90% True

.: Two weeks ago my molecular genetics professor, Dr. Chris Kearney, made an announcement in class about a local elementary school teacher needing volunteers to judge at the school’s science fair. My friend Larry and I decided we were up for it, and today we woke up an hour early and drove across town to harshly critique appraise and encourage burgeoning young scientists.

.: It was your typical science fair scene in all its tri-panel glory. I walked up to a kindergarten student — official clipboard in hand — and asked her what she did in her experiment. “I mixed oil and water and food coloring and I found out that it creates two colors that separate after you shake them up.” I asked her if she knew what she wanted to be when she grew up, and she said she didn’t know.

.: Some of the experiments were good, practical experiments that a kid could easily create on their own. One such experiment was the simple question, “Can you taste the difference between splenda cookies and regular cookies?” It’s a good question, and the student even went through the trouble of making a survey sheet for everyone involved (216 people!). It was a good project, and it was clear that the parents only helped with the implementation of the experiment, not with the ideas behind it. I was a little dismayed, though, when I learned that — after making sure to record all the data about which variety of cookie the people preferred, and whether or not they thought they would be able to determine the difference — the student never wrote down the figures for whether or not people could actually tell the difference between the two cookies!

.: With few exceptions, the best projects showed tell tale signs of deep parental involvement — and of these, the best were from parents who were also scientists. Compare and contrast the following statement from one third grader:

I took the pennies and I stacked them ten at a time and placed them on the scale and I took their weight and the the boat that held the most pennies was also the biggest boat and my conclusion was that the bigger the boat the more pennies it could hold.

… with this from another third grader:

Light enters the eye by first passing through the cornea, which is the outer layer of the eye, then on through the lens, which is an adjustable clear structure that stiffens with age — which is why older people need glasses more than younger people. Once light passes through the lens, it is projected onto the retina, but because of the curvature of the lens, the image is inverted. The image is then converted into signals by the retina and the signal is sent to the brain by the optic nerve. Once in the brain the image is flipped right-side up again, and the end result is what you see. I’ve constructed a model eye which demonstrates the image-flipping property of a convex lens.

.: The first third grader was helped by his mom, who as near as I could tell was your regular non-scientist mommy. The second third grader was helped by her dad . . . who was an optometrist. However, the second third grader really knew what she was talking about. It wasn’t the case of a parent doing all the work and sending their clueless child to a science fair with a whole bunch of mysterious writings pinned to a cardboard display. I pressed her on a few questions (questions that not even some of my friends would know), and she didn’t even hesitate in answering them correctly. I asked her if she wanted to be a scientist when she grew up. She said, “No, I want to be a doctor.” I laughed.

.: I asked every kid, “Who came up with the idea for this experiment?” and the most common answers were “My mom/dad” and “We just picked it out of a science project book.” In those cases, I would ask questions to make sure they knew what the purpose of the experiment was. But my favorites were the kids who picked their own topics after seeing something their siblings did. “I saw my brother accidentally spill some vinegar on the counter and it made neat bubbles, so I experimented with all kinds of liquids to see if they would make bubbles with vinegar.”

.: For other kids, I would suggest further things they could do that were related to their experiment. One girl collected a whole bunch of liquids and performed litmus tests for all of them (her father was a chemistry student). I saw that she tested 7-UP, so I told her to ask her dad if they could test 7-UP again. I suggested she shake it up to get all the bubbles out and test it one more time to see if the pH changes (it will of course become less acidic as the carbonic acid converts to water and carbon dioxide, which leaves). I also noticed that she listed the pH of saltwater as 10.0. I asked her if she used tap water for her saltwater; she said yes, so I further suggested she ask her dad for distilled water to use for the next round of saltwater. I think she’ll be pleasantly surprise.

.: My favorite project, though, was by a particularly enthusiastic third grader. I walked over to his presentation and before I could ask for his name he started immediately:

In genetic engineering they use a technique called knockout mutation, where they take a gene in a mouse and remove it to see what kind of mouse results. If the mice run around only in circles then they know that gene has something to do with navigation. In my experiment I made knockout muffins where I removed a single different ingredient from each batch of muffins so I could determine what role that ingredient played. The muffins without baking powder failed to rise, the muffins without sugar tasted like biscuits, the muffins without flour hardly looked like muffins at all . . .

.: I was blown away. Here’s a third grader . . . talking about knockout mice! The kid knew what he was talking about, knew the importance of each step in his experiment, and even knew how to relate it to other areas of science. Clearly there was parental involvement, but of the most positive kind. Then I looked at the name on the tri-panel:

B. Kearney.

.: I submitted my piece on Acid/Base Titrations to the Science Creative Quarterly and found out today that they published it two days ago.

.: The SCQ is a fun place to browse, so I suggest you go read some of the other pieces there, like these: My New Graduate Course Offering, A Dialogue with Sarah…, and Photos of a Nice Set of Boobies.

.: In my last post I linked to what I thought was a clever parody of creationist thinking, Argument by technobabble? I’m still certain the author is a crafty prankster, especially after reading this interesting analysis of the author’s name.

.: But like all great stories, there’s more. Taking a cue from Gandhi, hblavatsky writes:

1.First they ignore you: Leading ID researchers such as Behe, Dembski and Ujvarosy have been prevented from publishing their work in many peer-reviewed journals. It’s not that our research isn’t good enough, it’s just too radical for the mainstream biological establishment.

Ask yourself, why is it that most mainstream biologists refuse to debate the Evolution controversy with us? I suspect that it is part of a deliberate and organized conspiracy to marginalize our exciting and important discoveries.

2.Then they fight you: The evolutionists have started an unprovoked war against us. They will stop at nothing at all to restrict our academic freedom until every American kid is taught the lie of evolution.

At this stage their goal is to frighten anybody who dares to oppose Darwinism into an oppressed silence. The recent Dover trial shows that evolutionists are prepared to use every trick in the book to keep their foothold, but like the oppressors that Ghandi fought, every act of suppression only hastens the revolution. America has seen what neo-Darwinists are capable of, and will not be so easily beat the 2nd time.

3.Then they laugh at you: That awful film “A Flock of Dodos” is only the tip of the iceberg. When unhinged evolutionists know that they have lost the argument they can only resort to mockery and cruel ad-hominem remarks.

If you search Technorati search for external comments about Overwhelming Evidence, you will notice that the overwhelming proportion are written by neo-Darwinism apologists who have nothing better to do than to mock us. For example, this article by “90% True” is probably less than 1% true. He unfairly attacks OE Blogger Quizzlestick for daring to reveal the scientific applications of ID philosophy.

Internet nut-case “Shelly The Republican” is no better. Her mockery takes the form of copying a number of our articles without permission. As you can see, she has taken one of my articles and added what she believes are humorous images in order to use my words against us. I am considering legal action against her organization on the grounds of blatant copyright abuse. If your articles have been stolen by this site I urge you to contact me as soon as possible. If we work together we can silence these jokers.

.: I’m honored, I really am. At this point I see two options: I can risk taking these people and their writings seriously, or I can treat them as the clever jokes they are. If I opt for the former, and incontrovertible evidence surfaces that proves they are in fact parodies, I’ll be the dope who didn’t get the joke — and nobody likes being that guy. However, if I smile and go along with the joke, and it turns out these people really are serious . . . well then that doesn’t necessarily reflect bad on me, now does it?

.: As it happens, I know one of the moderators of Overwhelming Evidence personally. He’s on my university’s quizbowl team, and I know as well as one can know that he really is an intelligent design creationist. But it brings me no end of joy to see such a terrible waste of internet resources overrun with uncontrollable hijinks from posters like hblavatsky, HaEris, and TroutMac, the latter of which wrote this hilariously bad bit of reasoning:

I like to think of it this way…think of DNA as a set of blueprints, like for a building of some sort. On the one hand, you’ve got blueprints for a simple “organism”… let’s make it a storage shed. One room, a pair of doors, a roof, etc. Pretty simply. Maybe one page is all it takes to describe how that shed is built. Now, compare that to blueprints for a 4 bedroom house. Now you’ve got multiple rooms, a bunch more doors, plumbing (that’s a whole new system there… the shed didn’t need plumbing) and electrical (also a whole new system), windows, insulation, etc. This might be a 20 page set of blueprints. The question is, how are you going to get all the new information that describes how the 4-bedroom house is built from JUST the information for the storage shed? Never happen.

.: You’d almost have to be a real creationist to be able to write such confused gobbledygook. And the best part is: if it were legitimate creationist thinking, there’s no way a reasonable moderator would keep it while discarding a perceived parody, because there’s no way they could tell the two apart!

.: Now, I realized I’ve made a (somewhat) serious charge against the people at Overwhelming Evidence. I think, what with the available (and hilarious) evidence, it’s reasonable for me to conclude that OE has been overwhelmed with parodists. BUT, like a good skeptic, I’ve an open mind and will still consider the possibility that these people are completely, utterly, and cluelessly honest.

.: Over at Uncommon Descent for Kids! a contributor named HaEris posted this delightful parody(?) which I’m reposting, since it will most likely be deleted soon. It’s a response to this wonderful post by Ian Musgrave at The Panda’s Thumb about Sea Squirts and Irreducibly Complex systems.

Argument by technobabble?

If you want a laugh, go see today’s update on “The Panda’s Thumb” called Behe vs the Sea Squirt, the best place to see that rare and endangered species the red-faced angry evolutionist blogger. Today’s theme is an attempt to discredit Michael Behe’s proven facts that the mamalian clotting sequence is Irreducably Complex.

When I read their pathetic attempt at a rebuttal I almost fell off my chair with laughter. Consider the following paragraph, which is unfortunately typical of the pompous and heavy handed style of the Panda’s Thumb site:

“Activated Factor VII and Factor X both activate PAR2 [5,7] . This receptor is also activated by trypsin released by damaged epithelial cells, and other serine proteases released from mast cells and white blood cells during injury or inflammation [8]. Activated Factor X and thrombin (and trypsin) turn on PAR1, which amongst other things, activates neutrophils and causes aggregation of platelets [5,7,8]. In protovertebrates without a clotting system, wounds are plugged with haemocytes, primordial versions of the white blood cells and platelets that are activated by thrombin and trypsin. Trypisn or trypsin-like enzymes leaking from damaged cells attracting haemocytes to plug a wound would be the start of a protoclotting system.“

I’m sure I do not have to dignify this obviously absurd technobabble with a rebuttal. Anybody with the most basic qualification in biology can see that they are making up this zany nonsense as they go along.

I do wonder where they are getting their so-called facts? Has anybody been watching too much Star-Trek recently?

One of the great things about Intelligent Design is that it simplifies things. Unlike the theory of evolution it passes the test of Occam’s razor the universally true scentific axiom that given a choice between a complex theory and a simple one, the simple one has the greatest probability of being right. It’s another way of saying that tall-tales and just-so stories are usually false. ID is so simple that even people who are un-trained in biological sciences can make great and astounding progress. What could be a greater indicator of it’s truth than that?

And the theory they use to “disprove” IC - it’s the most absurdly complex idea of all: They claim that irreducable things are not irreducable because the components have other uses in other possibly unrelated structures in life. Of course the fatal and obvious flaw in this argument is that the other structure must by definition be also IC. Instead of having just one IC structure the darwinists have actually proved that there are two! There is the precursor IC structure and also the originally observed newer IC structure. If only they taught that in schools!

As we keep simplifying things and reaching a wider audience, lets let the darwinists keep their crazy technobabble and flawed logic. In the meantime, I’ve got a question for any evolutionist friends who might drop by and read this:

Anybody want to buy a 2nd hand warp-phase modulator anti-gravity sensor array? One careful lady owner, it’s never been past Alpha Centuri. Only $1000 to you.

I’ve heard they just cannot resist sci-fi technobabble, lets just see how gullible they are!

HaEris

.: Well, I laughed, anyway.

.: Excepting Oscar’s comment, I’m following through on my offer to give the people what they want. As it turns out, Ben specifically requested for things that he liked. I happen to know Ben, and so by extension I know what he likes. I therefore present to you, dear reader, the following pictographic list of things Ben likes:

Ethanol
.: Ethanol, or ethyl alcohol, consists of two carbons, five carbon-bonded hydrogens, and a hydroxyl (-OH) group. In organic chemistry, “alcohol” refers to any compound with a hydroxyl group attached to a carbon in an alkyl group, but most people refer to ethanol specifically when they talk about alcohol. As it happens, Ben really likes ethanol.

Klein Steins
.: Ben likes his liquids confined “within” non-orientable surfaces like this Klein Stein. The Klein Stein is a slightly modified Klein bottle, which is an object that interests topologists because of its amazing properties (such as having only one side and no edges). Ben likes math, and he likes drinking, so I’m including this on the list for those two reasons alone.

Music
.: Ben likes music, and he can also play the piano. One of the songs he knows how to play is Chopin’s Military Polonaise. Astute readers will have noticed by now that the image above is not the sheet music to the A major polonaise Op. 40 No. 1 “Military,” but belongs rather to the A-flat major polonaise Op. 53 “Heroic.” This discrepancy can be explained by my utter failure to find free online sheet music to the former, and I wasn’t about to go to the university library to scan the correct one.

Breasts
.: Ben is your regular heterosexual male. He, like many men his age, has a personal fondness for these curious secondary sex organs of females. Those of you with breasts who know Ben will have undoubtedly experienced his leering at them, although at the time you were probably — and, I should add, inexplicably — charmed by this act. I don’t know how he does it either.

.: That’s about everything you need to know about Ben’s likes. If you are a female reading this and for some reason you have suddenly developed an interest in Ben, he can be reached by Internet.

.: I’m currently putting together a mix album of songs, and like all of my mixtapes I want to completely fill it to the 80 minute capacity. So far I have 49 minutes of music, so that means I need 31 minutes of recommendations from you!

.: Here are a few YouTube videos I’ve found of the songs I have so far:

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