Oh noes! Their on 2 uz!

3 Comments

1. Rob on 05.04.2007 at 13:35 (Reply)
   

   It’s all well and good mocking these attempts to use pseudoscience to disprove scientific theories, but if you’re claiming to present the scientific viewpoint wouldn’t it be more useful to instead (or additionally) provide a counter-argument?

   Looking around the web at other instances of this story, the majority of the responses are incredulous mockery. But very few bother to present a viable explanation of why it isn’t the case. How is this helping to support the case of science? These replies are no better than Creationists pointing at Evolitionists and laughing among themselves that we believe we’re related to monkeys.

   One more useful reply I did find was here:

   http://scienceblogs.com/miketh…..butter.php

   With the relevant comment being this (since it’s about halfway down a list of blustering amusement):

   -Quote-

   This is completely irrelevant to evolution because evolution only seeks to explain the diversity of life. The creation of life, according to evolution, absolutely may have been up to who set up a D.N.A. template. But the experimentally believable theory (remember, a theory is a collection of facts connected by one overall idea) is abiogenesis.

   No one here answered the abiogenesis question yet, which is a valid question. The Miller-Urey experiment asked this question, and came up with the idea, that if we took early-Earth conditions, then something that resembles life should form. The experiment resulted in a 10% yield of organic compounds, including 13 of the 22 amino acids which are absolutely crucial for the proteins which do life’s work, enzymes which take stable molecules and get energy from them, and D.N.A. which is the very basis for life’s replication. An interesting side note, studies of the oldest parts of our D.N.A. are mostly composed of only the amino acids available in primordial conditions.

   So what are the chances of this happening? Pretty great considering this was happening all over Earth, constantly, for a few million years at the least. What these experiments, and evolution, don’t make the assumption of, is that all this only happened once. Most nucleotides formed would have been destroyed, but we do know at least a few of them survived to make life. It is interesting to note that in further experiments, it was assumed that actual ocean conditions would have destroyed the nucleotide chains, but when the experiment was performed on clay, nucleotides of about 50 chains of amino acids have been formed.

   Now why doesn’t life grow in your peanut butter? Because its chemically stable. If it is satisfied in its current state, then there won’t be any spontaneous reactions. If it was chemically unstable, then you would see a change no matter what, whether it produced life or not, but because our peanut butter is always the same, it is unsuitable for making life. What would prove god though, is if there was life in the peanut butter when I opened it…

   Now the reason life can live on peanut butter, but not form from it, is because we already have enzymes. Molecules take a certain amount of energy in them before they will react, which is what cooking does. Enzymes create a specific area where a molecule will be reactive at normal temperature by changing things like pH, polarity, among others. This allows your body to store molecules which won’t react until needed.

   Posted by: David | March 31, 2007 09:02 AM

   -/Quote-

   If people would post responses more like this when Creationists put forward ridiculous arguments then we might sound a bit more credible.

   It might even force the Creationists to evolve their arguments in order to provide a viable position.

   Just a thought.

   Rob

2. Will Goring on 05.04.2007 at 17:31 (Reply)
   

   OK, so I have to admit, I didn’t post this as a serious debating point; sometimes I post things because I think they’re funny, and this was one of those cases. I found it on my lunch break and posted pretty much right away (after checking that it had been floating around since before April 1st,) as a humour entry.

   The point being that anyone with a GCSE-level science education and critical ear can see right through the distortions in the “science” on display here. There are three that leapt to my mind immediately (two of which the commenter you quote mentions):

   • The timescale and the likelihood: Missler authoritatively talks about over a billion experiments a year over a hundred years, as though that’s conclusive. He used the word billion to impress the audience with just how many experiments have been done, and that’s almost painfully misleading when you stop to think about it. Each of those “experiments” (yes, scare quotes - see my third point) is so tiny in scope - one food package over the shelf-life of the product - that it should be obvious that even 200 billion (being generous and giving him two billion a year) of them combined don’t come close to what was theoretically required for abiogenesis to occur.

     Let’s do some beer-mat maths to find out. Let’s assume that the average food package has a volume of 500ml, and a shelf-life of 5 years. That gives the great food-industry distributed experiment a rough coverage of .5 * 200,000,000,000 * 5 = 500,000,000,000 litre-years. Doesn’t sound so impressive when you put it like that, does it? For the sake of argument let’s assume that abiogenesis must have happened in the ocean (recent studies have questioned this,) and calculate how many litre-years it actually took for abiogenesis to occur. A quick Google tells me that the current volume of Earth’s oceans is about 1.3*10^21 litres, but that may have fluctuated, so let’s assume 10% of that: 1.3*10^20 (again, being generous.) We obviously don’t know the exact date at which the earliest life appeared on Earth, all we know is that it was sometime within about 500,000,000 years of the planet forming since there are fossilized traces of bacteria from about that time, so let’s assume 200,000,000, for the sake of argument. Multiplying that together gives us 2.6*10^29 litre-years. Wow. That’s a pretty big number. In fact it’s so big, I’m going to type it out in full for emphasis: 260,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s 5.2*10^17 times more than the 500,000,000,000 that Missler wants us to be impressed by. Makes his disclaimer of “not-often, but on some occasion” seem like a bit of an understatement, doesn’t it?

   • The chemical stability of peanut butter: I don’t really have a lot more to say about this. Peanut butter is chemically stable, it’s nothing like the primordial soup that is hypothesised for abiogenesis, and it certainly is not subjected to the same sort of high-energy reactions (like lightning strikes.)

   • The form of new life: I just love the way he peers in there as he opens the jar, like some “new life” is going to be sitting there waving at him. The fact is that even if abiogenesis did occur inside his jar of peanut butter, and even if that life was successful and viable and survived until he opened the jar, the overwhelming probability is that he couldn’t see it, and wouldn’t recognise it if he did. It’s not going to be some complex, mobile organism like an ant, and it’s not going to be a slightly-less complex life-form like a mould: it’s going to be a few self-replicating molecules, that we probably wouldn’t even recognise as life from a cursory glance through a microscope, sitting unassumingly in the middle of the jar (or possibly clinging to the inside of the glass where there’s plentiful light-energy available, but certainly not handily on the top - remember that Oxygen is pretty unpleasant stuff that life on Earth had to evolve to cope with.)

     Basically, Missler’s claim that there are over a billion experiments carried out a year is a lie: the vast majority of people don’t, in fact can’t, examine their food-stuffs looking for new life (if you want evidence, check the stats on food poisoning cases - and they’re caused by well-known, screened life-forms), and even those that do (food health officials, etc) might well not recognize a new form of life if they saw it.

   That’s a pretty accurate dump of the sort of thing that went through my mind, the first time I watched that video. Why didn’t I write that down? Well, for one, I assumed the same sort of thing would be going through any sensible person’s head - apparently I was wrong. Also, I was on my lunch break and didn’t have the time or energy to write an essay rebutting the same old silly arguments. Everyone who reads a lot on the subject will be familiar with the term Creationist Whack-a-mole. The basic problem being that there is no arguing with these people. No matter how many times, or how convincingly, their arguments are shot down, they always come back round and need to be argued to a standstill all over again. ,This is such a well known phenomena, that talkorigins maintains a quick reference list of common creationist claims, and their counter-arguments. It’s always a good place to stop by if you hear a creationist “proving” that Evolution is false, and can’t immediately dismiss their argument.

   The reasons for this aren’t complex - Creationists aren’t interested in the truth. They’re interested in being comforted that their religious beliefs are valid, or in manipulating those same religious beliefs in others. If you read Mike The Mad Biologist regularly you’ll have come across his recent coverage of the issue, to which I have nothing but my wholehearted agreement to add.

3. Rob on 05.04.2007 at 19:34 (Reply)
   

   Thanks. That was the sort of thing I was asking for. And apologies for taking more than your lunch hour on covering that.

   The links are also useful. My point was that while these things seem obviously ridiculous to those of us interested in science, anyone fence-sitting or even open-minded non-scientists might be interested in counter-arguments. In a brief scan of instances of this (and previous) stories throughout the web, the vast majority of replies were useless if not blankly provocative - eg “There are so many reasons why this is rubbish that I can’t even begin to start…” It would help if they just tried, presenting at least one reason.

   Mind you, I take your point that the people responsible for this kind of propaganda aren’t really interested in debating facts and figures. And I hadn’t previously seen the more reasoned rebuttals that you linked above.

   It just seems that we’re not being true to ourselves if the most overt response to such attacks is ridicule. It doesn’t really help fence-sitters make up their own mind. And if people aren’t given the facts they need to make up their own mind then they might just follow the herd blindly. And that would be a tragedy - no matter which herd they chose to follow.

   Rob

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