Religious nescience strikes again!

Here's another aneurism-inducing quotation from a creationist:

The bible does not contradict anything in reality. And most scholars believe the bible to be the most accurate history book ever written. It also talks about many things that took up until less then 100 years ago for science to discovery such as "the life is in the blood" which turns out that life comes from the DNA in our blood.

-CodeforSyn

Where do I begin with this one?

1) "The bible does not contradict anything in reality." This is blatently false. The Bible is filled to the brim with passages that contradict reality. How about the Bible giving impossible dimensions for Solomon's temple¹ (resulting in the wrong number for Pi)? How about claiming that birds crawl around four legs²? How about claiming that rabbits chew cud³? There are many examples of things that are completely errorneous in the Bible.

2) "And most scholars believe the bible to be the most accurate history book ever written." Except that most scholars dont believe that at all. Perhaps most theologians, but definately not most scholars. There is actually very little in the Bible that has been supported with historical evidence. And even those few occurances that it mentions which did occur, the Bible does a very inaccurate job of describing them. Take, for example, the fact that the New Testament makes the claim that King Herrod wanted all young boys killed after Jesus was born. Its pretty certain that Herrod did exist; unfortunatley for those that claim the Bible is "historically accurate", though, Herrod is thought to have died five to ten years before Jesus was supposedly born. Another good example is the Exodus. When Moses attempted to liberate his people from the Egyptian, it was a pretty major event. Even if the leaving of so many slaves went unnoticed, it would be silly to think that no one would notice the repeated plagues - the frogs falling from the sky, the crop-devouring locusts, or the bloody water. At the very least, someone would have noticed the "angel of death", killing the first born sons. Yet, despite all of the devestating happenings, absolutely none of them were recorded by the Egyptians. Odd, for something that claims to be historically accurate. If you claim that the Bible is historically accurate, then you need to have evidence from other historical records that corroborate those claims. For most (if not all) the major 'events' in the Bible, this evidence is lacking.

3)"It also talks about many things that took up until less then 100 years ago for science to discovery such as "the life is in the blood" which turns out that life comes from the DNA in our blood" Except not. Ignoring his pittiful example, there has really been no "scientific discoveries" that have been made in the last 100 years which were explicitly stated in the Bible. Any examples to the contrary are examples of confirmation bias: creationists read a passage in the Bible, and equate it to a new discovery since they went in assuming that such discoveries were already in the Bible. The example that is provided is pretty poor, too. The idea that "life is in the blood" extends back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. And besides, DNA isnt just in our blood. Its in ALL our cells⁴.

Once again, a creationist speaks his mind on a topic which he is absolutely ignorant about. Such is the norm it seems.
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1. 1 Kings 7:23 "He made a molten sea, ten cubits from the one brim to the other: it was round all about, and his height was five cubits: and a line of thirty cubits did compass it round about."

2. Lev 11:20-21: "All fowls that creep, going upon all four, shall be an abomination unto you."

3. Lev 11:6: "And the hare, because he cheweth the cud..."

4. Except red blood cells, which have no nucleus (or any other organelles).

Scooped!

As I talked about yesterday, waiting is one of the worst parts of research.
Today, I discovered another part of research that really sucks: getting scooped.
Turns out that Penn State's iGEM team is working on a project pretty much exactly like ours - making an E.Coli biosensor for bisphenol A in environmental samples. I'm not going to point fingers and cry "Thieves!" since there's no evidence they are directly copying our project, but we all thought our project was pretty novel up until 5 minutes ago. True, we havent really been scooped - their project isn't finished or been published - but Penn State has more resources at their finger tips and has the potential to blow our project out of the water. Our project has alot more aspects to it, though: we are developing a cell-free system, a degradation pathway in addition to the biosensor and tools to move the system into plants. So if we work hard, we can kick their butts. Nonetheless, we now have direct competiton. It'll be pretty embarassing in November if we lose to a team with a nearly identical (yet less intricate) project; the very idea for which was originally ours.

...In Which We Play The Waiting Game

Science is exciting. Being on the cutting edge of novel research is exciting. What alot of people don't realize, though, is that there are parts of science which can be downright boring. Those parts are the waiting parts.

Molecular biology is probably the most notorious for its waiting periods. The techniques used in my field can be pretty technical and can be tough to understand and do, but there is alot of waiting around. Want to do PCR? Put your PCR mix in the thermocycler, press 'start' and sit back and wait for 2.5 hours while the machine does the work for you. Want to transform bacteria? Take your competent cells, give 'em your plasmid, and put them in the incubator for 2 hours and go for coffee. The worst waiting comes when you have to order supplies. We put an order in for a site-directed mutagenesis kit and an order for the synthesis of a few genes last week; they have yet to arrive (and the kit is on backorder until next week). Until then, there's really nothing we can do in the lab. So we sit. And wait.

Research is awesome. It's just the waiting that sucks.

Painfully Dumb

Ok. Prepare yourself. Go grab a bottle of Tylenol because you're going to need it. What you are about to read is so incredibly inane that it is likely to induce a headache.

"Evolution is nothing but a denial of God. Let me pose a question to the godless! On a clear crisp night, when the moon is full, what do you see? Do you see a formless terrain on the moon? If you do, it is because God has placed a veil over your eyes. The entire moon is the face of a man, formed by the shadows of the moons features. It is a beautiful face but mysterious. It's eyes are those of an old man, while it's nose and mouth are those of a child. It's expression is a look of awe. How could there be a face sculpted on a body that circles a body with creatures having a similar face? The odds of this occuring by accident are astronomical, leaving only one answer: IT WAS SCULPTED BY GOD." - Jerome Shaunnessey

Ouch.
Have you recovered from your migrane yet? Ok, good. Let us critique this statement, shall we? Mr. Shaunnessey here is basically claiming that the moon resembles a man, and this is absolutley improbable to have occured by chance, so it had to have been made by God. The idea of a "man in the moon" is far from an original idea. Im sure you've heard of it before and spent time as a child trying to pick out the vaguely humanoid features on the moon's surface. Personaly, I've never been able to see a man's face but maybe I'm simply not imaginative enough. And THAT is the key word here - imagination. The "man in the moon" is nothing but imaginative. There is no "face". This is supported by countless high-resolution images of the moon taken over the last few decades. Take a look at this picture and try to point out what resembles a face. Not only that, but we have actually been on the moon (despite claims otherwise) and we know with certainty that the terain is pretty formless (at least in respects to resembling a face).

But lets ignore that for just a moment. If the moon really did resemble a face, then all cultures around the world should have made such a moon-to-face association, shouldnt they? All cultures have faces, do they not? If a face in the moon - designed by God, no less - really existed, then all cultures should see a face in the moon. But, this is not the case. The Chinese and mesoamerican cultures believed the moon displayed a rabbit; whereas Shia Muslims believe that the name of Muhammad's son-in-law, Mauli Ali, is written across the moon. There are many other shapes that can easily be seen in the dark and light spots displayed across the moon. Try and come up with your own; if you look hard enough, and have a good imagination, you can see pretty much anything up there.

What's more, Shaunnessey claims that the face has "eyes...of an old man, while it's nose and mouth are those of a child". He then says that the Earth has creatures with "similar faces". I cannot think of a single person with the eyes of an old man and the mouth of a child. That sort of sounds like a debilitating genetic condition to me. Perhaps Shaunnessey grew up next to Chernobyl, but claiming the man in the moon resembles people on Earth is a stretch.

And then comes the kicker: "The odds of this occuring by accident are astronomical". Astronomical? Really? I guess the odds of Jesus appearing on a grilled cheese sandwich is also astronomical, or the Virgin Mary appearing in a stain on the highway or the Pope on a pop-tart (thanks, Skeptical Enquirer!) is also astronomical, but it happens. Alot. The man on the moon is a simple case of pareidolia and nothing more.

And, being a typical creationist, Shaunnessey includes a clause that makes his statements unfalsifible: "Do you see a formless terrain on the moon? If you do, it is because God has placed a veil over your eyes." In other words, if you dont see his proof as being selfevident, its because God is making you not see it, not because he's wrong. How typical.

I've read some really wacky claims for "proof" of God's existence, but this ranks up there as one of the craziest. In actuality, the only thing that this proves is Poe's Law.

Ignorance at Work

With the olympics being held in Beijing this year and beginning in only a few months, there has been alot of media coverage on the ongoing protests regarding the host country and thier track record of civil liberties (or lack thereof), especially in regards to the Tibet issue.

I kinda get the feeling that alot of the protestors, however, dont really know much about what they are protesting. Yes, China has had a deplorable record of human rights violations and is infamous for the amout of stifling they do on personal freedoms and censorship of the press. Tibet (the Dalai Lama in particular) also has not been so kind in the past. Who's right and wrong is a bit of a tricky issue.

Nonetheless, I get the feeling that many of the pro-Tibet side dont know all there is to know about the issue. They are, i n a word, ignorant. And the following picture is proof of this:

The answer is Yes. Yes, we did, in 1936. Please learn your history before you protest kthnx.

Like roses? Think again...

By no means do I want to claim that I'm a wonderful horticulturist, but I do not think I would be far off in claiming that roses are the best selling flower at any flower shop. No Valentines Day would be complete without the inclusion of a rose or two. Unfortunately, despite the beauty of a rose, the process of producing that rose isnt so pretty.

Surprisingly, the world's largest exporter of roses is Kenya. Kenya, unfortunately, does not have all the environemtal restrictions that we, in the developed countries, do.

Producing roses takes alot of water. The water that Kenya uses for producing their roses is drained from a lake called Lake Naivasha, which just so happens to be a bird and hippo sanctuary, and home to many species of fish. Every year, enough water is drained from this lake to meet the needs of 20,000 people, and along with the water, entire generations of fish eggs are siphoned up. Some of the water is washed back into the lake, contaminated with chemicals that are used to keep the roses fresh and pretty for their shipments out to Europe and North America - chemicals, like DDT and Dieldrin, which have been banned in countries that buy the roses from Kenya. The rotting corpses of hippos and birds betrays the presence of these chemicals in the lake.

So every time you buy a rose, youre likely giving your money to support an industry that is actively killing African wildlife, in a so called "sanctuary", no less. Much to the chagrin of my girlfriend, I dont think Ill be buying any roses for a while...

Florida, I weep for thee.

In what feels sadly unsurprising, a comittee in Florida today approved Sen. Ronda Storms's "Academic Freedom Bill". For those of you who are not familiar with the bill, it aims to "allow public school teachers to present science-based alternatives to Darwin's theory of evolution" in schools throughout Florida. Since people obviously learned nothing from the Dover, Penn. case, the anti-evolutionists have been hard at work in the past few months to get this bill passed and today they succeeded. This is a terrible blow for the public school system in Florida.

First of all, there are no "science-based" alternatives to evolution. The bill obviosuly has Intelligent Design in mind but there is about as much science in ID as there is in homeopathy. People like the lackeys at the Discovery Institute like to try and push the idea that ID is scientifically credible, but it falls apart under even the lightest scrutiny. This was explicitly ruled by Judge Jones in the Dover case, and although the rulings in a Penn. court dont extend to other states, the failure of ID to prove itself even the slightest bit scientific hasn't changed.

Sen. Storm claims "It's not about letting religion creep into science classrooms". What an outright lie. If she was really concerned with protecting the rights of science teachers and students who disagree with the idea of evolution, then why is she not concerned with protecting the rights of those who disagree with things like a heliocentric solar system, or a spherical earth, or any other scientific model for our universe? This bill is not concerned with protecting the rights of anyone; it's concerned with injecting irrational nonsense into science classrooms because they are afraid that their religous beliefs are going to be taught.

This is not an "Academic Freedom" bill. It's a "Freedom to teach students whatever we want no matter how unscientific it is" bill.

So what's the harm?

An argument that I often encounter when batteling pseudoscientific ideas is "So what? What harm does it do to anyone?" Alot of people seem to think that passing off pseudoscience as "fact" is a "victimless crime". Going to see the phychic doesnt hurt anyone even if it is bunk, people think. I vehemently think that this is not the case; psuedoscience, religion, alternative therapies/medicines and just plain nonrational thinking does countless amounts of damage and the loss of many lives every year. And I've found a website that will help get this across to anyone who still thinks that there is "no harm" in quackery.

Appropriately titled What's The Harm, this site lists case studies that are submitted by users about people who have been hurt, either physically, mentally, or finacially, by quack medical claims, religious beliefs, or other forms of pseudoscience and nonthinking. At press time, the site boasts a statistic of "2,435 people killed, 117,727 injured and over $115,817,617 in economic damages" due to such causes. Many of the people featured on the cite are innocent children, who have died because of their parents' religious beliefs, or because their parents chose "alternative therapies" as cures for their childrens' illnesses.

This is the reality of this kind of dangerous thinking, folks. Religion and peudoscience kills.

Brand new base pair created.

The lexicon of life just got a little larger. According to a recent article from New Sceintist, researchers at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have created the world's first synthetic base pair. After about 10 years of research, Dr. Floyd Romesberg has designed two new molecules that are accurately and "naturally" incorporated into growing DNA strands by DNA Polymerases, called dSICS and dMMO2. This expands the 4 letter "alphabet" of DNA from 4 bases to 6. Borrowing high throughput screening methods usually employed by drug developers, Romesberg screened though about 3600 candidate molecules and found that dSICS and dMMO2 worked the best. Still, dSICS seemed to pair with itself better than with its intended partner. This meant that the two molecules underwent some 15 modifications to alter their pairing specificites until one change seemed to work - adding a methly group onto the side of dSICS (the base is more accurately named d5SICS). The two new bases act just like regular bases, as far as the cell is concerned.

But what good is this? Adding two new base pairs could give DNA the ability to code for a greater variety of amino acids, meaning a number of new proteins can be produced. This idea, however, is somewhat pointless - the genetic code already codes for the esscential amino acids; any "rare" amino acids are just altered versions of the core 20, modified through specific biochemical pathways. Cells already produce a vast variety of amino acids using the 4 bases we have now. Romesberg has his sights set on other uses for dSICS and sMMO2 - applications in building nanostructures, molecular computing, and highly specific primers or tags. Even more ambitiously, he sees his work as a step towards "increasing" evolution: "We want to import these into a cell, study RNA trafficking, and in the longest term, expand the genetic code and 'evolvability' of an organism."

This technology is far from becoming widely used, and there is still much work to be done to get dSICS and dMMO2 to be used for molecular applications. Nevertheless, the potential behind new synthetic bases will make then an incredibly useful tool in the future.

The United States of Canada

As much as it pains me to say it, our country is slowly transmorgifying into a colder version of the US (I blame the Harper government). If you haven't heard by now, Harper and his lackies have recently disbanded the position of National Science Advisor. The National Science Advisor was basically the link between the scientific community and the Prime Minister; he also helped advise the government on its role in sceince and scientific policy. When it comes to issues like GMOs, or global warming, the government no longer has a voice of reason helping to explain the issues and to clear up the cloudiness caused by the popular media and industry on such issues. Basically, Prime Minister Harper no longer gives a crap about science - something I find terribly troublesome. He's looking more like Bush Jr with every passing week.

And if that were not bad enough, the government has put a muzzle on our environmental scientists. According to the National Post:

Environment Canada has "muzzled" its scientists, ordering them to refer all media queries to Ottawa where communications officers will help them respond with "approved lines."

The new policy, which went into force in recent weeks and sent a chill through the department research divisions, is designed to control the department's media message and ensure there are no "surprises" for Environment Minister John Baird and senior management when they open the newspaper or turn on the television, according to documents obtained by Canwest News Service.

In effect, this means that the government has to approve any responses scientists may have to queries by the media about environmental issues; any response they dislike, they have the ability to "disapprove". Our environmental scientists are basically being censored.

What is wrong with our country? It feels like the federal government has suddenly turned anti-science. No good can come of this...