A Few Things I've Learned About Creationists - PZ Myers -Skepticon 2 Redux

all right well in between and our little break there I showed you that nice documentary right and so now you know my qualifications I'm unsurprised JT missed it I'm the guy who invented evolution I'm also the guy who convinced the deity to use it so you know I I have some authority here as long as you believe that video and I think you from that video you can now say there's more evidence for my role than there is for Jesus so which is pretty good so what I was going to talk about today is you know here here I've gotten all this effort of creating this magnificent system that the deity has used to create us all and and the darn creationist keeps screwing it up and it's annoying so I'm gonna tell you about a few things I've learned from I've learned about creationist but it's really a few things that have pissed me off about creationists so this is this is my cranky talk I hope you don't mind yes the talk the talk I gave yesterday was my my friendly cheery talk and this is this is my pissed-off talk that's what I want to do is I want I will go through a couple of little examples of things that creationists have done that have annoyed me and they've taught me some nice vocabulary of course here's a good word to learn if you're dealing with creationist so it's it's amazing how pretentious they are when you talk to a creationist what you discover is somebody who knows absolutely nothing at all but as thoroughly convinced he knows at all it makes for a great deal of aggravation when you're trying to impart information to them because they're already pretty convinced that you're wrong and this is this is the classic example a while back I got in a radio debate with a guy named Jeffrey Simmons and you'll notice he is Jeffrey Simmons MD one other thing I have discovered about creationists and I'll mentioned briefly is that they all plaster the creation their credentials everywhere so if they've got an MD it's up there there you've got a PhD it's right there often their PhD is some worthless piece of paper that they got from an online source or something but it's still there this guy's a legit legitimate MD but being an MD is not qualification for understanding evolution unfortunately anyway so this guy he's a he's a fellow of the Discovery Institute which you may have heard of it's that think-tank in Seattle that pedals really silly creationism and unfortunately the Discovery Institute everyone swell gets it in their head to send a hit man out to Minnesota to take me out they've done this a couple of times now with people like Paul Nelson and Jeffrey Simmons and a few others that have come through to give lectures to show me up and I'm sorry I'm not being arrogant here I send them packing pretty quickly this guy was no exception so we had a radio debate on Christian talk radio how many of you listen to Christian talk radio oh yeah isn't it entertaining yes as long as your brain can survive the the high intensity moron ways it's very entertaining so here I am I'm in this debate this guy has written a book it's called billions of missing links in which he argues that there's this standard creationist trope there are no transitional fossils and he says it over and over again in his debate in particular he announces flatly that we don't understand how whales evolved he says there are no whale transitional fossils which of course you know I just I just sit there and rattle off a long list of them you know I mention all these things like pakicetus and Rhoda Cetus and ambulocetus and all these really cool whale fossils that are out there and and he he's sitting there sort of denying them all and then he tells me he's never heard of them before okay remember the for the word of the day here pretentious he had never heard of these and I called him on this and I told him that that his ignorance of these fossils is no evidence for his point of view which got the radio people very upset that they really got angry at me because I called their their cherished creationist ignorant when he had just demonstrated it so thoroughly for us all he knew none of these when I tried to pin him down he said well I read an article a couple of months ago in Scientific American and it said there were no whale transitional fossils which is bizarre you know scientific American's a popular publication it's not quite scientific quality but it usually gets a story right so I was very surprised to hear this I later dug up this article it turned out to be a very nice survey of the transitional whale fossils had been discovered in the last twenty years so I don't know what he was doing when he read this book he also made these claims like he said okay well you've mentioned these fossils but they don't they don't demonstrate any transitional features and he specifically said you know there's this thing called the blowhole and in these animals it's all up there at the tip of the nose like it is in most tetrapods and you're looking away on its way up here which is that the fossils don't show this but this is exactly what the fossils show that's what this little diagram down here is that's pakicetus row to see this in a modern baleen whale and there's a phenomenon seam got a name it's called nasal drift it's thoroughly documented it's measured they know they can tell you the rate in millimeters per million years that that nasal passage has migrated up and over to the top of the head he didn't know about this which is weird we mentioned a few other things I mean like the transitional tetrapod series is really beautifully preserved some of you may have heard of Tiktaalik that beautiful specimen discovered by neil shubin up in ellesmere island which is a beautiful in mediate between Fish Lake forums and trust you living tetrapods it's it's a gorgeous fossil it's beautiful he's never heard of it so this is what I mean when I say pretentious this is a guy who has never heard of the most famous fossil series in the world he doesn't know any of the names of these transitional species he doesn't understand the basic concepts he's lying about the fossils when he says they do not demonstrate certain characteristics and I will remind you this is a guy who has written a book called billions of missing links so this is what we're dealing with you get out there and argue with creationists you discover they know absolutely nothing but they are happy to write long books that are putting up a pretense of being scholarly and selling them to a gullible public ok let me talk about another example and here's and here's another good word to know this one I run into all the time when I'm talking with a creationist it's it's the word that's right the top of my head every time I'm dealing with one of these people you'll notice this one does does ask you to see the note it's stupid or if you go there this is what you find Reiko this is kind of this is kind of unfair of me because Ray Comfort is probably the very bottom of the creationist barrel he's the worst of the bunch and I've listened to Kent Hovind talk ok so when I say Ray Comfort is really really stupid I'm saying something well I want to give one example of Ray Comfort slogic and it's not the banana story everybody knows a banana story right if you don't ask me afterwards Ray Comfort has been doing this thing for about a year he's got a little blog and he throws these things out he writes books and he goes on right-wing shows and Christian shows and he makes these same arguments and there's one that just bugged me this first this one first came up about a year ago here's his foolproof argument against evolution ok says Darwin theorized that mankind both male and female evolved alongside each other over millions of years both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to have sex evolved they did this through asexuality each of them split in half now think about this ok this is ray comforts argument he is doing two things here he is saying this really silly claim that humans reproduced by asexual fishing for millions of years and he's saying that Darwin said this I guarantee you I know Darwin's works inside and out I've read them all and nowhere does he say that human beings reproduced by splitting in half okay I actually took some time out and I wrote a post explaining to him that this is not true Darwin never claimed this humans evolved from other Apes these other Apes are sexually reproducing we were sexually reproducing sexual reproduction was not a novel innovation in the appearance of the human species okay it's been there all along in fact if you want to trace the evolution of this kind of sexual reproduction that we have you have to go all the way back to single-celled organisms before you find a complicating instance where you do have asexual reproduction and you do have reproduction by fishing well there probably are a few primitive metazoans but they're all extinct now so we don't know too much about them okay so this I explained them carefully this is this is totally false and I know that Ray Comfort noticed this because he commented on his blog about it and he said he'd think about it so I thinks about it and a little later he comes up with a brand new blog post and this is what he says okay let's look at elephants elephants have male and female populations and what time in evolutionary history did the female evolve alongside the male and why did she evolve he's got this long story about how the first elephant who is of course male because in his world view everything that's first is male so the first male elephant evolves and it's stumped because it can't find a female elephant to mate with this is Ray Comfort slogic I know it's a it's a strange world I have led you into so once again I write a long post rikes carefully explain to him all these details about the evolution of whales or I mean elephants so they say these are some little diagrams I dug up they're very nice diagrams again they show the same thing I talked about before that these elephants evolved from earlier elephants who were also sexually reproducing that there was no novel innovation required for these new species to acquire sex and also I carefully explained that evolution is about changing populations so what happened is you had a population of elephants that gradually evolved and at no time were there single individuals it was always dealing with populations so there was always somebody to mate with if there wasn't you wouldn't see elephants nowadays okay I explained this to him I thought I thought I'd nailed it down just just fine and then he goes on Pat Robertson's show and they have a little interview and he explains his killer argument against evolution which is this one a dog evolves it's the first dog he's got to find a female because without the female he's gay he's a dead dog he's not gonna have anything to reproduce with so we've gone from humans to elephants to dogs every time he's not grasping the concept he's focusing on while this species had to evolve have evolved this way all right and and this was this if you look on YouTube and you can find this this little video recording of this interview and it's amazing because not only is it Ray Comfort but it's Pat Robertson together stupidity multiplies it's there sitting and he and you know Raik pat robertson is sitting there with his his goofy little smile nodding his head and saying wow you've really done it you've got you've got the evolution on the right and and this is what Ray Comfort says the evolution is crazy people don't think very deeply oh man you know the irony it's it's it will kill you in this business well that's not enough I again I explained him it's not dogs this is generalizable to all animal species so what does he do he writes another post and this is what he says he matches me and generalizes it and says that everything is that way that any species that will come into existence without a mature female present again species evolved by a male appearing first and then hanging around waiting for a willing nubile attractive female to pop into existence and then mating continues this is the site and he says why you hundreds of thousands of animals fish reptiles and birds evolved a female partner that coincidentally matured at just the right time with each species it's clear that in order to win this argument I have got to do these same arguments for a hundred thousand species or so and I'm afraid to mention to him that plants reproduce sexually - okay well Ray Comfort is is the gift that never stops giving I here's another word for you not not only is he obtuse but you may have heard this in the news lately you may have seen this on the this campus in the last couple of days he's really hit rock bottom in the sleazy category here what he has done lately is he has been distributing his very own personal customized copy of Charles Darwin's version of the species the hubris there is kind of amazing basically what he's noticed is while this book is 150 years old and it wasn't produced by Walt Disney therefore it's wide open and you can do whatever you want with it and so we got the text and this is easy to do any of you can get the text to just you know go to Project Gutenberg just search on Google the entire volume of the Origin of Species is available on the web in plain text and PDF of all these different formats you can get each of the seven editions separately it's amazing what you can get off the web there and it's all there so what he did is he he took this which is fine like I said we can all do this too you don't get our own private copy electronic copy of the Origin easily and then he wrote a 50 page introduction to it that is a catalog of in named creationist lies with roughly nine pages that's decent there's a nine page biography of Charles Darwin that's not bad it's actually pretty good that the only sad thing about it if you look for this particular biography you discover that he plagiarized it he stole it off the web from a legitimate reasonable college professor who'd written a short essay on Charles Darwin and posted on his website and there it is it's right it's the only decent part of the entire interaction the rest of it is complete garbage and yeah he's been distributing these I've seen a few of you here who got these yeah isn't it amazing how much money does this guy have he's reportedly published had about a hundred thousand copies of this publish he's been distributing them all across the country so stupidity pays that's that's all I've learned from this particular incident okay let me talk about another one yeah we're gonna have a lot of beer to cleanse our palate after Ray Comfort that's for sure uh here's another good word incompetent and it's amazing how incompetent creationists are even the ones who are considered real scholars in the creationist community all right this definition I particularly love because of that last little definition a sphincter unable to perform its function seriously whenever I see a creationist now I I see spanked er malfunctioning sphincter there it is well let me talk about one among many incidents that emphasized this lack of competence on their part a couple of weeks ago I was in Chicago at a big conference of Darwin scholars and evolutionary biologists and this was an amazing conference these were the biggest names in the field they're all getting up there showing off their best work and telling us all these wonderful stories all this great science that's being done in evolutionary biology right now one of these stories I could sit here for a couple hours talking about all the stuff at this one meeting but then Rebecca Rebecca would beat me up and wouldn't be fun one of the best stories is this one it's from a guy named David Kingsley at Stanford University and he's looking at the evolution of sticklebacks turns out sticklebacks are a wonderful model system for this because what you have is a marine population there they live out in the ocean in salt water they're heavily armored and as the name might hi that cover spikes they got these little spikes and along their back and particularly they have these pelvic fins that have been strongly calcified in they're very sharp and pointy and these are very useful properties for a small fish to have because it makes them unappetizing it's like bike biting into a into little pile of needles if you try and eat a stickleback so they've developed this armor these spikes all over their body the sticklebacks though come in to fresh water to breed and in particular they may go up long distances and they may actually get stranded in some cases high upstream in lakes and ponds and so forth and what will happen then is that they'll be isolated from the parent population and they will start to diverge they will start to do this thing called evolution right there and these little isolated ponds it's a beautiful place to study speciation so David Kingsley has been doing this this amazing work where he's sampling multiple populations subpopulations of sticklebacks all over the place and he's working out exactly what happens to them when they evolved most of these ponds there they're fairly young they're under ten thousand years so he's looking a little slice ten thousand years of evolution and he can bring all these wonderful techniques to bear on them what he can do is he can take populations from the marine population for instance freshwater population and if you bring them together naturally they don't like each other they look very different from one another and they don't interbreed but they've only been separated for a few thousand years so you can artificially inseminate and do hybrids you can do genetic crosses with these so you can for instance take these heavily armored marine versions of the stickleback and the one at the bottom is a freshwater fish which has lost most of its armor and also in particulate Schloss that spine they do this because when you go from deepwater out in the ocean to the shallow waters your predators change and these sticklebacks are mostly preyed upon by these evil things called dragonfly larvae which like to reach up and hook passing fish toes pull them down and eat them and to these animals those pelvic spines are just these handy handle to to the dragonfly what this is is fish on a stick and they grab it mmm chew on it so they lose these things they you guys what's going on here how are they doing this and he's mapped out the genes that are involved for instance one one of the primary genes involved this is something called pit x1 which is a gene that's expressed all over the place it's expressed in your pituitary gland it's expressed in some of your internal organs yeah we have this gene too and it's also sprites expressed in the hind limbs and it seems to be the gene that's switching on this armoured stuff so what he's done is he's worked out in detail what gene it is he's gone in such detail that he knows precisely which regulatory region of the gene is changed between these species he's mapped it all out this is the kind of stuff that blows the mind of evolutionary biologists because what it means is that not only can we identify species and follow their evolutionary changes we can follow them in such a detail that we know precisely what mutations occurred and work them out ok so trust me it's beautiful stuff you know if you look in nature and science you'll find David Kingsley and has to work all over the place it's just amazing ok so we're at this meeting he's giving this presentation is gorgeous we're all impressed it turns out we should have some ominous music here there were creationists in attendance ok in particular there's this fellow named Paul Nelson a fellow the Discovery Institute who likes to think that he's sophisticated and thinks scientifically and he goes to science conferences all the time and annoys us with really stupid questions and stupid propositions anyway he's there and afterwards we get together at a little reception I see Nelson there and yeah it's terrible to say you know when I see creationist I don't run up and kick them in balls I don't I'll have a polite conversation with them and so that's what happened we hit a polite conversation and Nelson explained to me that hey that was really cool work that Kingsley was doing but you know ultimately it's kind of trivial it doesn't mean much it's just things getting broken what's always happening is he's describing these fish and they're losing pieces and you can see what the the wheels turning in his head you know he's thinking all the fall I just knew it he's thinking the biblical fall this is well we expect everything falls apart and he actually writes about this he puts us on the web later and here he says you know they evolutionary changes they're all losses they lose pelvic structures they do this all over the place and they says I'm macro-evolution can't be this and then he throws out of drops a name here might be he and he have talked about this quite a bit he says it was all breaking things and losing things talk about missing the point this is a case where they have worked out in detail the genetic changes that have caused morphological changes in a lineage they understand this stuff and you know the cool thing we're discovering is that there all these regulatory switches they're turning morphology off and on and basically what he's saying is oh yeah they've discovered a switch it's in the off position it doesn't do anything if you've got a switch though you know and if it's a switch you can flip it on you can flip it off that's the power of it you can do you can go both ways these changes you can also have sticklebacks that evolved the other way so here's an example of this this is from Lake Washington near Seattle where they've observed an interesting phenomena there's a population of sticklebacks in this lake and the sticklebacks for a long time were pretty heavily armored why because they didn't have to worry too much about dragonflies because this was an urban lake it was disgusting this was this was actually when I was living in Seattle you didn't really want to go swimming in Lake Washington it was pretty turbid and muddy and unpleasant looking so you had sticklebacks in there they didn't have to worry about the dragonflies because because the dragonflies couldn't see them the lake was that murky and what happened is they got smart and they cleaned up the lake they reduce the turbidity in the leg they can remove the pollution right now lake washing is a beautiful place to visit and what happened in that case is now the the fish have changed and they have acquired armor again why because now fish in the lake can see them from a long distance and come charging up and try to eat them so what's happened now is you get sticklebacks have turned on armor this is not a loss is it I kind of suspect it in the minds of the Discovery Institute people there they're somehow going to distort it into that well yeah this is a case where they built armor and built pelvic spines here's another case and again I'm going to talk about fish because I love fish if you read Sean Carroll's book the making of the fittest he talks about this in great detail and it's another beautiful story in fish and what they're doing is they're looking at ice fish these are these amazing Antarctic fish that are almost perfectly transparent and one of the ways they've achieved this transparency is they no longer have red blood cells they've gotten rid of them they live in water that is so cold that you know the colder the water the higher the oxygen carrying capacity they can get by this plasma instead of plasma plus red blood cells of course the other catch is that this is in saltwater and as you all know saltwater freezes at a lower temperature than freshwater the insides of a fish are less salty than the ocean around them and they have another problem and that is that at those temperatures if they didn't do something all these little ice fish would be swimming around and they freeze solid and go clunk drop to the floor before the ocean dead so they've evolved an anti freeze here's another case where you could look at it superficially you say well oh it's just losing things they've lost their red blood cells right and yes the creationists have said this but the same time they've acquired something they've acquired an anti freeze where did the anti freeze come from the other thing is in this diagram that I put up here is we also know when these fish evolved and we know what environmental circumstances caused them to evolve and what it is is they're all down around Antarctica and and round about 35 million years ago Antarctica and if you look at the if you look at the globe and you look at Antarctica right there at the bottom and you know how South America reaches down with Tierra del Fuego and all that sort of stuff 35 million years ago they were connected so there was a land bridge right there which meant that ocean currents didn't go around the Antarctic they went around and then they hit South America and then they went up to the equator and the waters warmed up and came back down and so the Antarctic was fairly temperate 35 to 50 million years ago then this thing called plate tectonics happened they separated all of a sudden the currents could just do this go circling around and around never taking a vacation in the equator and getting colder and colder and colder and we've got this period of this rapid cooling phase it's illustrated here 25 to 15 million years ago where the temperature just slowly dropped they call it a rapid cooling phase because they're there they're thinking geologically ok wrap it to them is oh wow five million years to drop a 1000 degrees centigrade okay but anyway it's getting colder and colder so there's this gradual period where they had to adapt to extremely frigid conditions they could start off without an antifreeze and as it got colder the antifreeze became more and more advantageous well you might ask where did the antifreeze come from and here it is isn't this perfectly clear to everyone this is an amazing diagram you know I read making of the fittest to describe this knot so I had to go back to the original papers and I went back the original papers really isolated the anti-freeze gene to figure out what it was and unfortunately scientists tend not to be very good graphic designers which is why this is some kind of ugly pink with blue and yellow and orange and green all over the place so it's a really ugly diagram but it's extremely informative what they're showing up at the top up there at the very top that's the antifreeze protein that's the gene for the antifreeze protein and what it is is is if you're used to thinking about molecular biology it's a diagram with a gene structure we're off to the left there there's that SP and 100 base pair etcetera that's describing a regulatory region it's a little strip in front of the gene itself so that's where these all these interactions go on to turn it off and on the blue part is a gene itself and it turns out the antifreeze is really simple it's just it's a short peptide with three minutes amino acids amino acids repeat it over and over again threonine alanine alanine that's all it is threonine alanine alanine and that's enough to prevent nucleation of ice crystals forget that in your blood you don't freeze okay so there's the gene they find it and then what they say was well of course you don't stop there we've got the inter fries dream yet again ask where did this thing come from and so they sort of scout around the rest of the fish genome they are there any other parts of the genome that resemble the antifreeze protein and yeah they find it it's that second one right there the one says B they find that there's another gene it's a called a trypsinogen like a protease gene and what it is is an enzyme it's a digestive enzyme produced by the pancreas pancreas produces the sense I have secretes it into the small intestine and what it does there is it's a protease it breaks down protein so it helps digest the proteins of the fish eat has nothing to do with antifreeze but look at the sequence that initial segment is almost identical so it's got a very similar regulatory region in front of it and then the first three amino acids coded for by this particular protein are threonine alanine alanine and then the rest of that orange stuff that's the business side of the enzyme so they immediately could see well here's where the amino acid or the antifreeze came from it's a copy of this particular enzyme that got truncated so just chopped off that irrelevant enzyme part just has that initial segment again these are processes that happen all the time cell so we know about these it makes this little antifreeze right there and that's all it is and then over the course of time it got duplicate and duplicate to have many copies of the threonine alanine alanine and there it is it's it's a very convincing story and to make it even more convincing that wasn't the whole story what they have in the fish genome is a copy of the antifreeze gene they have a copy of the trypsinogen like protease gene and they also have a another copy which is an intermediate it's a copy of the gene that was taken mate by a gene duplication event during the evolution of the antifreeze and that's illustrated in C and D and what this is is it's a gene that's got the antifreeze stuff duplicated in it and it's also got a big chunk of the trypsinogen protein stuck in there as well so it's like a fossil of the gene during its evolution captured right there in the genome so there's the whole story here's how these fish evolved this new gene product over the course this period of cooling oh and there's other parts of the story of it together it turns out that the antifreeze has some peculiarities which are what you'd expect from a gene that evolved from a pancreatic enzyme it turns out that the way the fish makes the antifreeze is it makes it in the pancreas secretes it into the small intestine and then the small intestine absorbs it and passes it into the circulatory system where it does its work as an antifreeze so it's a really beautiful story very clear step-by-step everything has been found which leads into this next word this is something else creationists are is they're very dismissive you can imagine what the creationist think of the icefish story it's just a little protein big deal they do this over and over again I got to give you another story this is another great story this is a the work of a guy named Joe Thornton at the University of Oregon who's been looking at the evolution of receptors hormone respect receptors that we have a big battery of all kinds of different hormone receptors in our bodies right we all know this males have got one set of receptors females have another set of receptors it's responsible for a lot of beautiful differences between us these things had to evolve Thorton is looking at a particular class of corticoid receptors one you may have heard of cortisol if you have inflammation you get things like cortisone and so forth it mimics this particular this particular hormone it regulates the stress response so you use this to reduce them for inflammation if you're injured for instance so we've got this one we've also got another one it's it's a mineralocorticoid called aldosterone aldosterone is a hormone that you don't hear much about because what it does is it regulates salt balance in your body there are diseases that throw it off you may have heard of Addison's disease jf John F Kennedy had this Addison's it it's a defect in this particular structure that causes overproduction or under production of these particular hormones and it throws your salt balanced way off and you get all kinds of unfortunate symptoms well when you look at these two hormones their diagram right up there they look awfully similar you might guess hey maybe there's some evolutionary relationship between these when you look further you find that there are these proteins that have to be on the surface of cells of buying those particular hormones these are called hormone receptors and Thornton is looking at the evolution of glucocorticoid receptors these g RS that bind to cortisol and mineralocorticoid receptors the mrs the buying two aldosterone and he knows a bunch of things about this stuff he knows the specificity of their binding he knows which Prout which hormones bind to which protein he knows they're homologous to each other the proteins look very similar when you look at their sequence and he's just asking his basic questions which one evolve first and I won't go into all the details it gets pretty hairy and technical but I'll summarize what he what he does is he makes hypotheses he looks at different forms of these receptors and he has okay what's the difference what what what nucleotides what amino acids have changed between them and then he postulates what an ancestor would have looked like so he says well they're they're two amino acids different let's ask what happens if we make them one amino acid different and he synthesizes whole new receptor proteins that have their postulated ancestral form basically it's a kind of molecular archaeology where he is reconstructing the ancient forms of proteins and then he's inserting them back into animals and asking what do they do are they specific which which hormone do they bind to which one evolve first what changes had to have occurred and he's worked this out in great detail I mean like I said I'm not gonna go into this and bore you any more than I already have but he's worked out step by step the stuff it's amazing work because he can tell you which amino acid to had to have changed first to know the order that they changed you know which two amino acids had to have changed he knows which ones are responsible for the specificity of binding to aldosterone versus cortisone he can tell you the entire evolutionary history of these two proteins this is exactly what the intelligent design people have been demanding of us they want step-by-step molecular descriptions of the evolution of significant structures in our evolutionary history and Joe Thornton has provided it he seriously has now you might imagine what the creationist would say that this you'll hear something they've been demanding for years Joe Thornton has conveniently provided it for them you would have negative expectancy wow that is amazing you have done it okay you have demonstrated unambiguously the evolution of a molecular machine a significant one in our history - this is what they actually said they they were given this work shown it had it carefully explained to them in little words because we don't expect them to understand anything too complicated every details explain to them and might be he says it's piddling the Steven Mayer who is another guy at the Discovery Institute declares that it's trivial how can we win okay you see you can do things like you can find evidence of these big macro evolutionary changes things like what's going on in sticklebacks the stuff that were they were describing an ice fish with these major changes in proteins these new proteins evolving and what do they say it's still just a fish it's only breaking things they trivialize it when you work out the details step by step what do they say it's piddling which leaves us on an interesting dilemma here where do we find the balance here you know if we get the big picture it's not detailed enough if we get the details it's trivial so this is what creatures are there they're simply science deniers they're extremely annoying this way okay anyway you know I if you want to if you wanna hear more about these you can sign up at University of Minnesota Morris and take my courses and I go over these in a great detail and our tuition is fairly low it's only a few thousand dollars a box a year see you can afford this come take my classes it's a it's a good thing to do let me just do one last one a quick one because Rebecca wants to get up here yes okay another good word to know the the complaints that gracious makes are just silly and pointless they're trivial in the true sense of the word not in the Michael Behe Steven Meyer sense of the word they really are saying stupid things and I just want to mention one little story here because it involves puppy dogs and I've heard that it's always good to end a lecture on cute happy puppy dogs we know a lot about the evolution of dogs we have all kinds of information on these we have sequenced the genome of dogs okay we know their differences we know the differences between dogs and wolves for instance we've characterized the differences we can put together nice molecular cladograms that tell us about the divergence time we know when they evolve furthermore we've got archeological evidence it turns out people love puppy dogs we have from China from 15,000 years ago evidence of these dogs these village dogs that their remains are found in these archaeological sites and so from 15,000 years ago we have them in China ah this other one yes 12,000 years ago in the Middle East we have real evidence of the true love between dogs and human beings that we have burials people so loved their puppy dogs that when they died they wanted to be buried with them they didn't love them quite enough to let them live after they died but we're getting there so we have these burials you know we find that 12,000 years old they're clearly dated we know the history people dogs dogs domesticated and then the one point I want to make about this is this is a case where we have clear evidence that we were taming and loving puppy dogs 9,000 years before the creation of the world so you can't get much more ridiculous than that than what the equations are quite okay I'm a cat lover so I apologize do you have cats nailed down that well not quite as well because it turns out people don't want to be buried with their cats very often the exceptions the Egyptians but the objections are much more recent than any of this stuff so yeah we've got we've got good records from the Egyptians we actually think that cats evolved in North Africa and those early Egyptians were probably the first people domesticate them so they're there they're quite nouveau compared to dogs okay well cats were all dogs drool yes I I have I have two cats and they own me so I know what you know one one you were talking about how they dismiss the as piddling the finding of evolutionary paths with it the genitive the protein level but what I often hear is how where does the liver come from you don't just get a whole liver and I know there I know we know it's something that liver cells evolved from fat cells then you can you can explain whatever comes from dude I would actually be interested to know it has anyone worked this out as thoroughly or nearly as thoroughly and then not as thoroughly because the liver evolved roughly I'm guessing 700 750 million years ago that what we have is liver tissue in insects and in people so it tells you right away that the divergence was long long ago we know that in many primitive organisms the liver is a fairly simple structure small struck with few cells so it's it's a specialized population of cells that's that's how it started we can't say much more than that yeah I think that's one I hear a lot from creationists like where does the liver cover yeah embryologic embryological that one down because I really shame them I think I I will tell my developmental biologist friends that Richard carrier says yeah I would love to see that story right now yeah we do know that we know we know that broad picture of it that embryologically the way you develop is you start by forming this gut tube which is just a simple tube running from mouth to anus and what happens is you get a little divot ticular you get little specializations of patches of that tube and in some cases those patches expand and the liver for instance is just an out bud an outgrowth of the gut tube and so that that's how we expect it evolve it's just it's a little chunk of the gut that's got specialized you also see this for other structures like pancreas lungs all these tissues are simply outgrowth so this this initial tube so take a tube and make branches off of it that's how you make these organs cool thanks yeah with no trucks yes yeah I was gonna ask so does this comfort guy does he believe that only same gendered parents pass along their genetic information to their offspring and if so is this a common belief among people who don't believe in evolution I I think you're giving comfort far too much credit for what he no I I never seen the argument apart from that yeah every every conversation you know I've had I haven't met him face to face but every conversation I've had with him over email or over the Internet his level of ignorance is appalling I mean this this is a guy I mean even if you got to figure a guy who postulated humans evolve by are reproduced by fishing you know he doesn't know much biology so yeah he doesn't know anything about genetics transmission of traits he doesn't worry about it God said it that's way it is I just had one thing do you think the misinformation regarding the high numbers people say that they don't build in evolution is actually more close to the character of people who don't know basic facts about American history then a large number of people who actually scientifically dedicates the idea that did that it is fundamentally flawed so no so I'm not sure what the question is it is it is it are you asking whether the majority people are simply in other words when these poles come out they're routinely show that people say plane mats believe in evolution do you think that it's mostly just a matter of public ignorant that relates to lot o rather than this kind of active malicious thing that then you break comfortable yeah that the majority people don't know much about evolution because they don't care much about evolution and most of their assessments of evolution are made entirely on aesthetic grounds you've all heard the argument I didn't come from no monkey right that's that's the level of reasoning that they have that's why they rejected do you have any stories or impressions from the Creation Museum stories are impressions I'll show you my t-shirt yes oh okay I'm flashing ya the Creation Museum is is a it surprised me it about how bad it was that it makes a series of fallacious arguments it's more akin to a Disney ride than it is to a museum and that you have to go through this one little path and it leads you through these arguments one thing that totally surprised me is is I've talked to many creationists and you talk to your average creationist and they're pretty fuzzy on this evolution thing and they're willing to say things like well the book of Genesis is metaphorical you know that they say all it was a day aged a day Age theory that each day that God was working could have been thousands or millions of years and willing to say this sort of thing when you get into the Creation Museum you discover this this incredibly obstinate view that you have to take the Bible absolutely word-for-word literally this is not even this is not good theology but it's not even good creationism creationism for the last century has avoided that kind of thing they say that the earth was specifically created in 4004 BC you know James Usher's old arguments they say the flood occurred in 2348 BC precisely which leads to these these you know this is the funniest part to me is they have a bunch of dinosaur fossils there because dinosaurs are cool and impressive and they've got dinosaurs from the Triassic they've got dinosaurs from the Jurassic and they got dinosaurs from the Cretaceous you know the three big areas of the Mesozoic and you go through these and they've got these little placards on them that are all scientific they give the Latin name and they say oh this is from the Triassic and it'll say the Triassic 2348 BC the next time starts from the Jurassic 2348 BC Cretaceous 2348 BC I'm thinking that in their mind the Triassic was like May Jurassic about April you know the this this is how they're thinking it's this it's so literal it hurts I'm so used to other creationists who while really ridiculous are at least willing to bend a little bit and say well okay we can we can't allow a little metaphor here we can explain some phenomena with science not at the Creation Museum it is flat-out straight biblical literalism as interpreted by James Ussher as interpreted by the Seventh day Adventists which is another surprising connection which I won't get into right now I was home-schooled in a theist environment and only learned about evolution from the theists point of view in textbooks such as understanding and exploring God's world obviously as an atheist now I no longer adopt that mindset if I'm trying to expand my knowledge of evolution in a correct way and basically unlearn all of the incorrect information what is the best starting point for that oh you are really in luck I mean that there has been a boom in popular books on evolution lately there there's a couple I recommend look for Sean Carroll's making the fittest he's the one that gave that ice fish story and what's marvelous about Sean Carroll is he doesn't try to give you the whole picture all at once what he does is he gives you as examples he tells me here's an example of these ice fishing here's how we know they evolved here's all the details of their evolution and you can sort of grasp this concept you know in a small area very well other books to look for is our Neil Shubin is your inner fish what you laugh don't you realize we're all fish yes cladistic aliy we are all fish and he's he he is taking a very specific approach he I talked to him about this he teaches human physiology and Anatomy and he saw this as a way to relate this this whole concept of evolution to what for instance a bright pre-med student would be interested in knowing so he's explaining how evolution explains all these annoying features of the human body like bad backs and things like that and you can get it all straight from the evolutionary history another one is Jerry coins why evolution is true another book that it takes a it takes a wider approach where it goes through these different lines of evidence like biogeography morphology etc and gives all the evidence explains that supports the evolutionary theory in that little category it's very handy that way and of course I got to mention Richard Dawkins new book the greatest show on earth which is beautifully written and is written specifically at a very basic level so anyone here can read it unless you're a creationist in which case you really need some remedial work that will be Richard Dawkins next book he's writing a children's book so we hope we hope that creationists maybe can start there and work their way up over here there's Thanks you say most of the internal organs probably have come from this - right well there's a set of them that come from that tube there are organs that have different development origins the kidneys in the heart in particular come to mind but yeah right right well Richard if they if they nailed the whole sequence down to the liver back to this tube I am certain that the creationists would just call it tripe don't give them any assistance please there's people all over here sorry Rebecca you don't get to talk tonight because I have a lot of friends and co-workers who say that they believe in evolution the evolution process but they say that they don't believe in how it all started they think that a God started it all and then let everything else below and I feel like it's my duty to try to tell them like no but they kind of want the one-line answer to convince them and I'm just saying they're wrong doesn't work apparently not but I was wondering if you had any advice as to what I could say you're gonna help them other than just saying bowl here there's boats please read them yeah there's there's no one-word answer sorry to say there's this whole field of research and abiogenesis it's basically looking at chemical evolution and people have won Nobel prizes for this for instance Tom Cech when his for his work on RNA world's and so forth so there's a huge body of evidence out there and oh man summarizing it once and now I can't do it a book I'll recommend a couple books though it's always easier to just tell you go go read a few thousand words right guy named Bob Hazen wrote one called Genesis you can remember that title right Janice anyway it's all about origins of life research and its really good stuff it gives an overview of all the different theories and all the experiments have been done he does work in this field in himself and he's got some really cool experiments that show how you could how he's demonstrated the generation of major components of the metabolic pathways for instance just from purely integrating organic compounds so it's it's pretty cool hot stuff if you want to get more theoretical and kind of fun a guy named Stuart Kauffman wrote a book called origins of order or must be about 15 years ago but it's still pretty darn good where he talks about how you can evolve complex chemical chemical arrays you can evolve a metabolism from simple components so that's always fun to read yeah you've just asked me for this history of the first two billion years of life and once then I just I'm stuck yep oh it's just Rebecca though you don't know that's fair [Applause]

Channel: HamboneProductions

Views: 277,878

Rating: 4.5599451 out of 5

Keywords: PZ Myers (Academic), Skepticon, sk2, Evolutionary Biology (Field Of Study), Creationism (Religion), hambone productions, a few things ive learned about creationists, Christianity (Religion), humanism, Humanism (Belief), bible, darwin, Darwinism (Literature Subject)

Id: 0MoY5o__Vis

Length: 57min 5sec (3425 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 13 2014