Academia, Politics, Society

Akin Disproves Evolution

Sen. Claire McCaskill’s gift of Rep. Todd Akin (R-MO) is a gift that simply keeps on giving. Previously Akin alienated the GOP leadership and most of the known world with comments that, in cases of legitimate rape, women often do not get pregnant because “the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” He also claimed that doctor routinely performed abortions on women who are not pregnant. Now, at a Tea Party meeting in Jefferson City, Missouri, Akin has said that that there is no science behind evolution. Akin sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology.

Akin’s remarks not only leave doubt about his knowledge — or ability to understand – science but also what he considers “the thing” that he is supposed to do in Washington:

I don’t see it as even a matter of science because I don’t know that you can prove one or the other. That’s one of those things. We can talk about theology and all of those other things but I’m basically concerned about, you’ve got a choice between Claire McCaskill and myself. My job is to make the thing there. If we want to do theoretical stuff, we can do that, but I think I better stay on topic.

Of course, such comments could be used by some to disprove any evidence that we have evolved intellectually. Frankly, whenever I hear Akin speak recently I too begin to doubt evolution in the human species.

Notably, Akin sits on the committee with Rep. Paul Broun, the chairman of the House Science Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight. Broun made headlines this month with the following statement: at the 2012 Sportsman’s Banquet at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Georgia on September 27th, he said this:

God’s word is true. I’ve come to understand that. All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the big bang theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell. It’s lies to try to keep me and all the folks who were taught that from understanding that they need a savior. You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth. I don’t believe that the earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.

As many of you know, I have shown equal disregard for both of the main parties that hold a monopoly on power in the United States. Indeed, the low quality politicians that we see in both parties is the very danger of all monopolies — once protected from competition, the quality of a product declines. The political monopoly in this country is the ultimate example of that phenomenon. What we need is a Sherman Act for politics, starting with the eradication of the electoral college and the establishment of a new rule on general elections.

As for Republicans, I have many friends from that party who are intellectual and honest. These characters are destroying the credibility of their party which often appears anti-intellectual and anti-science.

262 thoughts on “Akin Disproves Evolution”

  1. WOW! The woman even has a lab: Bonnie’s Laboratory … and she says she is into microbes “for understanding how higher organisms and sophisticated organisms evolved. We think all those secrets are in the bacteria.”

    Eat your heart out Akinoids, she knows more than you think you know.

  2. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve seen Bonnie’s talk before. She’s not the problem. Your understanding of her is the problem. You should beg forgiveness for not understanding analogies and causal connectivity.

  3. The video above, concerning microbial languages, was given by Dr. Bonnie Bassler:

    Bonnie Lynn Bassler (born 1962) is an American molecular biologist. She has been a professor at Princeton University since 1994.

    Born in Chicago and raised in Danville, California, Bassler received a Bachelor of Science in biochemistry from the University of California, Davis and a Ph.D. in biochemistry from Johns Hopkins University. She made key insights into the mechanism by which bacteria communicate, known as quorum sensing. In 2002 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Bassler was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2006. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2007.

    Bassler has been nominated by the American Society for Microbiology to be one of the USA Science and Engineering Festival’s Nifty Fifty Speakers who will speak about her work and career to middle and high school students in October 2010. Bonnie Bassler is a member of the USA Science & Engineering Festival’s Nifty Fifty, a collection of the most influential scientists and engineers in the United States that are dedicated to reinvigorating the interest of young people in science and engineering.

    (Wikipedia). I am sure she begs our forgiveness for being so scientifically unaware of what is happening in evolutionary microbiology.

  5. Please don’t do it Gyges!

    Think of the children!

    Besides, if TonyC and I are to fight for Gene’s amusement on another thread, I should at least get to enjoy Gene pummeling Dredd like a speed bag here…

  7. Primitive social behavior does not have the bells and whistles of fully evolved human social behavior, however, evolutionists recognize social behavior in the oldest life forms:

    It is an extremely exciting time for researchers interested in the social behaviour of microbes. Microorganisms exhibit a stunning array of social behaviours …

    Our main findings include:

    We have shown that Quorum sensing is a cooperative social behaviour, which can be exploited by cheats and that a potential solution to this problem is cooperation between relatives (kin selection) – both in test tubes (Diggle et al. 2007 Nature) and mice (Rumbaugh et al. 2009 Current Biology). Our mice work also allowed us to examine the virulence consequences of social interactions.

    We have reviewed how social evolution theory applies to microbes (West et al. 2006 Nature Reviews Microbiology). We hope that the semantic debates which have wasted time in the evolutionary literature will not reoccur in the microbiology literature (West et al. 2007 J. Evol. Biol.). See also the primer on altruism.
    We have demonstrated, both theoretically (West & Buckling 2003 Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. B), and empirically (Griffin et al. 2004 Nature; Ross-Gillespie et al. 2007 Am. Nat; Kümmerli et al. 2009 Evolution; Kümmerli et al. 2009 JEB), how kin selection influences selection on the production of public goods, such as iron scavenging siderophore molecules.
    We have shown that bacteriocin production is a spiteful behaviour, whose selection is influenced by kin selection (Gardner et al. 2004 Proc. Roy. Soc.; Gardner & West 2006 Current Biology).
    We have shown that cooperation by microbial symbionts can be selected for if their hosts preferentially reward partners who cooperate or punish partners that do not cooperate (West et al. 2002 Proc. Roy. Soc. London Ser. B). We have also shown that such sanctions occur in the legume-rhizobia mutualism (Kiers et al. 2003 Nature). Soybeans penalise rhizobia that fail to fix Nitrogen inside their root nodules, by decreasing Oxygen supply, which results in huge fitness costs to the rhizobia (Kiers et al. 2003 Nature).

    The siderophore work is led by Ashleigh Griffin (Oxford, UK), and involves collaboration with Steve Diggle (Nottingham, UK), Angus Buckling (Oxford, UK) and Kendra Rumbaugh (Texas, USA). The theory involves collaboration with Andy Gardner. The rhizobia work involved collaboration with Toby Kiers (Amsterdam, Holland) and Ford Denison (Minnesota, USA).

    (Social Evolution In Microbes). Social behavior … its not just for human socialists anymore … it is for primitive socialists too.

    And one professor / research micro-biologist indicates that microbes make the rules for multi-cellular development (@15:20 in the following video):

  8. Part II
    A famous evolutionist is in hot water because he has advocated a notion of altruism evolution not based on kinship, the current consensus theory of altruism:

    In 1975 Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson published Sociobiology, perhaps the most powerful refinement of evolutionary theory since On the Origin of Species. Darwin’s theory of natural selection postulated a brutal world in which individuals vied for dominance. Wilson promoted a new perspective: Social behaviors were often genetically programmed into species to help them survive, he said, with altruism—
self-destructive behavior performed for the benefit of others—bred into their bones.

    According to this way of thinking, “altruistic” individuals could emerge victorious because the genes that they share with kin would be passed on. Since the whole clan is included in the genetic victory of a few, the phenomenon of beneficial altruism came to be known as “inclusive fitness.” By the 1990s it had become a core concept of biology, sociology, even pop psychology.

    So the scientific world quaked last August when Wilson renounced the theory that he had made famous.

    (Discover). Neither Wilson nor the scientific establishment rejects altruism as an evolutionary biological reality, but Wilson did reject his own theory that made him famous, i.e., altruism biologically is only done for kinship purposes, helping ones family as it were.

  9. Part I

    There are so many religions, with many likenesses and differences, that it is difficult to grasp an aspect of religion that can be taken back to its primitive origin, but altruism may be one:

    Altruism is the principle or practice of concern for the welfare of others. It is a traditional virtue in many cultures, and a core aspect of various religious traditions, though the concept of ‘others’ toward whom concern should be directed can vary among cultures and religions. Altruism is the opposite of selfishness.

    (Wikipedia, emphasis added). The origin of altruism has biological validity, because many microbes and multi-cellular organisms exhibit altruistic behaviors:

    In evolutionary biology, an organism is said to behave altruistically when its behaviour benefits other organisms, at a cost to itself. The costs and benefits are measured in terms of reproductive fitness, or expected number of offspring. So by behaving altruistically, an organism reduces the number of offspring it is likely to produce itself, but boosts the number that other organisms are likely to produce. This biological notion of altruism is not identical to the everyday concept. In everyday parlance, an action would only be called ‘altruistic’ if it was done with the conscious intention of helping another. But in the biological sense there is no such requirement. Indeed, some of the most interesting examples of biological altruism are found among creatures that are (presumably) not capable of conscious thought at all, e.g. insects. For the biologist, it is the consequences of an action for reproductive fitness that determine whether the action counts as altruistic, not the intentions, if any, with which the action is performed.

    (Stanford). The primitive form of anything is not replete with the bells and whistles of the fully evolved form, thus one should not expect primitive forms of altruism to be equal to fully evolved forms of human religious altruism.

    It is also possible that human social evolution engendered altruism separately and distinctly from the primitive biological forms.

  10. Repeating what you don’t properly understand (to be clear, that would be the net impact of symbiosis on natural selection) only further illustrates how poorly you understand evolution in general including natural selection and speciation. Yours is an extremist view of the evolutionary process that is fringe all the way. It’s as bad as the hardcore genetic determinism camp. Evolution is a confluence of forces, but no one force is dominant: not genes, not environment, not symbiosis. All three work together as inputs for the evolutionary process of natural selection. This is the mainstream view, but it’s the mainstream view because it is correct, not correct because it is the mainstream view. Anyone who claims evolution is dominated by one input – be it nature (genes), nurture (environment) or biological symbiosis – is someone missing the complete picture off the actual dynamic. They are taking comfort in a state of perpetual oversimplification (a logical fallacy, btw).

    And microbes still don’t practice religion or science even if they do display highly simplified (and often tenuously) analogous behaviors. Get back to me when a microbe formulates a theological doctrine or a scientific theory.

    Carry on.

  12. There is abiotic evolution, microbial evolution, biological evolution, and human social evolution.

    Those don’t work in the same way at all.

    So, the unique processes in each of those evolutionary realms throws a lot of Akinoid people off track.

    Especially when they think “one size fits all”, i.e. that one and only one grandiose process is prevalent in each of those four types of evolution.

    For example, those Akinoid kinds of mistakes gave us Social Darwinism and Eugenics
    —————————————————————
    World English Dictionary:

    symbiosis — n

    1. a close and usually obligatory association of two organisms of different species that live together, often to their mutual benefit [the primitive]

    2. a similar relationship between interdependent persons or groups [the fully evolved]

    [C19: via New Latin from Greek: a living together; see symbiont]

    (Dictionary). The primitive:

    Margulis spent much of the rest of the 1960s honing her argument that symbiosis (see figure, below) was an unrecognized but major force in the evolution of cells. In 1970 she published her argument in The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells.

    (History of Evolutionary Thought). Dr. Margulis’ theory was rejected for decades because it departed from allie samie evolution, distinguishing microbial evolution from biological evolution.

    Human “interdependent persons or groups” in symbiotic relationships does not preclude primitive existence of this social phenomenon.

  13. And Dredd says . . .

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-U7_iNIgGjc

    “Religion has primitive beginnings, as does propaganda, as does science, as does anything that can evolve.”

    Yes, they do have primitive beginnings and none of them are microbial. Analogous behaviors are comparisons, not direct or indirect causal connections or equivalences. Correlation is not causation.

    But please do continue to dance every time I push the bacteriological button.

    I think it’s hysterical.

  14. Gene H. 1, October 18, 2012 at 1:26 pm

    pssst!

    That was a rhetorical question.
    ==================================
    So is this.

    Hey propaganda boy, check out propaganda too!

    Get your fella Akinoids on that and this right away (NeoCon Planet: Magic Teflon Vagina Juice) cause you are a big blog Akinoid empire now.

    Evolution is impossible unless there is a process from primitive to fully evolved.

    Religion has primitive beginnings, as does propaganda, as does science, as does anything that can evolve.

    Even fifth graders know that, so to recoil at the notion of very primitive social activity is not very evolved.

  16. However, it is not a misrepresentation that you have in the past claimed that microbes do practice both science and religion. Repeatedly. I just don’t care enough about your ridiculous arguments to go back and look them up even when you want to back track now. Which brings up an interesting question, Dreddful. Why the backtracking and false accusations? Did someone finally explain to you how utterly full of crap you were when you said that?

  18. Gene H. 1, October 18, 2012 at 1:08 pm

    “That is why I caution about catching the Akinoid infection by muddled conflation of things that are not the same.”

    Said the guy who thinks microbes practice religion and science.

    Yeah, I know the difference, thanks. I’m kinda surprised you do though. I was making fun of you and your conscious microbes again.
    ======================================
    That is what all Akinoids say.

    “Said the guy who thinks microbes practice religion and science.”

    That is a deceptive misrepresentation by someone who does not quite understand the difference between primitive beginnings compared to ultimate evolved states.

    Akinoids are not quite as smart as fifth graders, so they use deception and bullying which does not work well, but it does work on fellow Akinoids.

  20. “That is why I caution about catching the Akinoid infection by muddled conflation of things that are not the same.”

    Said the guy who thinks microbes practice religion and science.

    Yeah, I know the difference, thanks. I’m kinda surprised you do though. I was making fun of you and your conscious microbes again.

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