I'm proud to be an American again

 

Can facts be racist?

Here's a fact:

[D]ifferences in home and neighborhood quality do not fully explain the devaluation of homes in black neighborhoods. Homes of similar quality in neighborhoods with similar amenities are worth 23 percent less ($48,000 per home on average, amounting to $156 billion in cumulative losses) in majority black neighborhoods, compared to those with very few or no black residents

(And here is some analysis of that fact.)

Here is another fact:

The government-sponsored Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew a line around Bedford-Stuyvesant on a map, colored the area red and gave it a “D,” the worst grade possible, denoting a hazardous place to underwrite mortgages.

Lines like these, drawn in cities across the country to separate “hazardous” and “declining” from “desirable” and “best,” codified patterns of racial segregation and disparities in access to credit. Now economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, analyzing data from recently digitized copies of those maps, show that the consequences lasted for decades.

As recently as 2010, they find, differences in the level of racial segregation, homeownership rates, home values and credit scores were still apparent where these boundaries were drawn.

And here is a recent data point:

Abena and Alex Horton wanted to take advantage of low home-refinance rates brought on by the coronavirus crisis. So in June, they took the first step in that process, welcoming a home appraiser into their four-bedroom, four-bath ranch-style house in Jacksonville, Fla.

The Hortons live just minutes from the Ortega River, in a predominantly white neighborhood of 1950s homes that tend to sell for $350,000 to $550,000. They had expected their home to appraise for around $450,000, but the appraiser felt differently, assigning a value of $330,000. Ms. Horton, who is Black, immediately suspected discrimination.

The couple’s bank agreed that the value was off and ordered a second appraisal. But before the new appraiser could arrive, Ms. Horton, a lawyer, began an experiment: She took all family photos off the mantle. Instead, she hung up a series of oil paintings of Mr. Horton, who is white, and his grandparents that had been in storage. Books by Zora Neale Hurston and Toni Morrison were taken off the shelves, and holiday photo cards sent by friends were edited so that only those showing white families were left on display. On the day of the appraisal, Ms. Horton took the couple’s 6-year-old son on a shopping trip to Target, and left Mr. Horton alone at home to answer the door.

The new appraiser gave their home a value of $465,000 — a more than 40 percent increase from the first appraisal.

Nothing but facts and data here, no different from the fact (and it is a fact) that blacks are by and large better basketball players than whites, and that this is not because blacks are taller (because they aren't).  To this point I have drawn no conclusions and made no value judgements.  All I've done is cite facts from credible sources.

Now, I am going to draw a conclusion, and then I'm going to make a value judgement, but I want to make it very clear that I am not going to take a position on the titular question of this post (because I have learned the hard way that that is fraught with all manner of rhetorical peril).  The conclusion I draw is this:

The facts I've presented above are an indication of the existence of a very serious problem in our society, and this problem has something to do with race.

Note well that I have intentionally said nothing about the exact nature of this problem except that it is serious and it has something to do with race.  In particular, I have not said that it has anything to do with real estate prices nor with playing basketball.

Now, I can imagine at least three different kinds of reactions to this:

1.  "Yes, there is a problem.  It is mainly a result of some external influence over which blacks have little to no control, like systemic institutionalized racism, or well-meaning but ultimately misguided government intervention, or something like that."

2.  "Yes, there is a problem.  It is mainly a result of some deficiency in the black community and so only the black community can do anything about it."

3.  "I disagree that these facts are an indication of a problem.  This is just the free market operating as expected (or something like that).  Everything is as it should be."

There is a fourth possibility.  Someone could reject the premise that these "facts" are in fact facts and say that they are lies, the product of a disinformation campaign, or something like that.  Fake news.  For the purposes of this discussion we can discount this.  The fact (and on this view it is manifestly a fact) that lies like this can so effectively masquerade as facts is a problem in and of itself, and that brings up back to 1-3.

Now I am going to make my value judgement: if you subscribe to reaction #3 then there is something deeply wrong with you.  If you can look at the current state of affairs and say that there is no problem at all, that this is the best humanity is capable of, that there is nothing left for our society to aspire to, then you are suffering from some kind of serious mental deficiency.  You either lack empathy or imagination or the ability to properly process information or something.  If that offends you, then you should probably stop reading my blog and seek counseling.

If you are still with me, then we agree that there is a problem, but potentially disagree on its nature and source.  That's fine, reasonable people can disagree about these things.  But now here are a few more facts:

1.  There was at one time legal institutional discrimination against black people in the United States, first through chattel slavery, and then through Jim Crow laws.

2.  Neither slavery nor Jim Crow were ended by societal consensus.  Slavery was ended by a civil war, and Jim Crow was ended by a series of Supreme Court decisions in the 1950s and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s, i.e. well within living memory.  The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was highly contentious, with the Southern states overwhelmingly opposed to it.

3.  Before the Civil War, negro slavery (as it was then invariably referred to) was openly defended by many Southerners as a positive good:

Slavery as a positive good was the prevailing view of White Southern U.S. politicians and intellectuals just before the American Civil War, as opposed to a "necessary evil." They defended the legal enslavement of people for their labor as a benevolent, paternalistic institution with social and economic benefits, an important bulwark of civilization, and a divine institution similar or superior to the free labor in the North.  Proponents of enslavement as "a good — a great good" often attacked the system of industrial capitalism, contending that the free laborer in the North, called by them a "wage slave", was as much enslaved by capitalist owners as were the African people enslaved by Whites in the South.

The right of white people to own negro slaves was explicitly enshrined in the Constitution of the Confederate States of America, which specifically provided that, "No ... law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed."

So for hundreds of years there were substantial numbers of people in the U.S. willing to defend, at times quite literally with their lives, not just racial discrimination against blacks, but race-based chattel slavery, and willing to do so openly and on the merits.  The defenders of slavery genuinely believed in their heart of hearts that they were the good guys.

Very few people openly advocate racial discrimination on the merits today, but there are some who do.  That link is to a video, one which I find rather shocking, but it is worth watching.  I am, of course, repulsed by the ideology espoused by the subjects of the film, but I really do think that these people believe in their heart of hearts that they are the good guys.  Furthermore, I respect the fact that they are willing to stand up openly for what they believe.  They wear the badge of "racist" with pride (4:00).  They leave no doubt about where they stand: "We are a white nation, founded for and by the white man." (2:40).  And, it is well worth noting, that that, too, is a fact.

Game over for the USA

I would like to think that Ruth Bader Ginsberg's untimely passing is not the catastrophe that it appears to be.  I would like to think that Mitch McConnell is a man of principle, and having once said that the Senate should not confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year he will not brazenly expose himself as a hypocrite and confirm a Supreme Court justice in an election year.

I would like to think these things, but I can't.  My ability to suspend disbelief only goes so far.  Of course McConnell is not a man of principle.  Of course he will ram Trump's third Supreme Court nomination through the Senate in the next few weeks.  That much is absolutely certain.

What is only a little less certain is what happens after that.  If you eliminate the totally unrealistic scenario that Biden wins the election in an overwhelming landslide and Trump concedes, what are we left with?  Either Trump wins outright, or he loses on the margins, and we have a replay of Bush v. Gore, except that this time it will be adjudicated by a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, and three of nine justices appointed by the very president whose fate they are deciding.  If you think they will rule against Trump, well, I wish I shared your ability to suspend disbelief.

So the legitimacy of the government of the United States of America after January 2021 is now very much in doubt (if it isn't already).  The legitimacy of the Supreme Court is already very much in doubt, and has been ever since Mitch McConnell exercised his extra-Constitutional veto power over Barack Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland.  We are facing the very real prospect of a second Trump term even if Biden wins, to say nothing of losing 70 years of social progress.  Roe v. Wade is already as good as dead, as is the separation of church and state, and we are now we are looking at the very real prospect of also losing Obergefell v. Hodges, possibly even Griswold v. Connecticut.  LGBT rights, worker's rights, minority rights, immigrant rights, gone, squished under the new Christian theocracy thinly disguised as "religious freedom."

Fundamentalist Christians voted for Trump because he promised them power.  Some have speculated that they might be having buyers remorse but I'm pretty sure today the opposite is true.  Trump has delivered what he promised.  In spades.  His legacy will last generations.  It may never be possible to undo the damage.  The United States of America may soon be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump Organization.

This is what the apocalypse looks like

 This is a photo of our house taken at noon today:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is not the raw image.  I took this with an iPhone, whose auto-exposure made the image look much brighter than it actually is.  I've adjusted the brightness and color balance to match the actual appearance as much as I can.  Even so, this image doesn't do justice to the reality.  For one thing, the sky is much too blue.  The actual color of the sky is a reddish brown, the same overall hue as the rest of the image.  But the main thing to notice is that the lights in front of our house are on.  Those lights are on sensors that are supposed to make them only come on at night.  But here they are on at high noon in summer.  It's dark.  It feels like twilight.  We have to have lights on inside the house.  It is deeply creepy.

The cause of this is, of course, smoke from fires that are burning all around us, probably combined with some marine-layer overcast, though it is impossible to tell because the sky has absolutely no texture at all.  In 32 years of living in California full time, I have never seen anything like this.  No one has.  There has never been anything like this in recorded history.

Three days ago we set a record high at our house of 103 degrees.  Today it was 62 degrees when I woke up, and now at noon it has warmed up to a balmy 64.

I think we broke the planet.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has a story about this with better photos.

UPDATE2: It is now 2:30 in the afternoon and it just straight-up looks like night outside.  The sky is still glowing a faint dull red, about what you would expect an hour or so after sunset, but anywhere else you look it is full-on dark.  It is genuinely scary.

They knew. They still know.

Never forget what conservatives were saying about Donald Trump before he cowed them into submission.

(Sorry about the tiny size of the embedded video.  That's the default that Blogger gave me and I can't figure out how to adjust the size.  If it bothers you, click on the link above to see the original.)

Republicans officially endorse a Trump dictatorship

The Republican party has formally decided not to adopt a platform this year, instead passing a resolution that says essentially, "we will support whatever the Dear Leader says".  Since the resolution calls out the media for its biased reporting, I will quote the resolution here in its entirety, with the salient portions highlighted:

WHEREAS, The Republican National Committee (RNC) has significantly scaled back the size and scope of the 2020 Republican National Convention in Charlotte due to strict restrictions on gatherings and meetings, and out of concern for the safety of convention attendees and our hosts;

WHEREAS, The RNC has unanimously voted to forego the Convention Committee on Platform, in appreciation of the fact that it did not want a small contingent of delegates formulating a new platform without the breadth of perspectives within the ever-growing Republican movement;

WHEREAS, All platforms are snapshots of the historical contexts in which they are born, and parties abide by their policy priorities, rather than their political rhetoric;

WHEREAS, The RNC, had the Platform Committee been able to convene in 2020, would have undoubtedly unanimously agreed to reassert the Party’s strong support for President Donald Trump and his Administration;

WHEREAS, The media has outrageously misrepresented the implications of the RNC not
adopting a new platform in 2020 and continues to engage in misleading advocacy for the failed policies of the Obama-Biden Administration, rather than providing the public with unbiased reporting of facts; and

WHEREAS, The RNC enthusiastically supports President Trump and continues to reject the policy positions of the Obama-Biden Administration, as well as those espoused by the
Democratic National Committee today; therefore, be it

RESOLVED, That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention will adjourn without adopting a new platform until the 2024 Republican National Convention;

RESOLVED, That the 2020 Republican National Convention calls on the media to engage in accurate and unbiased reporting, especially as it relates to the strong support of the RNC for President Trump and his Administration; and

RESOLVED, That any motion to amend the 2016 Platform or to adopt a new platform, including any motion to suspend the procedures that will allow doing so, will be ruled out of order.

Here we go again

 Here is a snapshot of the current map of temporary flight restrictions (TFRs) issued by the FAA across the western U.S.:

Almost every one of those red shapes is a major fire burning.  Compare that to a similar snapshot taken two years ago at about this same time of year.

The regularity of these extreme heat and fire events is starting to get really scary.

Irit Gat, Ph.D. 25 November 1966 - 11 August 2020

 

With a heavy heart I bear witness to the untimely passing of Dr. Irit Gat last Tuesday at the age of 53.  Irit was the Dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Antelope Valley College in Lancaster, California.  She was also my younger sister.  She died peacefully of natural causes.

I am going to miss her.  A lot.  I'm going to miss her smile.  I'm going to miss the way she said "Hey bro" when we talked on the phone.  I'm going to miss the joy she brought to everyone who knew her, especially my parents.

It wasn't always easy being my little sister.  I could be a real dick at times.  But mainly as she was growing up she found it difficult to forge her own identity.  Irit sometimes said she felt like she was growing up in my shadow.  I was two years ahead of her in school and an academic overachiever, which is a nice was of saying I was a geek without a lot of friends.  But the teachers all loved me, and so the first thing she usually heard from them was, "Oh, you're Erann's sister!"  That was hard on her because on the one hand it was true, and she loved me, and so she embraced it.  But on the other hand she was too nice to say, "No, I'm not, I'm me.  I'm my own person with my own identity, my own dreams, my own foibles, my own strengths."  And yet, she was all those things too.

Irit's main strength was an extraordinary ability to get along with everyone.  It's not something I appreciated when I was growing up.  It is only much later in life that I came to realize how important the ability to forge interpersonal relationships is.  She was a natural from the beginning.  She was on the homecoming court.  She was the prom queen, and I don't mean that metaphorically.  My little sister was literally the prom queen in her senior year.  Her peers liked her that much.  I was lucky if I could get through the day without someone pinning a "kick me" sign on my back.

She then went on to forge an extraordinary professional career.  She earned a Ph.D., did a post-doc at NASA, and was then appointed professor of psychology at Antelope Valley College.  I saw her teach once (and only once).  She was good.  She was poised.  She was prepared.  She controlled the class.  She consistently got excellent reviews on RateMyProfessor, with a 100% "would take her class again" rating.

After about ten years behind the podium she decided she needed a new challenge and went into administration.  She become department head, president of the academic senate, and finally, Dean of Behavioral and Social Sciences.

On a few occasions I told her how proud I was of her.  I wish I could tell her again.  Sis, if you're listening, I'm proud of you, and have been for a long time.

Irit never married, but she did find love.  Lots of it.  The outpouring of emotion from her students and colleagues has been extraordinary.  If these were normal times and we were able to hold a funeral, a whole lot of people would have shown up.  That is the measure of a successful life.

Irit was engaged to be married to extraordinary man named Bob, whom I would have been proud to call my brother-in-law.  She invariably referred to him as "my Bob."  They did a lot of traveling together.  Bob is an avid cyclist, and many of their trips were BackRoads cycling trips, so she was an athlete too.  (In fact, in college, she was a body-builder.)  They had grand plans to retire in a few years and move to Tuscon or some such place.  Retiring with "her Bob" was the one dream she never got to realize.  Other than that, she lived a full and happy life (except when her older brother beat her up before he grew up and got a clue).

I will miss you, little sis.  Rest in peace.

The insidious problem of racism

Take a moment to seriously think about what is wrong with racism.  If you're like most people, your answer will probably be that racism is bad because it's a form of prejudice, and prejudice is bad.  This is not wrong, but it misses a much deeper, more insidious issue.  The real problem with racism is that it is that it can be (and usually is) rationalized and those rationalizations can turn into self-fulfilling prophecies, which in turn causes racism to not only be rationalized, but rationally justifiable.  It's a vicious cycle that leads otherwise virtuous people to unwittingly contribute to great evils.

Here's an example: professional basketball players are disproportionately black by an enormous margin.  Why?  It would seem odd if this were a result of racial prejudice.  Being a professional basketball player is not a menial job.  It's a challenging, well-respected and well-compensated profession.  Professional basketball players are role models.  The stakes are high: if a team could gain a competitive advantage by hiring more white players they would surely do so.  So it seems more likely that there is actually some kind of causal influence that results in black skin being correlated with basketball skill.

The obvious candidate for this kind of causal influence is that black people are taller than white people.  Being tall presents an obvious advantage if you're a basketball player.  I was convinced that this had to be the answer, but it's not.  It turns out that, on average, black people are actually shorter than white people.  (The source data is here.)  So there goes that theory.

There could be some other physical trait that is linked to black skin that provides a competitive advantage in basketball.  Black people also dominate in other sports, like running.  Maybe there's some biological factor that makes blacks faster than whites, or able to jump higher, and that produces a competitive advantage in basketball.

But there is another, much more insidious possibility: maybe black dominance in basketball is not a physical advantage, but a cultural one.  Maybe blacks make better basketball players simply because as a group they happen to spend more time playing basketball.  And maybe the reason they spend more time playing basketball is that other avenues of economic advancement are closed to them for one reason or another, and so basketball is seen as the only way out of the hood.  So they play basketball.

Notice that it is not necessary for it to actually be true that non-basketball careers are closed to blacks to set this vicious cycle into motion.  The mere perception that it is true is enough.  If a black kid growing up in the hood believes that he's never going to be hired as an engineer then he could reach the perfectly rational (albeit possibly mistaken) conclusion that he should not spend his time studying math but should practice basketball instead.  The result is a lot more black kids playing basketball, and doing it with much more seriousness and dedication, than white kids.  And the result of that is that the best basketball players are overwhelmingly black simply because they've been working at it harder than whites.  And so the NBA team managers make the perfectly rational decision to hire black players because they are in point of actual fact better than whites.  And then the next generation of black kids grows up seeing a lot of basketball-playing role models and very few engineering role models, and reach the perfectly rational conclusion that maybe they ought not to study engineering.

The mere belief that black people make better basketball players can actually cause them to be better basketball players in point of actual fact.  It is, quite literally, a self-fulfilling prophecy.  And the thing about self-fulfilling prophecies is that they are actually true!

Notice that all this can happen even if everyone is behaving rationally on good evidence and without any ill will on anyone's part.  Less damaging forms of the same underlying dynamic are very common.  Taxi cab drivers in Glendale, California are overwhelmingly Armenian.  Restaurant owners in San Carlos are overwhelmingly Turkish.  Cruise ship crew members are overwhelmingly Filipino (except for the senior officers).  It's not because there is anything in the genes of Armenians that makes them better cab drivers, or the genes of Turks that makes them better resaurateurs, or the genes of Filipinos that makes them better sailors.  It's purely a cultural dynamic of expectations playing against rational decision making to produce self-fulfilling prophecies.

But now, instead of basketball player or cab driver or sailor, consider a drug dealer.

Think about the mental image that popped into your brain when you read those words.  I'll wager it was not a white guy in a suit and tie in the board room of a pharmacology company, though such a person is very much a drug dealer.  The image that popped into your head was very likely a black man in a hoodie shuffling furtively on a street corner.  And yet John Kapoor is every bit as much a drug dealer as El Chapo Guzman, and vastly more of a drug dealer than, say, Aron Tuff.

You have likely never heard of Aron Tuff.  I hadn't until I started researching this post.  Tuff was sentenced to life in prison without parole because police found a third of a gram of cocaine in his yard.  It was his third strike.  Compare that to Kapoor's five-year sentence for peddling massive quantities of opioids that caused tens of thousands of deaths.  Part of the rationale for Kapoor's reduced sentence was his "philanthropy", notwithstanding that the money he used to engage in philanthropy came from dealing drugs.  Vast quantities of drugs which killed tens of thousands of people.

There is no end to the ways in which the disparities between Kapoor's sentence and Tuff's can be rationalized.  The drugs Kapoor sold were legal.  The drugs that Tuff (allegedly) possessed (but did not sell) were illegal.  Kapoor was a respected captain of industry, a job creator.  Tuff was an addict with priors.  All of these things are true.  None of them have anything to do with race, at least not overtly.  And yet, somehow the net result is that blacks get sent to prison for drug offenses a lot more than whites do.

This is the problem with racism: it's never just about the color of someone's skin.  Skin color is always just a proxy for some other quality which actually justifies the racism.  This goes all the way back to chattel slavery in the American South: blacks were not enslaved because they were black per se, they were enslaved because they were inferior.  Skin color was just an indicator of the inferiority.  Many slave owners believed in good faith at the time that they were actually doing blacks a favor by enslaving them.  If you don't believe me, all you have to do is read this excerpt from the articles of secession of the state of Texas:

...all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations...

That sounds shocking today, but it wasn't shocking then.  Millions of people passionately believed in the sentiment expressed in these words.  Tens of thousands literally fought and died for them.  They sincerely believed they were the good guys.

Today the proxy quality that launches the vicious cycle is no longer genetic inferiority, it's something else.  It's "making poor decisions" or whatever the fuck it is, it doesn't matter.  What matters is that the structure of the argument and the resulting social dynamic is exactly the same as it was in 1861: black skin is taken to be a reliable proxy for some other quality --the ability to play basketball, a propensity to criminality-- and that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and hence actually true.  Everyone believes in good faith (indeed, correctly!) that they are acting rationally and on good evidence!  And yet the result is catastrophic.

So what do we do about it?  After all, rationality got us in to this mess, so how can it possibly get us out?  Well, first we have to agree that it's a mess.  Not everyone does.  There is a school of thought that says that everything is basically hunky-dory, at least on a systemic level.  Slavery is gone.  Jim Crow is gone.  Any remaining disparities must therefore be a result of individual choices because the playing field has now been leveled.  If there are problems they should be dealt with on an individual level.  If someone breaks the law, they go to jail.  Eventually the transgressors will figure out that it is better for them to hew to the social order, so all we need to do is send enough troops to quell the riots and sooner or later this will all sort itself out.  Now, excuse me while I mix myself a martini and get my kids ready to go to their private school.

There are actually people who think that we've already gone overboard in our attempts to address racial issues in the U.S.  There is a small but significant contingent who believes that legally enforced segregation, a return to separate-but-equal, is actually the Right Answer.  If you think these people can simply be ignored you have not been paying attention.  The Trump administration is actively courting these people.  If you are one of those people who believes that Donald Trump doesn't have a racist bone in his body, well, I have a bridge you might be interested in buying.

Personally, it seems to me that we tried segregation for about 100 years and as far as I'm concerned it was not a good outcome, and I'm white.  Like I said in my earlier post on this topic, I am the beneficiary of the current system.  The expectations that turn into self-fulfilling prophecies have worked very much in my favor.  I'm a white male, and so everyone expected me to grow up to be successful, and lo and behold I grew up to be successful.  I was there for this entire process and so I can tell you that this was not because of any extraordinary effort on my part.  I totally coasted to my success.  I figured out how to game the system in middle school, and I've been doing it ever since.  I have a very impressive-looking resume, but if you look carefully none of it actually reflects any extraordinary accomplishment on my part.  Yes, I worked for NASA for fifteen years.  Yes, that sounds impressive.  But the reason I worked for NASA for 15 years is because I happened to be in graduate school when my advisor got a job offer, and he took me with him.  The reason I was in grad school is because I was too lazy to get a real job.  The reason I was able to go to grad school in the first place is because the government gave me a fellowship, and before that the university I attended gave me a scholarship, and all that happened because I got good grades.  And the reason I was able to get good grades is that I grew up in a quiet house within walking distance of the country club (the neighborhood I grew up in was literally called Country Club Estates!) where there was not a basketball court to be found.  Tennis.  Golf.  A swimming pool where waiters would bring me club sandwiches that I didn't have to pay for.  It was fucking awesome.  And it was only possible because I was white.  There were no black people in the Country Club Estates.  Not in the 1970s.  Not in Tennessee.

Things are certainly better today.   My parents still live in the house I grew up in, and today their next-door neighbors are black, so maybe this will all sort itself out in the fullness of time.  But at the same time the Supreme Court casually disenfranchises a million ex-felons in Florida, who are, of course, disproportionately black.  The President of the United States calls white supremacists "fine people" and sends secret police to arrest people carrying Black Lives Matter banners.  An American Senator defends chattel slavery as a "necessary evil".  Black people are killed by police at a much higher rate than white people.  I don't have to worry about any of this because I'm white.  And this gnaws at my soul.

No human being should grow up believing that they will be judged by the color of their skin, and they certainly should not grow up being correct in that belief, but that is today's reality.  The first step to fixing this is to persuade people that it needs fixing, and it needs fixing now.  We've been fucking around for 400 years.  Enough.  The recently deceased John Lewis said it better than I can:

“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we have long said that we cannot be patient.  We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now! We are tired. We are tired of being beaten by policemen. We are tired of seeing our people locked up in jail over and over again.”

I want my black brothers and sisters to be free now.  That is, of course, impossible.  The scars of 400 years of oppression will not be erased in my lifetime.  Getting to the point where everyone is truly judged not on the color of their skin but the content of their character will be a multi-generational project even under ideal circumstances, and today's circumstances are far from ideal.  But there are three requirements for solving this problem.  The first, as I've already said, is acknowledging that there is a problem.  The second is a sense of urgency.  We tried patience.  It doesn't work.  And the third is a recognition by those with power that racism is subtle and insidious.  It cloaks itself in rationality and good evidence and good intentions and a million and one reasons why this isn't your responsibility.  Simply by accepting those arguments, you advance, however unwittingly, the self-fulfilling prophecies they sustain and thus become part of the problem.

Abortion restrictions result in more abortions

Not that this was ever in any serious doubt, but now there is actual data published in The Lancet showing that abortion restrictions increase the number of abortions:

In 2015–19, there were 121.0 million unintended pregnancies annually (80% uncertainty interval [UI] 112.8–131.5), corresponding to a global rate of 64 unintended pregnancies (UI 60–70) per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. 61% (58–63) of unintended pregnancies ended in abortion (totalling 73.3 million abortions annually [66.7–82.0]), corresponding to a global abortion rate of 39 abortions (36–44) per 1000 women aged 15–49 years. Using World Bank income groups, we found an inverse relationship between unintended pregnancy and income, whereas abortion rates varied non-monotonically across groups. In countries where abortion was restricted, the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion had increased compared with the proportion for 1990–94, and the unintended pregnancy rates were higher than in countries where abortion was broadly legal.
Interpretation

Between 1990–94 and 2015–19, the global unintended pregnancy rate has declined, whereas the proportion of unintended pregnancies ending in abortion has increased. As a result, the global average abortion rate in 2015–19 was roughly equal to the estimates for 1990–94. Our findings suggest that people in high-income countries have better access to sexual and reproductive health care than those in low-income countries. Our findings indicate that individuals seek abortion even in settings where it is restricted. These findings emphasise [sic] the importance of ensuring access to the full spectrum of sexual and reproductive health services, including contraception and abortion care, and for additional investment towards equity in health-care services.

Of course this will not sway those who are opposed to abortions because they don't really care about abortions at all.  They care about punishing women for being sexually promiscuous, a goal which is well-served by making abortions illegal, and all those additional aborted babies be damned.

Game over for Hong Kong

The Washington Post reports:

Early Wednesday, under a heavy police presence and before any public announcement about the matter, officials inaugurated the Office for Safeguarding National Security of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region at a ceremony that took place behind water-filled barricades. They played the Chinese national anthem and raised the Chinese flag, although local media weren’t invited. When the ceremony was over, reporters were finally able to photograph the building’s front door.

The Metropark Hotel on the edge of the city’s Causeway Bay district will be the initial base for the new agency, staffed by Chinese security officials. It will be tasked with collecting intelligence and implementing a new law that sharply curtails political freedoms as Beijing takes greater control of the territory after anti-government protests last year. 

It’s the first time the Chinese government’s state security apparatus has been permitted to operate in Hong Kong, marking a milestone in officials’ efforts to dismantle the firewall that separated the city from the authoritarian mainland.

This is what the Metropark Hotel's web site looked like this morning:

 Just in case the type is too small to see:

This is what the death of Democracy looks like in the 21st century.  As T.S. Eliot presciently observed, it does not end with a bang, but with an under-construction notice on a web site.

Mark your calendars: I am debating Ken Hovind on July 9

I've recently taken up a new hobby of debating young-earth creationists on YouTube.  (It's a dirty job, but somebody's gotta do it.)  I've done two of them so far [1][2], both on a creationist channel called Standing For Truth.  My third debate will be against Kent Hovind, one of the more prominent and, uh, outspoken members of the YEC community.  In case you haven't heard of him, here's a sample.  The debate will be this Thursday at 5:30PM Pacific time.  Come watch the sparks fly.

I Will Remember Ricky Ray Rector

I've always been very proud of the fact that I came out in support of gay marriage before it was cool.   I have been correspondingly chagrined at my failure to speak out sooner and more vociferously about the shameful and systemic mistreatment of people of color, and black people in particular, in the U.S.  For what it's worth, I hereby confess my sins, acknowledge my white privilege, and announce my advocacy for reparations.  No, I never owned slaves.  None of my ancestors ever owned slaves.  But there is no question that I have received preferential treatment because of the color of my skin.  Cops don't harass me.  Prospective employers don't look at me sideways.  I have shared in an inheritance of wealth that was built in no small measure on the backs of of the forced labor of black people that the descendants of those laborers have not shared.  My undeserved share of that inheritance is in and of itself a wrong that needs to be set right, notwithstanding that I had no direct hand in bringing it about.

There.  I said it.

Now, as the first step in my atonement, I would like to bring to your attention a name that should be remembered alongside that of George Floyd and Breona Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Trayvon Martin and the dozens and thousands of other black people who have been killed because they were black.  That name is Ricky Ray Rector.  His name is conspicuously absent from this web site despite the fact that he was killed by a white man because he was black.  The reason his name is almost completely unknown is because the man who killed him was Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the United States, while he was governor of Arkansas and still a candidate for president.  Conservatives don't remember Ricky because they do not mourn his passing, and liberals don't remember him because the Clintons are as sacrosanct to them as Donald Trump is to conservatives.

Ironically, Donny and Billy have an awful lot in common.  Both are narcissists.  Both are rapists.  And, apparently, both are racists, or, at the very least, willing to play to a racist audience for political gain at the cost of innocent lives.  And, I must grudgingly concede, both are political geniuses for being somehow able to get black people to support them despite making a show of courting ant-black racist sentiment.

So as part of my penance I pledge to keep the memory of Ricky Ray Rector alive.  I will remember how he ordered pie for his last meal, and then didn't eat it because he wanted to save some of it for later.  I will remember how I supported Bill Clinton, the man who personally oversaw Ricky's execution despite the fact that Ricky was clearly not mentally competent because no one was gonna Willie-Horton him, God damn it.

I will remember these things.  I don't know if by remembering them I will sleep better or worse.  But I hope that by remembering them I will be able to look at myself in the mirror when the morning comes.

A review of John Sanford's "Genetic Entropy"

1.  Introduction

(Feel free to skip this part.  It's just some context for what comes next.)

As regular readers will already know, I put a fair amount of effort into understanding points of view that I don't agree with.  I think if you're going to argue against a position it is incumbent upon you to understand what you're arguing against so that your arguments are actually on point and you're not just knocking down straw men.  So over the past few years I've taken a fairly deep dive into young-earth creationism.  I've gotten to the point where I'm pretty sure I could pass a YEC Turing-test.

One of the things I've noticed is that YEC arguments evolve (and yes, that is every bit as ironic as it sounds).  Old tropes like crocoducks and "If man evolved from monkeys why are there still monkeys?" have fallen out of favor.  In their place there are now a new crop of stock arguments that are not quite so transparently naive.

There are two arguments making the rounds nowadays that seem to be particularly fashionable: the "historical vs observational science" argument, and the "genetic entropy" argument.  The historical-vs-observational argument holds that there is some kind of fundamental difference when you do science about the way things were in the past vs about how they are in the present.  The argument goes something like this: we cannot time-travel into the past and so we cannot do repeatable experiments with regards to past events.  So the past is necessarily shrouded in a kind of mystery that the present is not.

This argument seems plausible on its face, but it is easily dispensed with: all of our data necessarily comes from the past (since none of it can come from the future -- duh!) so all science is in some sense "historical".  It is true that there are some singular events in the past that are inaccessible to scientific inquiry, and the further back you go the more such events there are.  There is probably no way to ever know, for example, what Julius Caesar had for breakfast the day after he crossed the Rubicon.  But there is a way to know (with very high confidence) that he did not cross the Rubicon by, say, flying across it.  How can we know?  Because we know a fair bit about the technology that was available in ancient Rome, and the constraints those would put on modes of travel.  Likewise, unless the laws of physics were different in the past than they are today, then it is extremely unlikely that biology was fundamentally different then than now.

The genetic entropy argument is not so easily dispensed with.  This is partly because the argument was advanced by John Sanford, a Cornell geneticist, in an eponymous book.  Sanford has credentials and that lends his argument some, well, credence.  Scott Buchanan wrote an extensive critique, to which Sanford responded, and then Buchanan responded to Sanford's response.  The exchange is very long and gets deep into the technical weeds.

This post is my attempt at a more accessible critique of Sanford's book.  It's not necessary to get very far into the details to see that Sanford is wrong.  By way of motivation I want to start with the story of another deep dive I did into a scientific controversy over twenty years ago.

2.  A parable

In 1996 a Berkeley biologist named Peter Duesberg published a book called "Inventing the AIDS Virus" whose thesis was that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus but was instead caused by the drugs used to treat people who tested positive for HIV.  The book is 700 pages long, and it is dense with data, graphs, references... it is a genuine work of scholarship.  It has a forward written by Nobel laureate Kary Mullis, inventor of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) which is a foundation of modern-day biological research.  The book is, by all appearances, a serious critique of the conventional wisdom, one that ought to command some respect.

It is also, of course, absolutely, 100%, catastrophically wrong.  But how can we tell?

Duesberg's work was never taken seriously by the scientific establishment, but it did launch a movement of HIV-denialism which persists to this day.  One of the leaders of this movement was a woman named Christine Maggiore, who founded an organization called Alive and Well.  She also wrote a short popular account of Duesberg's theory entitled, "What if everything you thought you knew about AIDS was wrong?"  Maggiore was diagnosed as HIV positive in 1992.  Her daughter, Eliza Jane, tested positive as well, having most likely contracted HIV through Christine's breast milk.  In accord with her belief in Duesberg's thesis, she refused treatment, both for herself and Eliza Jane.

Eliza Jane died of AIDS in 2005 at age 3.  Christine of course denied this, insisting that the coroner's office had gotten it wrong.  She even went so far as to sue them.  Three years later Christine also died of AIDS.  And that's how we know that Duesberg was wrong, because Christine and Eliza Jane did the crucial experiment, and the result was exactly what the scientific establishment predicted.  They even had a control in the form of Christine's son, Charlie, who tested negative for HIV, and is as of this writing still, as far as I have been able to determine, alive and well.

Keep all that in the back of your mind as you read the following.

3.  Genetic Entropy

In stark contrast to Deusberg's book, "Genetic Entropy" is not a scholarly work.  It is a popular book targeted at a lay audience, and as such it must be judged by looser standards than one would otherwise apply.  Unfortunately, even by the standards of popular accounts, "Genetic Entropy" runs off the rails almost immediately, in fact, in the third paragraph of the Prologue:

Modern Darwinism is built upon what I will be calling “The Primary Axiom”. The Primary Axiom is that man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection. Within our society’s academia, the Primary Axiom is universally taught, and almost universally accepted.

This is true, except for one salient detail: what Sanford calls the "Primary Axiom" is not an axiom.  An axiom is something that is taken to be true by assumption.  Axioms are, by definition, beyond question.  The idea that "man is merely the product of random mutations plus natural selection" is absolutely not an axiom of Darwinism, it is a conclusion, one that is supported by a mountain of evidence accumulated over 150 years of painstaking research.

But OK, maybe Sanford is applying Humpty-Dumpty's theory of language and is using the word "axiom" loosely?  Well, no.  In chapter 1 he writes:

An axiom is a concept that is not testable but is accepted by faith because it seems obviously true to all reasonable parties.

So Sanford really is attacking a straw man.  And that's really all you need to know about "Genetic Entropy."  Just as we can know that "Inventing the AIDS Virus" is wrong without wading into the details, so too can we know that "Genetic Entropy" is wrong because it starts with a false premise.  Garbage in, garbage out.

Still, Sanford is a Cornell professor, maybe there is something worthwhile in the book even if it's not his principal thesis?  Unfortunately, no.  The book is a hot mess of false premises layered on top of faulty reasoning resting on a foundtion of apparently willful ignorance.  There are far too many mistakes for me to go into them all, but a few stand out as particularly egregious, so I will talk about those in some detail.

First, let me summarize Sanford's argument to save you the trouble of actually having to read the book.

Sanford's thesis is actually pretty simple, and intuitively plausible: evolution happens when genes make copies of themselves.  Those copies are not perfect, but are subject to random mutation.  Because mutations are random, and because the machinery of life is very complicated and finely tuned, an arbitrary random mutation is vastly more likely to be harmful to an organism's reproductive fitness than beneficial.  Those harmful mutations will eventually overwhelm the beneficial ones through sheer force of numbers, and (he claims) he has the math to prove it.

Lest you think I'm being unfair in my paraphrase, here is Sanford's thesis in his own words, found at the end of Chapter 2:

Progressive evolution on the genomic level [is] virtually impossible. Adaptation to a special circumstance can still happen, due to extremely rare high-impact beneficials [sic] – which are isolated anomalies... These rare beneficial mutations almost always involve loss of function and are therefore unproductive in terms of “forward evolution”.

An example of a "high-impact beneficial" is a bacterium evolving a resistance to antibiotics.  Sanford has to carve that out as a special exception because such mutations obviously do occur, as evidenced by the existence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

Because harmful mutations are so much more likely than beneficial ones, Sanford goes on to argue, they must accumulate in the genome and eventually cause the species to go extinct.  This is the inevitable fate of all species.  So the fact that life still exists is evidence that it was all created fairly recently.

This is a not-entirely-implausible argument.  It is not even entirely incorrect.  It is true that, for certain kinds of mutations, harmful ones are much more likely than beneficial ones (with one very important caveat which I'll get to in a minute).  It is even true that harmful mutations can accumulate and eventually cause a species to go extinct.  This actually does happen -- in fact, it's not uncommon.  This is what has made is so popular in the YEC community: it's a position with a grain of truth and a veneer of respectability that YEC generally lacks.

Sadly (but not unexpectedly) it's just a veneer.  Underneath is one catastrophic mistake after another.

4. Mistake #1: Sanford does not appear to know what "information" is

Each chapter in "Genetic Entropy" starts with a "news flash", a pithy slogan that is supposed to set the stage for that chapter.  The first one is, "News flash: the genome is an instruction manual."

It is genuinely hard to tell how literally Sanford intends the reader to take this aphorism.  A plain reading of the following text seems to indicate that he means it to be taken quite literally: "A genome is an instruction manual that specifies a particular form of life. The human genome is a manual that instructs human cells how to be human cells and instructs the human body how to be the human body. There is no information system designed by man that can even begin to compare to the sophistication and complexity of the genome."

Sanford makes a big deal about "information".  The "news flash" in chapter 2 is "Random mutations consistently destroy information."  And yet, he never defines information in the body of the book.  He seems to assume that the reader already knows, and I suspect most of Sanford's readers assume the same thing.

The book has a glossary, and this is how it defines "information":

The most useful definition of this word is its plain and ordinary sense – information is “that which is communicated through language”. Biological information takes on many forms, due to the labyrinth of communication networks which enable life.

This definition is hopelessly naive.  It's akin to defining "transportation" as "that which is provided by the Mercedes-Benz E class sedan."  It is true that information can be communicated through language, just as transportation can be provided by a Mercedes-Benz E-class sedan.  But to define these words in such a way is to miss the point rather badly.

This is not hard to see even without getting into technical details.  The focus of Sanford's book is genetic information encoded in DNA.  But that information has nothing to do with language.  DNA was storing and replicating information long before human brains came along and invented language.

There is a whole field of study called "information theory" of which Sanford seems to be completely unaware.  Information theory was invented by Claude Shannon.  No reference to Shannon's work appears in the references, an absolutely stunning omission in a book in which the loss of information is a core theme.

Just in case you're interested, the actual technical definition of "information" is that it is a measure of the degree of correlation in the states of two or more systems.  It's easy to see why Sanford might want to avoid that verbiage in a book directed at a non-technical audience, but it's really not that difficult a concept.  If your car has a warning light that turns on whenever a door is open and turns off when the door is closed then the light contains information about the state of the door.  Genes contain information about the organisms they inhabit because there is are similar correlations between the sequence of DNA nucleotides and physical characteristics of the organism.  It's a very simple concept, and it has absolutely nothing to do with language.

There is, however, one crucially important feature of the correct definition: information is a relative concept.  It is a measure of the correlation between two systems.  There is no sense in which a system can "contain information" in an absolute sense.  Information resident in one system can only be measured relative to another.  Information is always information about something.  A light that turns on and off does not in and of itself contain information.  It only contains information if its flashes are correlated with something else (like the state of your car door).  Saying that a system contains information in an absolute sense is not only wrong, it is non-sensical.

This is important because Sanford speaks as if information is absolute.  He talks about information being "created" and "destroyed", but again, he never defines what this means.  He just assumes that it's obvious.  Well, it's not obvious.  In order to talk about quantifying information at all you have to specify what correlations you are talking about, and Sanford doesn't.

Because he doesn't, we are forced to guess.  There is an obvious candidate: the correlations between an organisms genotype and its phenotype, i.e. the correlations between various genes and various physical characteristics of the biological organisms those genes produce.  OK, fair enough, but even then it is still not clear what it means to "create" and "destroy" this information.  Sanford claims that biology cannot "create" information.  But biology manifestly can create copies of information.  Every time an organism reproduces the result is correlations between systems that weren't there before.  Clearly this cannot be what Sanford means by "creating information".

So what can he mean?  I suspect that what he really means is that biology cannot produce novel information.  It can (obviously) produce copies of information that was already there, but it can't "invent" new things.  Sanford speaks of "new information" frequently, but he never defines what he means by "new".  Presumably, a fresh copy of a genome produced when a cell reproduces is not "new information".  Again we are left to guess that what he means by "new information" is "information that has never existed before" or something like that.

But this is also clearly wrong.  Every human -- indeed every organism that has ever lived (with the exception of identical twins and organisms that reproduce asexually) -- has had a unique genome.  (This, BTW, is a big clue as to why sexual reproduction evolved!)  You are unlike any human who has ever lived and (almost certainly) unlike any who will ever live.  Your genome may not have been "invented", but at some point in time you were conceived and the information that specifies how to make you (i.e. the sequence of DNA that would eventually correlated with the physical characteristics of the person you are now) came into being for the first time.  I think it's fair to say that this information was "created" at that point.

I suspect Sanford would readily concede this.  The kind of information-creation he is talking about is not at the level of an entire genome, it is at the level of an individual gene.  Yes, he would concede, individual genes can be mixed-and-matched through sexual reproduction, and he might concede that this "creates information" (I don't know).  But that is not what he's talking about.  What he's talking about is creating individual genes.  And here he makes an unambiguous claim.  The "news flash" that introduces chapter 9 is: "Mutation/selection cannot even create a single gene."

This claim should already be a little bit suspect because, as we've just seen, sexual reproduction can "produce new information" (whatever that might actually mean).  And note that the mixing-and-matching that goes on during sexual reproduction is random, so the mere presence of randomness is clearly not a show-stopper.

But even this last bastion of Sanford's position falls to a second critical mistake.

5.  Mistake #2: the benefit of a mutation is not absolute

Sanford's argument that natural selection cannot produce new genes goes something like this: biological systems are incredibly complicated.  Even the simplest bacterium is more complex than the most complex computer man has ever invented.  All of the components have to work together in perfect harmony in order to sustain life.

A random mutation is vastly more likely to disturb this delicate balance than to enhance it.  In fact, the odds of a random mutation being beneficial is so small that it never actually happens in reality.  Therefore, it must be the case that all of the genes that are required to sustain life must already be in existence.  Moreover, the process of random mutation necessarily depletes this store of beneficial genes.  Eventually, we will run out.  Life is on an inevitable path of deterioration and decay that will lead to its eventual extinction.  And, more to the point, the only way that our current stock of beneficial genes could have come about is through a process of intelligent design which bestowed on us an initial endowment of beneficial genes that we are now in the process of frittering away.

Sanford's mistake here is similar to the one he made when defining information.  Just as information is inherently a relative concept, so are "beneficial" and "harmful".  A gene cannot be "beneficial" in an absolute sense.  Genes are only beneficial (or harmful) with respect to an environment.  A gene that is beneficial in one environment will always be harmful in some other environment.

And that is exactly how evolution works.  There are random changes.  Some of those changes are beneficial with respect to the environment in which the organism finds itself, and some are harmful.  Some are so harmful that they stop the reproduction process altogether and those are immediately self-correcting: a mutation that cannot copy itself will obviously leave no copies of itself to further contaminate the gene pool.  Of the ones that remain, the ones that are beneficial will make more copies of themselves because that is how evolution measures benefit.  Evolutionary benefit is not just relative to an environment, it is relative to reproductive fitness in that environment.

And the relativity of benefit doesn't stop there.  Not only is evolutionary benefit measured relative to reproductive fitness in an environment, it is measured relative to its competitors in that environment.  It's like the old joke about the two hikers who encounter a bear.  They start to run.  One hiker says, "This is silly, we can't outrun a bear."  The other says, "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you."

Consider this example from chapter 2:

[In] mutations that lead to antibiotic resistance in bacteria[,] cell functions are routinely lost. The resistant bacterium has not evolved. In fact it has digressed genetically and is defective."

Defective by whose standard?  Certainly not by the standards of a bacterium living in the presence of antibiotics.  Whatever it is that leads a bacterium to be resistant to antibiotics -- whether it is a "loss of function" or otherwise -- it is manifestly beneficial to a bacterium living in the presence of antibiotics.

But, one might counter, it is a loss of function.  If you take a strain of bacteria that has evolved antibiotic resistance and put them back in an environment without antibiotics, those bacteria will be less fit than those that never evolved resistance.  That's true, but it in no way refutes the point because benefit can only be assessed relative to an environment.  Antibiotic resistance is beneficial (to a bacterium) in the presence of antibiotics, and harmful otherwise.

Another example: chihuahuas are descended from wolves.  The evolutionary changes that led from wolves to chihuahuas could arguably be considered "loss of function".  Wolves are stronger, faster, better able to defend themselves.  And yet chihuahuas vastly outnumber wolves in today's world.  Why?  Because wolves are a threat to humans and chihuahuas are not, so we kill wolves but feed and shelter chihuahuas.  In an environment that includes humans, the functional loss of features that are a threat to humans is a net reproductive advantage.  If humans were ever to disappear from the face of the earth, wolves would very quickly regain the upper hand.

And yet, to paraphrase an old creationist trope, if chihuahuas are so much better at survival then wolves, why are there still wolves?  And the answer, of course, is that chihuahuas are better at survival than wolves in the presence of humans.  So chihuahuas thrive where humans are plentiful and wolves thrive where they are scarce.

This "relativity of benefit" is ubiquitous.  At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is no such thing as a beneficial mutation in an absolute sense.  A gene that produces sharp claws and teeth is beneficial to a lion living in the Serengeti, not so much to a human living in on the upper East side.  A gene that produces resistance to malaria and a concomitant risk of sickle-cell disease can be a net win if you live somewhere where malaria is prevalent, otherwise not so much.

There is one exception to this: a mutation that kills the organism before it is able to reproduce is unambiguously harmful.  Such mutations do happen.  But think about it: such mutations immediately eliminate themselves from the gene pool!  And that is the key insight into how evolution works.  Sanford is actually correct when he says that most mutations are harmful (with respect to the environment in which they occur).  But evolution is not just random mutation, it also crucially includes non-random selection which acts to amplify the prevalence of beneficial mutations and dampen the effects of harmful ones.  The more harmful a mutation is (relative to its environment of course), the quicker it gets eliminated from the gene pool (in that environment), never to be seen again (unless it should happen to arise again through random chance, which is, of course, extremely unlikely, and even if it does it will just get snuffed out again).

I've pointed this out to a few YECs and their response has been: but this is a tautology.  You are just defining benefit and harm in terms of reproductive fitness, so of course beneficial mutations are going to increase reproductive fitness.  And they're right, it is a tautology.  But here's the thing about tautologies: they are actually true.  The fact that random mutation + selection for reproductive fitness results in improved reproductive fitness is a tautology is in no way a refutation of evolutionary theory.  To the contrary, it is just the observation that evolutionary theory is obviously true because it is a logical consequence of two processes (random mutation and natural selection) that we know actually do occur.

The question is not whether evolution occurs.  Even Sanford concedes that it does:

Yet we all know that micro-evolution (adaptive selection) does happen. How can this be? Most adaptation is due to fine-tuning, not creation of new information.

The question is whether evolution can account for all of the variety of life on earth.

6.  Mistake #3: Evolution optimizes for the reproductive fitness of genes, not species or individuals

The reproduction of the human genome, like many (but not all) multicellular sexually-reproducing species, is an all-or-nothing affair: a fertilized egg either produces a baby which grows up to reproduce itself, or it doesn't.  There is no middle ground.

Because of this it seems intuitively plausible that evolution optimizes for the reproductive fitness of individuals, or maybe of species.  Indeed, this was the conventional wisdom for over 100 years, but it is wrong.  It was shown to be wrong by Richard Dawkins in his book "The Selfish Gene" and the associated scientific papers that back it up.  (This is actually the work that made him famous, not his activism as an atheist.)  Evolution optimizes for the reproductive fitness of genes.  The existence of things like species and individuals is a side-effect of the fact that cooperation among genes turns out to be an extremely effective reproductive strategy.

The easiest way to see that evolution does not optimize for the reproduction of individuals is to consider hive insects like ants, bees and termites.  The vast majority of ants are sterile.  They never reproduce as individuals.  And yet somehow ants have manifestly not gone extinct.

This is because evolution does not optimize for the reproduction of individual ants, it optimizes for the reproduction of ant genes.  A sterile ant is useless for its own reproduction as an individual, but it can be extremely helpful for the reproduction of its genes.  The same genes that reside in one individual ant also reside in countless other individual ants, and if any of those reproduce then it's a win for that ant's genes.  Indeed, an ant is more accurately seen as an organ rather than organism.  The organism is not the ant, it's the whole ant colony, which consists of parts that just happen not to be physically connected to one another.

This is even true for humans.  A single human individual cannot reproduce.  At the very least it requires a mating pair.  More realistically, it takes a village: a single mating pair of humans cut off from all civilization will almost certainly not be able to survive and reproduce.  The minimum viable unit of human reproduction is a tribe of at least a few dozen individuals.

This is no accident.  Diversity is a clear reproductive advantage.  The wider the range of available traits within a population, the wider the range of environmental challenges that population will be able to respond to without going extinct.

This is in fact the reason that evolution invented sexual reproduction, because it is a much more efficient way of producing diversity than asexual reproduction and waiting for cosmic rays to produce mutations.  Most of the variation that occurs in sexually reproducing organisms does not come from the creation of genes de novo (Sanford is actually right about that).  It comes from the mixing-and-matching of existing genes during sexual reproduction.  No sexually-reproducing organism ever replicates itself exactly.  But its genes are replicated (more or less) exactly (or at least half of them are) on every iteration.

Sanford is actually correct when he points out that the invention of new proteins is a very inefficient process.  But in the presence of sexual reproduction, it is also completely unnecessary in order for evolution to proceed as long as there is a sufficient pool of biodiversity to draw on.  It is analogous to the manner in which new information is created in natural language.  It is rare for new words to be created.  Most of the information communicated by natural language is created simply by putting existing words and phrases together in new combinations.

Sanford actually comes tantalizing close to realizing this in chapter 5:

The fact that most mutations are recessive dramatically masks their negative fitness effects, and greatly hinders selection against them. Likewise, all interactions between genes (“epistasis”) will interfere with selective elimination of minor mutations. In smaller populations, the randomness of sexual recombination (chromosome-segregations and gamete-unions are both random and thus fluctuate randomly) can routinely override selection. These effects cause the fundamental phenomenon of genetic drift. Genetic drift has been extensively studied, and it is well known that it can override selection against all but the most severe mutations in small populations.

Notice how the assumption that all mutations can be determined to be either "good" or "bad" in an absolute sense is baked into his rhetoric here.  Remember, diversity is a reproductive advantage.  A gene's reproductive fitness can only be assessed relative to its environment, and a big part of the environment for a gene is the various collections of other genes that it has "teamed up" with in order to build organisms.  The wider the range of organisms a gene has been able to get itself into, the greater its odds of survival against external environmental variations.  The reason recessive genes exist is so that genes that are deleterious in one environment can be held "in reserve", simply as a store of diversity to be used in the future when environmental changes cause it to become beneficial again.

Sanford simply ignores all of this.  He barely refers to Dawkins at all, and not at all to the selfish gene theory that is his main contribution to the field.  Because of this, he's attacking a straw-man.  Like all straw-man arguments, it is actually correct as far as it goes: an evolutionary process such as the one that Sanford describes would indeed not work.  But real evolution simply doesn't work the way Sanford describes.

7.  Mistake #4: complexity does not require intelligence

Apart from ignoring elementary facts like how evolution actually works and what information actually is, Sanford's entire argument really boils down to a logical fallacy called the argument-from-incredulity.  Life is fantastically complex (true) and so it cannot possibly have come about without intelligence.  The reason for this is essentially that Sanford cannot imagine how it could have happened, and because Sanford cannot imagine it, it must be impossible.  After all, Sanford is not just any old shmoe, he is a well-read and learned man, a professor at a prestigious university.  If he can't figure it out, maybe it's because it actually cannot be figured out.

Again, this is not entirely-implausible.  At the beginning of the book Sanford says that "the genome is an instruction manual", which is not a horrible analogy, and it does serve to illustrate one important point: the instruction manual is not enough.  If I gave you an instruction manual for how to build a 747 you still probably would not be able to build a 747.  Building a 747 requires, in addition to the instruction manual, a whole slew of specialized equipment, jigs, material, skills and knowledge that is not in the manual.

Likewise, if I gave you a printout of the DNA sequence of the human genome and said, "Here, go make a human", you wouldn't be able to do it.  The information in DNA is rendered into organisms through an incredibly complex process which we are only beginning to understand.  We don't even fully understand the first step in this process, the construction of proteins.  We know how the sequences of nucleotides in DNA get translated into sequences of amino acids by ribosomes, but how those amino acids then fold themselves into the particular shapes that allow them to perform various biological functions is still entirely beyond our ability to predict.  And what happens after that has all the appearance of true magic.

But just because something looks like magic doesn't mean that it is.  There are a host of natural phenomena that we once thought were the work of deities: Earthquakes. Lightning.  Floods.  All of these are still beyond our ability to predict or reproduce but no one seriously argues that this entails that they are the product of anything other than natural processes.

Creationists argue that life is different because of its complexity.  Earthquakes and lightning and floods might be mysterious, but they are simple phenomena.  Life isn't simple.  It is, as I have just noted, unfathomably complex, and it is that unfathomable complexity that reveals it to be the work of some kind of intelligent designer.

But there are many examples of simple processes that produce vast complexity.  In fact, simple processes can be computationally complete.  It just doesn't take a lot of hardware to build a universal Turing machine -- it can be done with a few thousand transistors or a pile of wood.  These machines can compute any computable function.

Of course, this leaves open the question of how complicated of a program you need in order to accurately model biology.   Creationists, notably Michael Behe, claim that biological processes are "irreducibly complex".  There is no merit in this argument, and to show this it is not even necessary to examine the argument.  Just as it is not necessary to dig into the details of Peter Duesberg's book to know that it is wrong, nor is it necessary to dig into the details of the design of a perpetual motion machine to know that it is wrong, we can formally prove that irreducible complexity cannot possibly be demonstrated.

How?  There is a formal result from the theory of computational complexity called Chaitin's theorem.  To describe it in detail would require getting deep into some technical weeds, but the upshot is that once a system gets beyond a certain threshold of complexity (and that threshold is quite low, vastly lower than the complexity of biological systems) you can never prove that it is irreducibly complex.

Here is a sketch of some of the technical details just in case you're interested: Chaitin's theorem refers to a mathematical quantity called Kolmogorov complexity (KC) of a system S which is defined (roughly) as the size of the smallest formal description that can reproduce the behavior of S.  To claim that a system is irreducibly complex is essentially the same as claiming that its KC is large.  Chatin's theorem shows that it is impossible to prove that a system has a large KC.  It's a remarkable result, but the proof is actually pretty elementary.

In the face of Chaitin's theorem, any claim to a proof of irreducible complexity has the same status as a claim of perpetual motion: such a proof, if it were valid, would quite literally violate the known laws of physics.  It might be true that biological systems are irreducibly complex, but we can prove that we can never know this for certain.  We can know therefore without even looking that Behe's argument must be an argument-from-incredulity.  It cannot be a proof because such a proof cannot exist.

It might be the case that biological systems are irreducibly complex.  There is some evidence that this is the case in the form of our current inability to fully understand it.  But I'll give long odds against this lack of understanding persisting for very long (where "very long" is a few hundred years or so).  Betting against the continuation of scientific progress has never been a winning strategy and I see no reason to believe that is going to change.

8.  Mistake #N

I could go on and on.  I could talk about how fuzzing proves that random processes can produce information.  I could give examples of known beneficial mutations in biological systems.  I could talk about how some biological innovations are indeed hard to produce, and so are correspondingly rare (but others that you would think are rare actually happened multiple times!)  I could talk about how Sanford completely ignores the existence of error-correcting codes, and the fact that biological systems use them, when he dedicates an entire chapter to talking about noise.

But I won't because life is too short.  It's too short for me to spend the time writing about it, and it's too short for you to spend the time reading about it (unless you're a YEC, in which case you should definitely go educate yourself).

I will, however, close with one more anecdote: one of the examples of beneficial mutations in biological systems is the evolution of lactase persistence, or the ability to digest milk into adulthood.  This evolved in humans when we moved north out of Africa and into colder climates where our normal diet of plants and animals was not available year-round.  In an environment like that, the ability to digest milk from domesticated animals is a clear win.

Sanford does not talk about this at all, but Answers in Genesis does:

Mutations responsible for lactase persistence actually represent a loss of genetic information, a shut-down of normal regulation. If anything, the prevalence of lactase persistence is a testimony to the fact an all-knowing Creator designed the human genome with the ability to change.

This actually made me laugh because it fully exposes how vacuous this argument is.  The only reason that the shut-down of lactase production is considered "normal" is because of the order of events.  If humans had originated in cold climates and migrated to warmer ones, the argument on AIG would surely have been the exact opposite: "The mutations responsible for the loss of lactose tolerance in adulthood are a perfect example of a loss of function leading to the further degradation of the human genome."

And that is the core problem with Sanford's thesis: biological systems are complicated.  For any incremental change (which is the only kind there is) it is always possible to tell a just-so story that casts that change as some kind of loss or deficiency.  All you have to do is cherry-pick your environment so that it is the one relative to which the change is in fact harmful.

The opposite is, of course, also true: you can (almost) always tell the same kind of just-so story that casts any change as a benefit.  But here's the difference: cherry-picking those environments is exactly what evolution does!  It's not that beneficial mutations survive, it's that mutations that are beneficial relative to some environments survive in those environments and not in others.  In this way evolution gradually, in the fullness of time, fills all the available niches and, in so doing, creates new environments, new niches, in which new kinds of genes, like those that make chihuahuas, can begin to thrive.  That's how life works.  It's complicated.  It's messy.  And it has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of design.