How could it be possible? It is miraculous!

Harun Yahya has a youtube channel, and it is surreal. He sponsors these panels of attractive young women with grossly overdone makeup — is he catering to his interpretation of how Western women are supposed to look? I don't know, it's just weird — and they talk about science in stilted, broken English for an hour. And when I say "talk about", I mean "recite facts poorly", as if they've memorized a script. Here's one of them; you won't be able to listen to the whole thing, it's just too agonizing.

I skipped around a bit to catch the tone. They talk about the pituitary, for instance, and how it regulates so many aspects of human physiology. They recite the details, and then ask, how can it do that? It's just cells! Allah must be doing it!

This is what we get throughout the discussion. I skimmed ahead, and they started talking about the regulation of blood sugar. They don't get the facts wrong — I suspect it's all just cribbed straight from some physiology text, but it's as if they don't comprehend what they are talking about.

The cells in the islets of Langerhans measure how much sugar there is in 5 liters of blood.

But this is impossible! A cell cannot do that!

The cells release a little key called insulin that opens the gates in cells to let sugar in.

How could it be possible? It is miraculous!

The gates only let sugar in, but not proteins.

How do they know? They are only proteins! They have no intelligence! Allah must will it.

Everything is a miracle. Common facts that I expect my students to grasp without a problem (maybe I've been mistaken there) are treated as cosmic mysteries that require a divine intelligence to execute — every little chemical reaction in your body only occurs because Allah is consciously and carefully willing it to happen. Why do glucose transporters only move sugars across the membrane and not every protein that comes by? I thought it was molecular specificity of the GLUT binding sites.

I would like to come before that panel with a sieve, and demonstrate how it works, just to see these women gasp and ask, "But how does it know to let the little particles through and not the big ones? It is miraculous!"

I really wonder about the audience for these videos. There is a whole string of them, and they're all the same, much like Yahya's books: declaration of basic biological fact, announcement that it is impossible, therefore Allah. They're not particularly enjoyable, either, unless you've got some weird fetish for watching young women say "Inshallah" over and over.

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Harun Yahya makes Islam look stupid! He sux at making videos.

By Dale Husband (not verified) on 26 Jun 2012 #permalink

They even talk about an octopus!

By John Salerno (not verified) on 26 Jun 2012 #permalink

How did their brains not dribble out their ears? I could explain about the structure of the skull, but "Inshallah it's a miracle!" has fewer syllables.

And the magnets? How do they work? ;-)

By Titousensei (not verified) on 26 Jun 2012 #permalink

What Yahya is really saying is that middle eastern women are easy, therefore creationism. And you know what? I think that hypothesis deserves some field testing.

Block report the channel, just keep reporting it as they do when they see or hear something they do not like and are suitably "outraged" as they are wont to get. Hammer them with the same tactics.

By Dave Phillips (not verified) on 27 Jun 2012 #permalink

Bill O'Reilly should invite these women onto his show.

By R.W. Thomas (not verified) on 27 Jun 2012 #permalink

Monty Python could not have done this any better.

By Dr. Whatshisname (not verified) on 27 Jun 2012 #permalink

They appear to have laptops positioned in front of them which they read from now and then. Horrendous make-up.

That's basically the same thing that Brad Harrub, PhD does (if you look him up on Google Scholar). Except he's working that Ned Flanders thing pretty hard (if Ned Flanders acted like an arrogant a-hole, that is).

By purplekoolaidblog (not verified) on 27 Jun 2012 #permalink

The thermos. Keeps lemonade cold. Keeps coffee hot. How does it know? Another miracle.

By Darwin Harmless (not verified) on 28 Jun 2012 #permalink

The subsequent time I learn a weblog, I hope that it doesnt disappoint me as a lot as this 1. I imply, I do know it was my choice to learn, but I actually thought youd have 1 thing intriguing to say. All I hear can be a bunch of whining about something that you may possibly fix in case you werent too busy searching for attention.

By lvoutleten.com (not verified) on 30 Jun 2012 #permalink