Irony in the battle of the Bible blog badges
Over the weekend, a proliferation of “Bible blog” badges popped up, mostly on blogs run by someone named Jim. I don’t think I’ve seen such rapid evolution since my last run-in with antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
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In the midst of all this grand entertainment, has anyone (else) noticed that the manuscript pictured on all these badges isn’t a biblical manuscript? No, my friends, all these “Bible blog” badges superimpose their message over a picture of the Temple Scroll, to which nobody today (as far as I know) ascribes religious authority. The operators of the “Believer’s” blogs and “Secular” blogs are equally non-religious with respect to the document shown in the badge. It’s like rai-ee-ain on your wedding day!
18 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (general), Dead Sea Scrolls, blogging
Before anybody leaves the de rigeur criticism: yes, yes, I know there’s nothing particularly ironic about rain on your wedding day. Isn’t it ironic that Alanis’s examples of irony aren’t ironic? Don’t you think?
you wouldn’t consider the temple scroll a type of rewritten pentateuch?
Sure, Bob, but the key word is rewritten. It’s not “Bible” (canon) for anybody these days. (I almost mentioned the Essenes but I don’t want a lot of Golb-spam.)
yes- it is ironic. and its amazing that you can read the text!!!!! to me it just looks like the sort of scroll found at qumran that contained texts like the temple scroll and the biblical texts.
i think you’re just being pedantic….
Better Irony than Copperee, methinks…
It is the temple scroll. Tom Robinson and I just picked it because it looked about right and the background on the image had already been removed when we found it on google.
Why should secular biblical scholars be essentialist about what counts as “Bible”? Really, there was no “Bible” bce, although there were sacred writing and for some folks, Temple Scroll may well have counted.
It was nice to have J. W. (how about those initials!) agree with that and to regard the T. S. meaning as sealed!
Alanis played God in the film Dogma. Isn’t it ironic, doncha think? :)
Me, pedantic, Jim? Inconceivable.
jimlin beat me to the canon comment. there was little/no consensus on ‘canon’ of the ‘bible’ at the time of the temple scroll. and, since we ‘biblical’ scholars usually have sub-disciplines, be they the dss, or the pseudepigrapha, or the kuntillet ‘ajrud or other nw semitic inscriptions, methinks the temple scroll is an appropriate logo background for biblical scholars.
what i don’t get is why that one badge has the word ‘hair’ on it?
This is the part of the blog where non Biblical specialists just step back a little and let other people do the discussing.
loved that film. affleck’s best (although- i shudder when confessing it- i really liked pearl harbor too…)
ok i’ll go hide now.
Jesus was a hippy.
Poor analogy. (You’ve already forgotten your own advice of sticking with your field of expertise.)
The appearance of this badge on certain blogs, represents a new piece of information among that array of pixels. It’s statistically impossible for such an arrangement to appear randomly when all the rest of the information on the blog appears deliberately from an intelligent source (though I’m willing to admit that the case of “someone named Jim” may possibly be an exception to the rule).
However, antibiotic-resistant bacteria already bear the same amount of genetic information as the non-resistant type. What has happened in the classic example Prof. Heard referenced, is that the non-resistant population has died off, & all that remains are the resistant ones, which, through a mutation, have lost the ability to thrive in a non-antibiotic environment. The antibiotics cannot disable the mutant bacteria the way they can the normal bacteria; hence this group of bacteria is resistant to such an attack.
The species has indeed evolved, but the population has lost genetic information, & is headed one way on a genetically dead-end street. It has evolved in the wrong (i.e., non-Darwinian) direction. This may come as a shock to theologians who “believe” in “evolutionary events” that can “go in different directions”.
It’s consistent with creationism (the belief in an intelligent source for the original information), but it tends to dissuade truly objective people from “belief” in the form of evolutionism taught in secular Biology classrooms, & promoted fallaciously by theologians who don’t always understand what they’re talking about when they depart from their field of expertise.
(Further clarification on this issue courtesy of, as the Higgaion blogmaster would say, a “real expert – one with an actual degree in biology who has an actual job doing biology”: Dr. Georgia Purdom.)
I’ll see your website and raise you a pair of peer-reviewed articles:
Salmond, George P.C. and Martin Welch. 2008. Antibiotic resistance: adaptive evolution. Lancet, December 2008.
Hegreness, Matthew, Noam Shoresh, Doris Damian, Daniel Hartl, and Roy Kishony. 2008. Accelerated evolution of resistance in multidrug environments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105 no. 37, pp. 13977-13981.
Seriously, G.M., where’d you leave your sense of humor?
Bluff all you want, but you have a losing hand.
The PNAS article you cited describes ordinary adaptation resulting from mutations inhibiting a particular trait. I’ve already told you that creationists & evolutionists agree on things that can be observed & studied in a lab. A simple text search within the article for “adapt” produces 62 matches, while “evol” less than half that amount (29).
It’s just like animals with genes for long or short fur migrating to a cold climate, & only their long-haired offspring thriving (or vice versa in a hot climate). No evidence for new genetic information here.
Another key root in this article is “inhib” (25 matches). Bacteria are harmed when their protein synthesis is inhibited. If they’re a bunch of crippled mutants, they can’t be inhibited as effectively. It’s like trying to put handcuffs on an armless criminal! Their population has evolved a new trait/characteristic, but many small changes like this over millions of years will continue to produce something worse (not something better) until it cannot survive at all.
Again, it falsifies the theory/faith of simple-to-complex Evolution espoused by most blinded-by-bias scientists (& theologians like you who apparently don’t realize when they’ve been dealt a losing hand of cards).
Since this free online article doesn’t substantiate your point (equivocating bacterial evolution with the rise of new information on blogs), I’m not inclined to pay $31.50 to view the other article you cited from Lancet, especially since its subtitle clearly states “adaptive evolution”. Big F’n deal.
Feel free to let me know when new genetic information “pops up” in labs, the way these badges popped up over the weekend. In fact you might want to let all major news reporters know about it, since right now there are no laboratory examples to support belief in Darwinian evolution.
As for my sense of humor, I heard a rumor that the scientists who study these mutant bacteria refer to them as “Jim”. But don’t take my word for it, Google returns over 3-million hits for the combined words “scientists”, “mutant”, & “jim”.
Here’s another way of looking at your problem that may help you.
Let’s take any form of life such as a bacterium or a Bible-badged blogger, & represent its genetic information with a big number like 1,000,000 (actually a very small number compared to the DNA storage system, which would be more like 10 to the 21st power, but it will be adequate for this analogy).
Adaptive evolution takes the number & subtracts info from it by inhibiting or reducing traits. These are the only mutations that have ever been documented scientifically, despite millions of evolution-believing biologists spending millions of grant-dollars over millions of hours of research.
So after however-many generations you wish to theorize, you have 1,000,000 minus 1 minus 3 minus 0 minus 1 minus 4 minus 0 minus 2, etc. – a random mutation with each subsequent generation that either preserves or loses info.
Anyone capable of elementary arithmetic can easily see that the original 1,000,000 specimen will eventually evolve into something substantially less in terms of genetic information. After millions of years, it will be biologically the same, worse, or extinct (all 3 options are things scientists actually observe), yet your beloved theory demands that it miraculously add new information, & change from something simple to something relatively complex over that extremely long period of imaginary time.
(Further clarification on this concept can be found in this great book: “[G]et an … introduction to subtraction every time a monkey falls off the bed.”)
It’s not that I don’t understand your argument, G.M. It’s just that your claims are factually incorrect. Addition of new information to a genome is neither miraculous nor uncommon.
Got any other monkeys you want to bounce around? (Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. The comments thread will just get longer …)
In a comment about your 5th podcast, Brad Haggard suggested that Michael Heiser was trying “to squeeze too much theology … out of a poetic text”; however, you countered that Psalm 89:6 was “not obviously metaphorical”, while Psalm 23:1 was.
On this Bible-badge-evolution subject, when I discuss “new genetic information”, you’ve swapped roles with Brad by “squeezing” a new definition-card into the deck we’re playing with.
You referenced an article by a blogger, 24YocWhac (a 24-year-old Canadian who hates Ann Coulter, & goes by the initials CWGK; I took the liberty of changing his initials the same way you took the liberty of changing the “obvious” meaning of my statement about new genetic information). 24YocWhac plays dumb by acting like he doesn’t know what “new genetic information” means in the context of an argument about the evolution of so-called simple organisms such as bacteria to far-more complex ones such as humans.
You’re both right; when you define “new” as anything different, & “genetic information” as anything in the genome, new genetic information is common. Every time a mother gives birth, the baby has new genetic information: unique DNA that has never before appeared in the biological record, & will never reappear. (It’s impossible to prove such a statement about the past & future, but it’s something no evolutionist or creationist would have a reason to argue against.)
However, we were not talking about the observable biological process of reproduction; we were talking about the alleged evolution of something known to something substantially different. Instead of no badge on a blog, a badge appeared on a blog. You equated this with a form of adaptive evolution where something in existence (non-antibiotic-resistant bacteria) adapts to a new environment due to a defect (the loss of an existing protein-binding site).
24YocWhac spoke of “[g]ene duplication as a major player driving evolution…”, but none of his examples of new genetic information via gene duplication support a simple-to-complex scenario (e.g., metabolize a new food, vary in size), even if you toss in a billion years of imaginary time & a side-order of fries.
Gene duplications & mutations are analogous to driving evolution down a one-way, dead-end street. Evolution can make U-turns, but they’re analogous to driving along an S-shaped curve. (Notice that an S contains 2 horizontally opposite U’s.) So even though 24YocWhac can twist the context to make it sound like new genetic information appears all the time, the organism (be it a human or a bdelloid rotifer) remains in the same family/kind of organism, on the same one-way genetic street, heading in essentially the same direction over time.
Dr. Purdom, who I referenced in an earlier comment, wrote an article debunking Duplication’s benefits on 4-30-2008, “Evolution Shooting Itself in the Foot”. Dr. Kevin Anderson of the Creation Research Society published one in their January / February 2002 newsletter, “Yeast Fails To Rise to Evolutionists’ Expectations”.
Is a lactose-intolerant person relegated to some other species or sub-species? How about midgets or pro basketball players? How about a 6-fingered, red-haired, white, lactose-intolerant, adjectives-ad-nauseam midget? In a population of billions, we all have various physical & functional abnormalities, but none of these small changes over millions of years will ever add up to something non-human unless you choose to believe they can.
Thou hast been bounced!