in the human genome that can consist of nearly
>three billion genetic “letters,” 10 percent of those genes can be multiplied in each different
>individual. Instead of being 99.9% alike, humans are more than ten times different from one another
>genetically. Instead of having two copies of each gene–one from each parent–humans have some genes
>that are multiplied several times. Scientists are excited about this discovery, which they say is
>the most revealing since Gregor Mendel’s initial work with the genetic code in the 1860’s.
>Scientists believe it will help them bring about curing individuals who have devastating diseases by
>using their own genetics.
Now, I admittedly have a bit of a hard time parsing this (I guess these creationists are illiterate as well as innumerate). But after correcting for grammar as well as I can, what I end up with is,
to put it mildly, pathetically stupid. Alas, they don’t provide *any* link to a *source* for this, so I can’t be sure of just what the heck they’re talking about, so I can’t completely correct their math. (You need *data* to do accurate math!) But I’ll do what I can. Read on, beneath the fold.

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Shrinking Sun (Part 2)

So, as promised, it’s time for part two of “The Creationists and the Shrinking Sun”.
The second main tack of the creationists and the shrinking sun is to *not* use the bare
measurements of an allegedly shrinking sun as their evidence. Instead, they use it as
evidence for a very peculiar theory. It’s an interesting approach for a couple of reasons: it
actually *proposes a theory* (a bad theory, but hey, at least it’s a theory!); it uses some recent theories and observations as evidence; and it casts the whole concept of how the sun works as part of an elaborate conspiracy to prop up evolution.

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Shrinking Sun (Part 1)

One of the more pathetic examples of bad math from the creationist camp is an argument based on the
claim that the sun is shrinking. This argument has been [thoroughly
debunked](http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CE/CE310.html) by other folks, so I haven’t bothered to
add my two cents here at GM/BM. I hadn’t heard anyone mention this old canard until
recently, when a reader wrote to me to ask if I could comment on it. I *hate* to disappoint
my readers, and this is *such* a great example of flaming bad math, so I figured what the heck. So hang on to your hats, here it comes!
There are a lot of [different](http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v11/i2/sun.asp) [variants](http://www.evcforum.net/cgi-bin/dm.cgi?action=msg&f=2&t=138&m=1) of [this](http://www.creationism.org/ackerman/AckermanYoungWorldChap06.htm) [argument](http://www.icr.org/index.php?module=articles&action=view&ID=165) out there. There are two main forms of this argument; there’s one version that focuses on extrapolating measurements of
the sun, and the more complicated one that adds in an explanation of the shrinkage and tries
to use neutrino measurements as a support. I was going to cover both in this post, but it was getting way two long, so in this post, I’m going to stick to the first naive argument, and then in my next post, I’ll cover the second.

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ISCID and the Definition of Specified Complexity

A while ago, I wrote about Dembski’s definition of specified complexity, arguing that it was a non-sensical pile of rubbish, because of the fact that “specified complexity” likes to present itself as being a combination of two distinct concepts: specification and complexity. In various places, Dembski has been fairly clear that his complexity is equivalent to Kolmogorov-Chaitin information complexity, meaning that a complex entity has *high* K-C information content; and in [my debunking of a paper where Dembski tried to define specificiation][debunk-spec], I argue that his definition of specification is basically an entity with *low* K-C information content. Put those two together, and an entity with specified complexity is “An entity with simultaneously high and low K-C information content.”
In the comments on that post, and in some rather abusive emails, some Dembski backers took me to task, alleging that I was misrepresenting the IDists view of specified complexity; that
the definition of specification used by IDists was *not* low K-C complexity, and that therefore, the definition of specified complexity was *not* self-contradictory.
Well, I was just doing a web-search to try to find some article where Dembski makes his case for a fourth law of thermodynamics, and in the search results, I came across a [very interesting discussion thread][iscid-thread] at ISCID (the “International Center for Complexity, Information, and Design”, an alleged professional society of which William Dembski is a fellow in mathematics). In this thread, Salvador Cordova is trying to make an argument that Dembski’s “Fourth Law” actually subsumes the second law. In the course of it, he attempts to define “Specified Complexity”. This thread started back in the spring of 2005, and continues to this day.
>The definition of Specified Complexity you gave is closer to Irreducible Complexity.
>
>Specified Complexity has this thing that is called “Probabilistic Complexity” which means simply
>that it’s improbable.
>
>These defintions are understandably confusing at first, but surmountable.
>
>We have many complexities involved, and seriously each one should be explored, but I’ll have to go
>into the details later:
>
>* Probabilistic Complexity
>* Specificational Complexity
>* Specified Complexity
>* Irreducible Complexity
>* Kolmogorov Complexity
>
>All of these are in Dembski’s book, and should be treated with care, lest one becomes totally
>confused. The diagram addresses 3 of the 5 complexities listed above explicitly.
>
>Probabilistic and Specificational Complexity require a separate discussion.
>
>Specified complexity has these features (per Design Revolution, page 84)
>
>1. Low Specificational Complexity
>2. High Probabilistic Complexity
Sal attempts to wiggle around, but low specificational complexity is, in his own words, means that
an entity that has low specification complexity is one whose description has *low* K-C complexity. Probabilistic complexity is, as far as I know, Sal’s addition. In Dembski’s writings, he’s been
fairly clear that complexity is complexity in the information theory sense – see the Dembski paper linked above, which quotes him explaining why “probabilistic complexity” isn’t sufficient and introducing K-C complexity to fix it.
So – one of Dembski’s associates, in an extensive message thread quoting Dembski’s books, says that specification is *low* K-C complexity; and tries to wiggle around the fact that the complexity part of “specified complexity”, when examined in terms of information theory means that the K-C complexity is high. Ergo, specified complexity as described by Dembski, *is* the property of simultaneously having both high and low K-C complexity.
Sad, isn’t it?
[debunk-spec]: http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/06/dembskis_profound_lack_of_comp.php
[iscid-thread]: http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-6-t-000562.html

The Return of Granville Sewell

Remember Granville Sewell? He’s the alleged mathematician who wrote the very non-mathematical “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution”, which I fisked [a few weeks ago](http://scienceblogs.com/goodmath/2006/10/second_law_slop_from_granville.php). Well, he’s back with a response to the people who criticized him, called [“Can Anything Happen in an Open System?”](http://www.math.utep.edu/Faculty/sewell/articles/open.pdf)
Did he actually address any of the criticisms in a substantial way? Did he actually say *anything* new?
Of course not. Do these idiots *ever* really address criticisms?

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