Old blue eyes

Where'd my kid's eyes come from?

Science Daily has a fun update posted on the origins of the blue-eye phenotype. You blue-eyed types had a switch turn off in your OCA2 prevents you from producing melanin in your eyes. Had the whole thing gone, you'd be albinos. What's pretty cool, though, is that by studying the variation in color, we can estimate the age of the mutation:

Variation in the colour of the eyes from brown to green can all be explained by the amount of melanin in the iris, but blue-eyed individuals only have a small degree of variation in the amount of melanin in their eyes. “From this we can conclude that all blue-eyed individuals are linked to the same ancestor,” says Professor Eiberg. “They have all inherited the same switch at exactly the same spot in their DNA.” Brown-eyed individuals, by contrast, have considerable individual variation in the area of their DNA that controls melanin production.

Professor Eiberg and his team examined mitochondrial DNA and compared the eye colour of blue-eyed individuals in countries as diverse as Jordan, Denmark and Turkey. His findings are the latest in a decade of genetic research, which began in 1996, when Professor Eiberg first implicated the OCA2 gene as being responsible for eye colour.

What's also cool about this? As far as evolution is concerned, it shows how neutral mutations arise and are propagated within populations. There's no fitness increase for vision related to blue eyes, though the striking quality of some people's blues might lead to increased sexual selection. I mean, I think my wife's blues are quite gorgeous and think of all of the women out there with blue-tinted contacts.

Texans wrangling for science

This has been dragging on and on as the voices of ignorance in Texas forced the ouster of Christine Comer from the Texas Education Agency and the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research has sought to get its Masters program in science miseducation through. But bit by bit, the voices of reason have come out and fought for science, rationality and evidence.

A few days ago, J. Tinsley Oden, Daniel W. Foster and David Daniel came out with a piece in the Austin Statesman. They write:

"Intelligent design" is not science and should not masquerade as such. Our country is founded on the concept of separation of church and state. Education is within the province of the State, but religious matters are not and, thus, do not belong within our educational system. Science is the systematic acquisition of knowledge through hypothesis and observations that are repeatedly tested, validated, and revised as new evidence emerges. Faith is based upon what one believes and often stems from one's cultural background or upbringing. The resolution of the teachings of science with religious beliefs should remain within the realm of the individual's experience and not taught as science by any institution approved or accredited by the State.

The opinions expressed here represent the unanimous views of the Board of Directors of The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas, a non-profit organization formed in 2004, The membership of TAMEST consists of Texas members of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. [...] Our project involves researching the actions through which Texas can improve K-12 education in the state, especially in science. It is our intent to establish a model for other states to follow in addressing this critical issue.

The unanimous view comes out more and more all the time and yet, the squawkers at the Disco 'Tute and the ICR and AiG keep hailing the fall of Darwinism and the collapse of evolution. Guys, the last time you had a really good argument against the theory of evolution was when Lord Kelvin calculated that the earth couldn't be as old as Darwin suspected it to be. That controversy died a century ago. Science has continued to win the day and evolution has worked. Over and over again the evidence piles up. Read the scholarly or popular journals.

Really, read Phillip Kitcher's Living With Darwin. ID is "dead science." Its hay day came with Paley's Natural Theology in 1802. But by then the arguments were already dismantled in Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Modern science long ago abandoned the idea that we need God to explain anything. The men in TAMEST understand this fact and want to get good science into the classroom, free of the obstructionist crap that creationists, big bang deniers, and climate change "skeptics" keep throwing into the mix.

It strikes me more and more every day how aligned the anti-evolutionists and the climate change "skeptics" are in cahoots. On a Venn Diagram that looked at these two populations, there would be enormous overlap. It's a shame. They continue to hamper our ability to understand our place on the planet as a biological species that has to come to grips that we are playing by the same set of physical and chemical rules that other species play by. Thermodynamics matter people. Evolution happens. They need to warm to the idea because they are really hampering us with effective public relations campaigns that feed us misinformation and wish-thinking.

So it's great to see that in Texas, where science denial is so vocal and well funded by big energy and big religion, people are drawing lines in the sand.

Oden, Foster, and Daniels conclude, "The aim of TAMEST and, we believe, all scientists, is to enhance teaching of true science and to make our public schools and universities excel in science, math and technology." That should be the aim of all science education and all education policies associated with science should be about science. Not sectarian religious wishes and contrived controversies.

Let's give them some real controversy. Let's teach evolution, the big bang, and climate change in their churches.

Forum on how to "come out"

Hello good folks. Need to know what and how to talk to your religious friends and family who don't know you're a non-believer? Come on down!

I'm really glad that Nat & the guys have been making the Penn State Atheist & Agnostic Association so positive. We're not a bunch of satanists and child eaters. Some of us even have kids. And *gasp* love them.

The beast with two backs has the same head

I spend a lot of time looking at creationist nonsense and wondering how they can get through the day when they believe that the rules of evidence change on their whims. Then I read global warming deniers and am left speechless. Sometimes you have to call a spade a spade and say, "Sorry guys. You're deluded, stupid, or both." End of story.
So I found a good example at Pat Robertson's anti-news CBN. It's an ingenious piece of garbage designed to distract the reader from doing anything. We should suppose that our inaction will be counteracted by the almighty?
Check it here.
CBN alleges that:

Global warming is now blamed for everything from Tsunamis to hurricanes, earthquakes, droughts, floods and mudslides. And most of the world's leaders now accept global warming as fact.

Well we do blame global warming for lots of things. But unlike Jefferson (quoted later) we have the data of the whole globe to back up the increased hurricane strength and its potential relationship to floods as the ITCZ changes and messes with evaporation, precipitation, transportation of atmospheric water, and the engine of the earth's climate. The contents of the atmosphere modify its operation the way a diet modifies your body's function. But what the f*** do earthquakes have to do with it?

Few people dispute that the Earth has warmed. But what is disputed is why it is warming, whether man is responsible, and if we should even care.

They are disputing details and predictions. No one contests that humans are the cause of this. We are well past correlations here folks. And those who want to disparage the science are doing so because they have a vested political interest, money, an ideological interest, religious interest, or some combination thereof. This just isn't a controversy. It's a lot like the contrived nonsense over evolution. There is not a bit of scientific controversy here in the broad sense. It is both a fact with predictive theory behind it. And those who think otherwise need to get out of the way. I hate to quote G.W. Bush, but..."You're either with us or against us." Please join us.

Teach-in on climate change

We all have to get on board to create change that will impede climate change. Penn State has been doing a good job on this front. Four of our faculty are on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that won the Nobel Prize with Al Gore last year. This week there's a teach-in at the HUB to bring that all home. GO!!!!!!

Just one more thing on the "peer review" of creation "science"

So I got this comment in an email from a friend of mine whose an anthropologist at Penn State. He gets Nature and thought it was a hoot:

A total goof. More deception: will they allow evolutionist to publish trenchant critiques, counter-data, theory clarification? But it gives the appearance of legitimate science.

Sad.

"Peer-reviewed" Creation "Science"

Oh yeah. Here it is. The folks at Answers in Genesis are publishing a peer-reviewed science journal titled Answers Research Journal. This should be good. Nature News posted the following:

“There have been these kinds of publications in the past,” says Keith Miller, a geologist at Kansas State University in Manhattan, who follows creationism. For the most part, he says, the work is ignored by the scientific community. But those without a science background, including some policy-makers, may not be able to judge the difference in value of a paper in ARJ and a genuine science journal.

This is great. More deception for the masses! I wonder if they are actually going to allow for the critical back and forth of real science. Let's look at their "About" page:

Answers in Genesis is excited to announce the launch of its online technical journal, Answers Research Journal. ARJ is a professional, peer-reviewed technical journal for the publication of interdisciplinary scientific and other relevant research from the perspective of the recent Creation and the global Flood within a biblical framework. All published papers may be freely copied, downloaded, quoted, and distributed for non-commercial and non-sale purposes (as long as the author of each publication is clearly identified, Answers Research Journal is acknowledged as the publication, and the integrity of the work is not compromised).

Technical. Professional. Peer-reviewed. Interdisciplinary. Scientific. Awesome!
But then there's all that nonsense about biblical frameworks, recent Creation, and the Flood. Later on, they assure us that articles will meet "the highest scientific and theological standard." What's theology have to do with the scientific method? When are these guys going to jeopardize their hypotheses? Just 'cause ya' call it science don't make it so guys. Looks like there's a lot of a priori bull**** you have to buy into before you can publish here.
I say we pull a Sokal on these folks and make stuff up for submission that supports their world view. That's what they do: relabel fantasy and myth as science and reality. Who's game?

How much closer to discovering the origin of life? Quite a bit.

"US scientists close to creating artificial life: study"

I really want to let this one speak for itself but know that any of this must proceed in an ethical way.

US scientists have taken a major step toward creating the first ever artificial life form by synthetically reproducing the DNA of a bacteria, according to a study published Thursday.

The move, which comes after five years of research, is seen as the penultimate stage in the endeavor to create an artificial life form based entirely on a man-made DNA genome -- something which has tantalized scientists and sci-fi writers for years.

"Through dedicated teamwork we have shown that building large genomes is now feasible and scalable so that important applications such as biofuels can be developed," said Hamilton Smith, from the J.Craig Venter Institute, in the study published in Science.

We are this much closer...because of evolutionary biology and our understanding of the biochemical interrelatedness of creatures that we can do this.

It's so exciting. But at the heart of it we have to be wise. Be patient and at least consider what we might do from here.

But it's soooo coooooool! It's all over the internet too:
The JCVI Institute
NPR's storyNew York Times

Why the wall of separation?

The U.S. has vaunted itself for overthrowing the Taliban in Afghanistan. Let's see how that's working out. :The New York Times reports

KABUL, Afghanistan — An Afghan court in northern Afghanistan sentenced a journalism student to death for blasphemy for distributing an article from the Internet that was considered an insult to the Prophet Muhammad, the judge in charge of the court said Wednesday.

The student, Sayed Parwiz Kambakhsh, 23, who also works on a local newspaper, was charged with directly insulting Muhammad by calling the prophet "a killer and adulterer," the judge, Shamsurahman Muhmand, said in a telephone interview.

The sentence was immediately denounced as unfair by Mr. Kambakhsh's family and journalists' organizations. Mr. Kambakhsh's brother, Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, denied his brother had committed blasphemy, and said his brother was not given enough time to prepare his defense for the trial and was denied a defense lawyer.

I think unfair might be just a little bit polite. How about insane? Draconian? Evil? Disgusting? Stone-aged? When you read these reports and their pleasant corollaries - in Saudi Arabia where a rape victim was sentenced to 90 lashes because she was in a car with a man to whom she wasn't married, an English woman is nearly killed because she allowed children to name a stuffed bear "Muhammad," or people rioting and killing one another over some cartoons - you need to wonder some things.

Obviously, you have to question whether the guiding principles these people hold dear are good for them. Probably not. Are they practicing a religion of peace? Not so much. Are they blinded by their religious dogma? Yeah.

Are all Muslims like that? Surely not. I don't know any. Are too many? That seems obviously true.

Islam, as far as I can see it, when practiced with zeal, demands a respect for authority that far exceeds one's commitment to one's fellow human being. You must become a slave to Allah and Allah alone and follow the dictates with unmitigated submission. A more placid version of this exists in American fundamentalist Christianity as well. But don't think the "faith heads" aren't out there waiting to demand submission. Dobson doesn't have an enormous following for nothing.

So three cheers for the wall of separation that keeps the tyranny of your god or mine out of the government so that we can all be free.

God the transcendant panopticon

Sometimes when I'm reading things, I am blown away by what we try to do in the name of security. I've just been reading some articles on the use of surveillance equipment - cameras and biometric tools - to "secure" us from terrorists. Of course, none of these technologies have necessarily stopped any terrorists from doing anything and it sure as hell didn't work in either London or the Glasgow airport where Muslim fanatics carried out their faith-based initiatives. But these things are paltry in comparison to what fanatical and even. by subscription, moderate Christians and Muslims contend God or Allah can actually do. Consider this paragraph from "A Watchful State" by Jeffrey Rosen (click to enlarge):

The version of the ever-watching God that the monotheistic traditions propose is just this this sort of being who can go well beyond the abilities of the guards in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon. Bentham wrote:

I FLATTER myself there can now be little doubt of the plan's possessing the fundamental advantages I have been attributing to it: I mean, the apparent omnipresence of the inspector (if divines will allow me the expression,) combined with the extreme facility of his real presence.

The prison guard was to be a mere imitation of the Christian father, a being whose consciousness is so omnipresent and full of judgment as to "induce in the [believer] a state of consciousness and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power." It is, as Christopher Hitchens has written and said publicly, a "celestial dictatorship."

The ultimate Big Brother.

The ultimate Kim Jung Il or Stalin. The ultimate untrusting ruler to whom we are to bow no matter what we see or experience contrary to the dictates who convinces us that we are with him even we aren't aware of being with him.

At the center of the panopticon is a being of such amazing power that it sees out from its celestial tower to see all. Its eye pierces every brains' action in past, present, and future, in detail that even its owner can't even comprehend. In detail so great, we must assume, that even our honest self-deceptions could be seen with such clarity and perfection that we could be guilty even in a state of blissful ignorance. In the world of the monotheistic panopticon God, we are like the orcs of Mordor before the great eye of Sauron.

But because the being is imaginary but believed in by so many as more than an intentional object, it takes on a false consciousness in the brain of each of its holders. As a meme that has evolved to control the masses, few can rival it. "But there really is an ultimate judge and arbiter who knows everything. He's so powerful that he is not only invisible but also outside of space and time but able to still monitor you and everyone else within space and time.

"Love him or despair! Trust him or fall!"

"Look! Listen! Kneel! Pray!"

What sort of love is this when it is predicated on fear? It is no wonder that so many of the faithful invoke Pascal's Wager to convert the faithless or prevent apostasy. They have no privacy even within their own brains. They must "trust in the Lord."

But this "trust" shows us how the idea of Christianity is a religion of servility and domination that primes the populace to kneel before the dear leader and trust the authority. Man. I'm a regular Nietzsche over here.

Why would you want to live in such a place?

One more cute picture of my son...

...with Darwin!

Let's have some Death, Necrophagist, Cynic, and Amorphis

For those of you who don't know, I am a bit of a death metal fan. So it's time to hear Chuck Schuldiner's take on deceit in "Trapped in a Corner"...


...and on organized religion, "Crystal Mountain."


A fine, if not super-exciting to watch, cover of "Crystal Mountain" by Necrophagist.


Cynic's take on the Buddhist concept of Maya in "Veil of Maya":


And some "epic" Finnish myth from Amorphis with "Black Winter Day"...

...and live too!

Now I will post cute pictures of my son and me

This is Alexander Dmitri Buckland, my 7-month-old offspring of ultimate awesomeness. We call him Sacha. I will spare your eyes the gushings of a gag-gah dad. Not bad for a little primate.

He loves our cat Floyd more than most things and regularly tries to stuff the cat's head into his organ of analysis - his mouth - causing some fur bits to get in there. The cat is amazingly patient for being 17.

Here he is with his Stegosaurus from the Utah Natural History Museum. All dinosaurs all the time! You can see the head is about to be eaten. He's working on cutting his razor sharp incisors to take on large Jurassic herbivores. Soon my boy. Soon.




One of the things I love about babies is how big their heads are. In this pic, his head looks almost as big as mine. It might be a little fatter than mine. Maybe.



And finally...Sacha in the Hannity podium. He sits in a seat, surrounded by a bunch plastic materials that divert your attention, and he can loudly declare basically unintelligible nonsense that he believes is very important. Just like Sean Hannity.



Love that kid.

An old man's conversion might be more spin than reality

When I attended the final day of the Dover trial in late 2005, heard the news that Antony Flew, the academic world's most famous atheist (see entries about his work here), had become something of an Intelligent Design advocate. It was unclear whether or not he was actually a Christian or what. But the vanguard of the atheist movement had lost an icon to the power of conversion. So it seemed anyway.

I was just poking around and found this article,"The Turning of an Atheist," in the New York Times archive from this past year. Since Flew's move away toward ID, a lot of Christians have been celebrating. Evangelicals have been saying stuff like, "Even Antony Flew accepts an intelligent designer. Why can't you?" But if they read the record (as I haven't done and only just now have looked into) there isn't much to actually celebrate.

He's a deist, though not in the sense of Jefferson or Franklin, he says. The article quotes him:

As Flew’s profile in the Christian world rose, he was also courted by Biola University, the conservative Christian school outside Los Angeles. On May 11, 2006, Biola awarded Flew the second Phillip E. Johnson Award for Liberty and Truth, named for the author of “Darwin on Trial.” At the Biola ceremony, Flew mocked the revealed religion of his audience and flaunted his allegiance to deism: “The deist god, unlike the god of the Jewish, Christian or, for heaven’s sake, the Islamic revelation, is neither interested in nor concerned about either human beliefs or human behavior,” he told the small crowd. Jim Underdown, who was there reporting for a skeptics’ think tank, said he was surprised that the Christians would want him. But the Christians, it turned out, were not concerned.

Why be concerned? Someone who looks like someone who might be the enemy of your enemy might sort of be your friend. Right? And it also seems that these wafflings are the signs of a man whose brain and body are succumbing to age, whose wits are much weakened. Having read his summaries of Hume, the following comes as a bit sad:

"The statement which I most regret making during the last few months was the one about Habermas’s book on the alleged resurrection of Jesus bar Joseph. I completely forgot Hume’s to my mind decisive argument against all evidence for the miraculous. A sign of physical decline.”

It only gets worse too. He is the alleged author of There Is A God, but he can't remember the writings of people he cites in the book and can't remember how well he knows people. He didn't actually write the book. It was written by a noted Evangelical, Roy Varghese...who also didn't write the whole book because he was abetted by Bob Hostetler, a pastor from Ohio. Opportunism knows no bounds. Use the old man as a football.
"They’re misusing him,” [Paul] Kurtz says, referring to the Christians. “They’re worried about atheists, and they’re trying to find an atheist to be on their side.”

Who's an Imperialist?

Over the Expelled! movie blog , Ben Stein has written a steaming pile of crap. You'd think that someone who wrote speeches for Nixon might be able to connect dots in a reasonable way. He's done it before. But it looks as though when it comes to Darwin, he is...how to say this nicely...cranially-rectally inverted.

Yeah. His head resides in his ass.

Stein takes some moments to set up a non sequitur from Marx and Darwin so that he can make this inane analysis:

Darwin offered the most compelling argument yet for Imperialism. It was neither good nor bad, neither Liberal nor Conservative, but simply a fact of nature. In dominating Africa and Asia, Britain was simply acting in accordance with the dictates of life itself. He was the ultimate pitchman for Imperialism.

This all ad hominem nonsense that has nothing whatever to do with what the Theory of Evolution actually describes or predicts. As I and lots of others have written before, to establish your moral system on what "is" is to change "is" to ought. It does not follow that because animals compete for resources in order to secure their own reproductive fitness that human beings should dominate one another. It's interesting to read something like this because Peter Singer has written in The Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation that we can use our understanding of how humans have evolved to form a more tolerant and equitable society that creates the "expanding circle" so the speak.

Suffice it to say that evolution doesn't tell us how we ought to act. It might well inform any discussion of human behavior and tell us ways that we might better structure society to accomplish any number of goals. But it cannot tell us whether those goals are ethically or morally good (see this recent post).

But Stein is making a genetic fallacy here by claiming that the cultural milieu in which Darwin formulated The Origin of Species somehow determines how we use the theory of evolution today. He does the same thing with Hitler and the Third Reich too, making a genuine reductio ad Hitlerum. It also pointlessly muddies the waters and impugns the character of current Darwinists by suggesting that they are imperialists and racists. Is this a joke? It must be. Or maybe he's serious when he writes:

Now, we know that Imperialism had a short life span. Imperialism was a system that took no account of the realities of the human condition. Human beings do not like to have their countries owned by people far away in ermine robes. They like to be in charge of themselves.

Whose an Imperialist?

Richard Dawkins, David Sloan Wilson, and Dan Dennett? Or, say, Sweden, Iceland, or France, where acceptance of evolution is very high? Nope.

AH YES! The United States is in the Middle East occupying Iraq and carrying out its super-hegemonic inhuman trade policies with the help of the IMF, WTO, and the World Bank, all nicely driven by the economy of a so-called Christian nation and its evolution-denying populace. And hasn't Stein defended the new imperial presidency of George Bush? He did work for Nixon after all. Stein has said:

[Bush] is going to go down in history as one of the great peacemakers and democracy-builders in the history of the world," and that his reputation will grow "by leaps and bounds.

If by "great peacemaker"you mean "crappy imperialist" and by "leaps and bounds" you mean by "stumbles and errors" then you're dead on. Otherwise, "Love is hate, "and "I love Big Brother."

Stein concludes with this piece of false humility:

Maybe we would have a new theory: We are just pitiful humans. Life is unimaginably complex. We are still trying to figure it out. We need every bit of input we can get. Let’s be humble about what we know and what we don’t know, and maybe in time, some answers will come.

We are human. Some of us are sometimes pitiful (read: Ben Stein while he works as the Disco 'Tute's PR guy). Life is comlplex and we are trying to figure it out. But its complexity has become increasingly well-understood because biologists, biochemists, zoologists, anthropologists, and medical scientists have decided that while complexity makes things difficult, it's no reason to cease working and throwing up your arms and saying, "Gee golly! It's so complex. I can't imagine how it came together. God must have done it!" What a non-answer.

So why doesn't Stein do the humble thing and admit that he doesn't know spit and that maybe in time, some answers will come. But in the meantime, he should find a better job. He can always praise Big Brother some more.

Over here goes faith. Over there goes reason. They mustn't touch.

For all of Steven Andrew’s talk in the Austin Statesman of compromise between science and religion, he seems to fundamentally miss something: the proposition that God did something to aid descent with modification at all is unnecessary to the theory of evolution’s descriptive or predictive power.

While I applaud the attempt to reconcile the sides in a very NOMA way, it ends up turning into watered down pandering:

It's no coincidence that professional creationists try to frame the issue as a struggle between science and religion. It's a false dichotomy to be sure, but it's also a powerful public relations tactic, one that serves their goals well. But despite what creationists may say, the choice is not between science and religion, or belief vs. atheism. If faith is an integral part of one's life and science is an interest, the question of how the Creator went about [c]reating is worth contemplating. And for the faithful who carefully and honestly study the fascinating bounty of scientific evidence, there can be only one liberating conclusion: God is one hell of a scientist, and He's not exactly a bad engineer either.

All of the astronomical, geological, linguistic, anthropological, or biological data has divined nothing to prop up a ghost in the machine of biological processes. To add God or any supernatural cause or influence into the mix is to muddy the waters where they are often very clear. Occam's razor folks.

In a sense, creationists are considerably more honest than their more moderate religious brothers and sisters. Both tend to say that God is omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. What creationists see, though, in evolution is that the evolution, when understood as it actually is, makes all of those beliefs unnecessary and even frighteningly absurd.

If he is omnipotent then why make beings in his own image who are so weak next to the might of say a tiger or the long extinct dinosaurs? If he is omnipresent then why the apparent absence? If he is omniscient then why “design” creatures like whales who live in an environment that can drown them at any time or give them hips? Why place the human female’s birth canal, urinary tract, and anus so close together, virtually insuring so many infections in their lifetimes? What sort of love for your creations is that?

Each of those questions has an actual evolutionary answer.

Andrews says that religious folks should be. “honored and humble at being descended from a long line of God's wondrous creations.” But to do that, we have to believe that the all-good and loving lord of the universe created human beings from a process that led to the agonizing deaths of billions upon billions of organisms. If death is that which is to be conquered in Christianity, then why use death as a tool to bring about those beings you have created in your own image especially when you are going to embody yourself on Earth to kill yourself according to your own will so that none of your dying creations ever has to really die again? Why be so sloppy?

Creationists understand that once the evolutionary meme gets a hold in someone’s mind, their conscious choices about the nature of God almost have to change:
1. Evolution must be denied as a theory.
2. People make inscrutable claims like “God works in mysterious ways,” and then they compartmentalize their belief in a perfect God and accept evolution. This is a sort of perfect God of the gaps argument.
3. God becomes less than the perfect being he is alleged to be in our common myths and becomes a messy tinkerer who constantly intervenes in a sloppy way. This would be an active, ingenious, but far from perfect version of #2.
4. God almost wholly disappears and becomes nature’s God a la Spinoza or Jefferson or Paine. It is the prime mover that imbued the universe with its suchness and now exists…well…who knows?
5. God disappears and we are left with the much less troublesome and considerably more elegant and parsimonious nature of the material universe as it is which seems to have created itself or be one of a nearly infinite set of universes. Really, we don’t know the answer to this question.

That isn’t to say that an atheistic universe relieves us of existential anguish or moral obligations in any way. In fact, it might well raise the ante because we are the most sapient and sentient beings we know of. We have to take care of one another and not count on the words of men who have claimed to speak for the creator of the universe.

Instead, we are the makers of our own fates. To quote at length from Rush’s “Free Will”:

You can choose from phantom fears
And kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will
…
All preordained
A prisoner in chains
A victim of venomous fate
Kicked in the face
You can’t pray for a place
In heaven’s unearthly estate

Each of us
A cell of awareness
Imperfect and incomplete
Genetic blends
With uncertain ends
On a fortune hunt
That’s far too fleet...

Evolution shows us how we have come to be. In some senses it also answers why. In the proximate sense it tells us that our parents were driven by their procreative desires to have sex and reproduce. Why exactly that one sperm out of the tens of millions from your father’s ejaculate is not a question to even ask. It was something of a crapshoot – cum shot really – with a lot of chance, chaos, and biological impediments from the moment our father’s semen entered our mother’s vagina. We could have just as easily been someone else, spontaneously aborted, not implanted as an embryo, or been unrealized potential as two unused gametes reabsorbed by our bodies. In fact, every day, tens of trillions of potential humans die as male human sperm die. Our chances of being us were infinitesimally small. It is so staggeringly small that our brains are not well-equipped to deal with it. Figuring out such probabilities and dealing with notions of chance are not instinctive for us middle-world creatures so imbued with intention.

This intentional stance lands us facing the stoic face of ultimate cause. In the evolved universe, the ultimate cause is merely the first event that triggered every contingency that has been since. It all seems to be merely a manner of matter and energy operating in the void of space. This universe seems to bring with it no “meaning” for us human beings. Why should it? What is the meaning of a rock sitting on a precipice, wearing away in the wind of the Gobi desert, unobserved by human beings? What is the “meaning” of the fusion at the center of the star Deneb? What is the “meaning” of Jupiter’s 61 satellites, the toxic bacterial cocktail of a Komodo Dragon’s saliva, the gear:inch ratio of a single-speed bicycle, or that honey bees see into the electromagnetic spectrum and we do not? The idea of meaning for human beings is a human concoction. We look for meaning where there isn’t any simply because we are so used to manufacturing it all the time. When we encounter something that is meaningless in terms of its emotional or cognitive content, we see it as a threat. It never was as we are. That, being unimaginable, scares us and alienates us. We are literally surrounded by a universe unaware that we are here. All of its particulars, that we adore and

The processes have not been what you might call “personal” or “loving.” For the most part. But when you consider – you, a person of flesh and blood and brain - how the impersonal forces of the universe have played out, you realize that they have indeed manifested in that very thing that we call love.

Many of us have had the good fortune of having caring parents who loved us and loved one another so much that they would give their own lives for us: their own possible further reproduction and accruement of more resources. Have you seen bonobos mate whether to soothe, play, or to procreate? Have you seen the golden retriever with her puppies as they suckle while she lies sleepily on the floor, occasionally nudging a runt to a teat? Or even the cold crocodile as she moves her young in her mouth across the broad and murky swamp? Perhaps you will say that those are animals subject only to the cold processes of nature and we aren’t like them. But aren’t we also carbon-based life forms subject to the same physical and chemical laws that they are?

We are the super-conscious ones on this planet, each an admixture of our parents’ genes with some novel mutations. We are on a fortune hunt that seems to fleet. In reality, though, it’s not too fleet.

What Andrews has posed as a truce is actually the acceptance of the partitioned brain that wants to have its cake and eat it too. Evolution doesn’t let you do that unless you get into some elaborate intellectual, ethical, and metaphysical acrobatics. Science, both as a method and as a body of historical knowledge, is surely imperfect. But it is the best spyglass we have to investigate nature and evolution is one of its best and most successful lenses and continuing to invite people into these elaborate schemes of self-deception and inconsistency is to continue to obscure free and thoughtful inquiry. Let’s take out Occam’s Razor and cut off the gristle of nonsense.

Walking with Dinosaurs. LIVE!!!

We all know that dinosaurs occupy a special place in my brain. In fact, I've cried watching Jurassic Park because the idea of seeing a live dinosaur just blows me away. When Allen Grant sees the duck-bills in herds and the Brachiasaurus feeding from the treetop, I get goofy. If Jurassic Park were real, I'd drop almost everything to get there.
Sadly, we humans never coexisted with them. Sad for me but good for early humans. We'd have been some bad lunch and never gotten here.
So why the long intro? The BBC has put together the following Walking With Dinosaurs Live! and it's coming to Penn State:

Walking with Dinosaurs: The Live Experience, based on the award-winning Walking with Dinosaurs BBC television series, will present seven performances in the BJC March 20 through 23. Tickets range in price from $29.50 to $69.50 and will go on sale at noon Saturday.

The show, which took 50 designers, six years and $20 million to put together, features 15 dinosaurs including a 36-foot-tall Brachiosaurus and a 23-foot-tall Tyrannosaurus Rex. It has already been shown in 26 other markets, but it's more than just a live version of Jurassic Park.

"It's a museum that actually visits you. What's unique about this is it interacts with you," BJC Programming Director Bernie Punt said. The dinosaurs will react and respond to what is going on in the audience.

Do you think they'll ever make a Liopleurodon? 150 tons? 300,000 pounds? The largest predator the earth ever knew. More than twice the size of the Sperm Whale.






I can't wait!

Some atheist and non-religious standards

Thanks to Marsupial Jones for this link to some great quotes on religion and its problems:

‘Two hands working can do more than a thousand clasped in prayer.’

‘Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a God superior to themselves. Most Gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.’ - Robert A. Heinlein

‘I have examined all the known superstitions of the world, and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.’ - Thomas Jefferson

Read on!

Science should prevail in Texas

Since the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research and Don McElroy, the chair of the State Board of Education have tried to slide teaching dead science and anti-science in Texas at the high school and graduate levels, some thoughtful people have come out to defend logic, reason, and the scientific method from the private sectarian belief built on legends.
The Austin Statesman ran this article, "Science should prevail at the Texas Education Agency" written by lecturer Jeff Leon of the UTeach program at University of Texas. It's a fine riposte in this battle in the culture war.
He makes some fantastic observations, including:

At the exit of the "Splash!" exhibit at our beloved Barton Springs is a quote by American Naturalist John Muir that eloquently captures one of the deeper implications of evolutionary theory: "When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world." How does this idea render our existence less meaningful? Where is the threat to metaphysical speculation? The only tension is between literal, fundamentalist dogma and enlightened understanding. It is unspeakably sad that we will revisit this debate in the Texas Education Agency hearings on textbook adoptions later this year.

The idea cannot help but render your view of yourself as something integrated into the whole of nature. We are one organism among many, attempting to make our ways in the universe and make sense of it. When you understand how we are a part of that biotic ecology, itself a subsystem of the whole Earth's system, itself a part of the solar system, and out to the Milky Way, our paltry ideas of limited imaginary specialness turn to dust. When you have a child and see that the very fluid of your and your mate's bodies have formed this amazing and resplendent creature, you see yourself attached to another part of the world. Evolution extends that wonder far beyond your own child. While you may not worship nature, you are almost compelled to bask in its unintelligent genius.

We cannot bow to the fundamentalist dogma because we have a longer view: a view that sees our connections on Earth going back over 3 billion years. Darwin was right in this regard as I have posted in the banner of my blog:

"There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved."

When you can't do better than point...

...and laugh. Look at Sandwalk and read through the creationist madness over yonder. It's a great hodgepodge of entertainment. Creationist microbiologists? Biblical understandings of microbes? Really? Give it up folks. It's a house of cards.
You can read more of the Answers Proceedings of Madness and Cthulhu here.
Paragraph 2 reads:

The task of creation microbiology is enormous, considering the number of microbial species which have yet to be discovered and characterized. Some estimates put the number of bacterial species on earth at 10 million. If there is a unique bacteriophage species for every bacterial species, then the number of viral species could easily be estimated to be several orders of magnitude greater than 10 million. The task of understanding and observing the microbial world is daunting when we consider that we have only documented around 5,000 bacterial species. In addition there is much yet to be learned about algae, fungi, macro-parasites, and the enigmatic “chimeric” lichens. Could there be other creatures composed entirely of microbes of which we are unaware? In addition, how do we classify microbes taxonomically from a creation perspective? Do they fit into conventional or baraminic taxonomical convention? How do we view them biblically? What day were they created? What were they originally created for? Were they created as separate baramins or were they created as parts of other organisms? Or were they created as part of the earth on Day Three? These are just some of the intriguing questions facing the field of creation microbiology.

Wow. Step back again. Read. Wow.

This brings up the baramin concept: a basically empty concept that has no way to reasonably and systematically call a mammal a mammal, an avian an avian, or an amphibian an amphibian unless it does comparative physiology, embryology, genetics, and biogeography which...interestingly...all lead to cladistics and phylogeny as we know them. Baramin is itself a modern anachronistic word from two Hebrew words that weren't intended to be put together but that's how language evolves...mutations and selections ya' know? It's sort of like "cdesign proponentsists" in a circuitous way.

But the concept of kind is totally unclear in Genesis and it is only with great post hoc difficulty and the triumphs of phylogeny that those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible can say that the kinds can be classified appropriately. And when they encounter the fossil record, what was Archaeopteryx or Quetzlcoatlus or any dinosaur or icthyosaur or...you get the picture.

The term kind has no predictive or observational power except for that which is brought to it with the lens of modern science. In the 19th century it was not so rich as it is now. How convenient that paleontology and geology have progressed in their knowledge since Sir Richard Owen and Charles Lyell and given us so much more to deal with that goes well beyond the Linnaean system into modern cladistics.

Creationism parasitizes from modern science and yields no classification system of its own and no way to explain the marvel of nature other than "God did it."

Wow. Step back. Wow. What a non-explanation. So they have to borrow the findings of evolutionary biology to prop up "God did it" and then claim the victory while they make totally ill-informed and debunked claims about what may or may not have happened on the Third Day of the Creation?

Aren't they embarased yet?

So HIV is irreducibly complex

Wouldn't that be a sign of the intelligent designer? Of the creator? Listen to this podcast from Science magazine.

I actually find this podcast an excellent piece of research distillation on what is happening in the HIV life cycle, how it replicates in humans, how many genes it has, and what proteins it creates. It's good science for the public who can stand a bit of jargon.

Maybe it's Satan...or maybe it's just about how materials interact in space and time to create horrid problems for us conscious beings and how we can deal with those problems for our survivability.

Oh Texas! Even the ICR are too low for thee?

Good times so far. Though the Institute for Creative Creation Nonsense Research wants to get its graduate degree certified in science education, Texas has declined for the time being according to The Statesman.

Higher Education Commissioner Raymund Paredes said last week that he was posing questions to the institute about whether it should offer a degree in creation studies instead of one in science education and about policies that require students and faculty members to believe in the biblical account of creation.

For instance, the students and faculty are required to believe that humans did not evolve from animals but were created in fully human form from the start.

So those who attend the ICR are expected to deny the findings of science in order to get a Master's degree in science education? This comes as no shock to me or any other creationist watchers but come on now.

If you are going to pose questions they should be things like, "Do you accept that every aspect of science supports evolution from astronomy to biochemistry?" or "When has any species ever been observed to come into being de novo when human beings have basically formed new species of domesticated pigeons, dogs, pigs, cattle, and the species related to cabbages and bananas?"

Silence.

"Right...NEXT!!!"

IDC has no predictions so what's it to do?

Of course! Solicit its greatest hits on a blog! Right! That's how really scientifically sciencey science is done! Right!?! I tend to avoid trolling but this one is just too good.
William Dembski, the fruit "Newton" of (mis)information theory has apparently been approached by a talking head show pundit. They've asked him to provide "samples of things that intelligent design theory has predicted, which researchers have later determined to be true?" Don't worry though! He assures his readers thusly: "I have my own list of answers, but I’d like to hear those of this group." Right on.
See, IDC has no predictions. Even perusing the comments is something of a scream. Like this one:

1) Origin of life: Intelligent design can predict that science will never be able to explain how this complex life arose (homochirality). This prediction has been confirmed every year for decades.

2) History of life: Life is shown too complex to develop slowly over time. Life will appear rapidly and remain in stasis. This has been confirmed countless times, i.e. the big bangs of life.

3) Irreducibly complex living forms exist.

4) Molecular machines.

5) Evolutionary convergence.

So #1 is a negative argument against evolution. #2 is a negative argument against evolution. #3 doesn't support ID as a predictor. #4 doesn't support ID as a predictor. #5 is an empty statement. Great!

This is fun. What about the next one:

That after “billions and billions” of generations of any particular biological entity no new morphology will occur due to random mutations and natural selection.

So this is another thing that they won't test and is actually a test of evolution. Interestingly, the fossil record scraps this one as do the biochemical changes discovered in bacteria that evolved a previously non-existent enzyme to break down nylon and thereby stumbling upon a way to increase their fitness in the dump they were living in. That's novelty for you.

The others are mostly subjective statements about the appearance of design and the purposeful arrangement of parts. These guys really don't get it. At all.

Vive Ignorant Dumbass Creationism!

An all-purpose takedown on reading morality into evolution

Hitler claimed that he believed that the Aryan race was the greatest race on Earth. He also denied Darwin. He did not accept descent with modification by means of natural selection. He believed in divine providence which guided his actions. There was a divine will guiding the rise of Germany and the Third Reich and "our God" (see Triumph of the Will) guided Hitler and the Nazi party. However twisted Hitler's ideas about anything might be, he cloaked himself in the language of German nationalist religion and appealed to long-held Lutheran and Catholic anti-semitism. The other side of Social Darwinism (it should be called Social Malthusianism after Thomas Malthus) comes from free-market folks like Carnegie who wanted to maintain their exploitive labor practices to elevate themselves and their wealth. Third, modern evolutionary theory trashes the whole notion of race as a pure construct.

And Hitler's master plan had nothing to do with...I don't know...Martin Luther in whose On the Jews and Their Lies you can read the floorplan for the Final Solution. Read it. You'll find therein the love of the founder of the Protestant Reformation for the "chosen people." Whole lot of love from Jesus in these passages:

First, to set fire to their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will ever again see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be done in honor of our Lord and of Christendom, so that God might see that we are Christians, and do not condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying, cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his Christians. For whatever we tolerated in the past unknowingly_and I myself was unaware of it_will be pardoned by God. But if we, now that we are informed, were to protect and shield such a house for the Jews, existing right before our very nose, in which they lie about, blaspheme, curse, vilify, and defame Christ and us (as was heard above), it would be the same as if we were doing all this and even worse ourselves, as we very well know.

Lutherans made up the majority of believers, and the majority of the population of Germany before and during the Third Reich. The Christian population of Germany accounted for some 90-95%, there were 600 independent church newspapers with 17,000,000 subscriptions (some of which may have overlapped in single households), and over 5,000 theology students.

From Bishop John Shelby Spong:

"Jesus is . . . depicted, especially in the Book of John, as being guilty of what we today would surely call antisemitism. Indeed, the hatred of the Jews that has been the dark underside of Christianity for two thousand years is fed by the pejorative attitudes found in the Christian Scriptures and even in the supposed words of Jesus. It has led to pogroms, ghettos, segregated housing and clubs, defaced synagogues, Krystallnacht, and Dachau."

But I'm not sure which "lie" has been around long enough, the "lie" that:

1. a man whose existence is contested was born of a virgin, effected miracles, and defeated death (good job on not accomplishing the stated goal) or
2. that organisms descend with modification.

Hmmm. I think that the nonsense from number one has been around a lot longer and been repeated as prayers and inculcation much longer than evolution has. The alleged source of our morality sure did a lot to stop the pogroms of the middle ages and beyond. During the Final Solution, where was the source of our morality to protect humanity from the evils of totalitarianism? Where was the church who should be so mighty if it is sanctioned by "the Lord"? It's pathetic that some people can take credit for divine will when things go well and then blame it on Satan or evolution when it doesn't. It exonerates them and their history. They are absolved. Hypocrisy.

The fact or theory of evolution (read: descent with modification or changes in allele frequencies over time in populations of organisms in space and time that result in phenotypic differences) contains no moral statements. It's a non sequitur. If it's cruel to human beings' senses of themselves then that is their belief.

The data that back up evolutionary theory nor the theory itself are a set of statements about what ought to be. Darwin recognized that fact. It is a statement about what has been, has come to be, and what is. That natural selection affects the survival of a species is not a moral question unless you choose to make it one. The only people who have to worry about that are theists who believe that their god(s) are behind everything and must assume that their god(s) is/are omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipresent. In order to prop up their beliefs about the moral character of the universe, they imbue mindless material processes like chemical affinities and the laws of physics with intent. To do so leads to metaphysical claims that defy scientific understanding, are not supported by evidence if not flatly falsified by the evidence, and the moralizing of that which is amoral.

If is not immoral. It is amoral. To read into the theory of evolution that it mandates racism or any other moral stance is to just flatly misread it because of an ideological principle that precedes it.

Don't use evolution to discover how we must act. We can understand why we act the way we act and how it came to be that way, but it's not going to give us a rubric for moral judgment. That's why we have moral philosophy and ethics. Science informs those decisions very well with data. But it doesn't tell us what to do.

The theory of evolution is a tool. Like any tool, it can be abused. No doubt about it. Eugenicists have done awful things in the U.S. and Germany and tried to prop up their ideologies about "Aryan science" and "Aryan superiority" with absolutely bizarre versions of readings of evolution. Notice, that science calls all of that pseudoscience. The "experiments" that eugenicists carried out were not jeopardized hypotheses but a priori ideological statements that were then propped up by cobbled together data that was itself wildly inconsistent. They then used people's ignorance, as ideologues, to foist these ideas onto the public.

Atomic theory is a tool. Look at the harm it has wreaked on Earth. Edward Teller turned it into a moral theory. Bonkers. It should not be a moral tool. Science is not a moral tool. It is a tool used by humans to extract information about nature from nature. That's it. Something that doesn't fall therein is not a scientific consideration.

Religion is a tool. Granted I think it's the most abused tool on earth besides economics, but it's a tool for creating communities and trying to understand our existence in the universe. When it makes claims about the nature of reality, it becomes a scientific enterprise that can be falsified. It so happens that many of the fact claims of literalists have been falsified to their chagrin.

Have their moral statement? Many of them not. "Do unto others as they have done unto you." Is this a falsifiable statement by evolutionary theory? Of course not. Can science inform us on why or how we might carry out such an ethical stance, how we have in the past, how other primates or species do, or why it might be advantageous for hunter-gatherer bands or tribes to act according to Jesus', Confucius', or Kant's aphorism (who each stated it a bit differently)? Yes. But it will be entirely based on a cost-benefit analysis or on the observance of behavior none of which will give us the actual instinct to do it...an instinct that most human beings have quite powerful for their kin and close communities.

I think that we need to understand that the Final Solution was a convergence of corrupt forces at work. Too many morally bankrupt Christians and powerful men willing to use any means necessary to accomplish their goals whether pseudoscientific, religious, racial, nationalistic, or technological. But surely, let's put to rest the notion that Darwin was the formulator of the Final Solution.

Christo-fascists want your kids more than you think they do

Generally, it's dangerous to make the reductio ad Hitlerum. In the case of much of the Christian Supremacist/American Christo-Fascist movement, the shoe fits. Hitler said,

"When an opponent declares, 'I will not come over to your side,' I say calmly, 'Your child belongs to us already...What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing but this new community'."

This as about the total reeducation of Germany for the rise of a great Aryan nation. While I don't suspect that Dobson, Falwell, D. James Kennedy, Hinn, Hagee, Ahmanson, Bauer, et al actively think about liquidating us non-believers, apostates, and different believers, it is clear that they wish to replace our current way of life with something total. Within their own churches they have been quite successful at integrating every part of life from family to social to business into the folds of their churches.

Schools have to follow from that. Here are just a few tastes:

James Dobson:
“Children are the prize to the winners in the second great civil war. Those who control what young people are taught and what they experience – what they see, hear, think, and believe – will determine the future course for the nation.” (*7&8) Children At Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids, Word Publishing, 1990, p. 35

Pat Robertson:
“[T]he only hope for the inner city is vouchers, so that all the churches can go in and plant Christian schools in the inner cities and capture these fatherless young people for Christ and teach them biblical discipline and so forth. It’s either God or it’s ruin for our country, I do believe.” – “The 700 Club,” Sept. 3, 1996, (reported in Church & State, October 1996, p. 19)

D. James Kennedy:
“This is our land. This is our world. This is our heritage, and with God’s help, we shall reclaim this nation for Jesus Christ. And no power on earth can stop us.” (*7&8) – Character & Destiny: A Nation In Search of Its Soul, (Zondervan Publishing House, 1997)

These are far from complete. They are, however, representative. They vault a militant Christian view into the place of citizenship that belies their so-called belief in our the good of our democratic republic. The slave mentality bred into too many fundamentalists of any religion makes for a population ready to relinquish its sovereignty to submit itself to the Leviathan of a theocracy.

Make no mistake, too many of the Christian Right want our kids as warriors against reason. Given the opportunity, they would pass their own laws to legally dismantle the Constitution.

Nature special on dogs

Nature featured an excellent show tonight on how dogs and humans have increased one anothers' fitness. It was a spectacular program discussing the selective pressures that humans have placed on dogs for the last 15,000 years to get the breeds we have now.

Most of this show discussed how quickly dogs are thought to have come about. Likely, the proto-dog came about in one human lifetime from the wolf in China (so far as Swedish biologist, Peter Savolainen, has ascertained) and then the dog spread from there all over the world as human beings and their dogs migrated. Wolves who lived in close proximity to humans and their easily-consumed waste came to not only adapt to one another's presence but came to rely on one another (see interview with biologist Raymond Coppinger). Those wolves who were, for lack of a better term, friendly, had a fitness advantage over their peers because they had comfortable access to a scavenged food source that more aggressive wolves did not. In a few generations, the selective pressures changed considerable, requiring a smaller animal.They showed how a Russian geneticist, Dmitri Belyaev, easily managed to transform breeding foxes into a species that is now tamer and has other features that weren't selected for initially but have remained consistent as the selective pressure remains.

The dog's adaptability has enabled us to achieve much of what we have. It's quite possible that had the ancient Chinese not domesticated the dog, the incredible pastoral and agricultural feats of all of the great civilizations would not have come to be. We might owe even more than we knew and the moniker "Man's best friend" is more than well-deserved.

My father is very ill.

A couple of days ago my dad went to the doctor and learned that he has pneumonia for the sixth time in 4 years. They gave him three days of oral antibiotics, two shots of antibiotics each day, and then some inhalers. Yesterday he was told that he hadn't gotten worse or better and that he should get to the hospital. He was admitted to the Mt. Nittany Medical Center where he has been given some more bouts of high-end antibiotics, had blood drawn, and now has oxygen in his nose.

If you know my dad, you probably understand that he has hated retirement. His knees are shot. He has diabetes. Neuropathy in his feet. Sometimes he drinks too much at a go (though not for some time) and falls down because his body is not the best load-bearing vehicle in the world and the combination of shitty hips, knees, and feet work poorly when he's wobbly. Lots of pain. And the hospital makes him feel dehumanized.

To make this as clear as I can: It is my belief that my father has been waiting to die since he retired and I have a hunch (that I will ask about today) that he doesn't want these measures being taken...that he feels finished. Why wait? Why keep delaying when it means that he will be sitting in the living room, waiting for the afternoon to arrive so that he can have a martini and check out again for the evening? The joys of his life are few and far between anymore. It isn't clear to me that seeing Sacha (who he won't hold anymore because his right rotator cuff necroticized so that he can't lift his right arm more than ten degrees), chatting with Catharine, Julie, Jess, or me, seeing the Dantisti (his weekly group for reading Dante's Divine Comedy), or reading another mystery novel breaks the monotony of the pain and the occasional stabs in his legs...the nightmares about having his feet amputated.

But perhaps he wants more days and more time. More to learn about the destruction of the Republican party. More chances to smile at Sacha and shout at referees who fail to call holding against the Wolverines.

Longevity does not equal happiness. I love my dad. He is one of my best friends. He is my father. My teacher. My confidant. I am prepared for him to die...for him to cease being what he is and become an ebullient man again in my and my family's memory. To become more the man he once was. A tall man unhunched by years of slow decay whose head was high and voice boomed as he recited Tennyson or Pope or Rich. Who played squash and chopped wood in Rothrock State Forest decked in denim and flannel and armed with Husqvarna, splitter, wood ax and coffee thermos. A man whose greatest joy was to merge his self with his class and all those around him to get to the aesthetic truth of every matter from the book of Job to Moby Dick to movies he termed "major" (read: Independence Day or The Terminator). A man in love with people and their stories, generous of spirit, and whose wit was more often like a filthy-minded 15-year-old than a man of his years might be suspected to have.

I love my father. He knows this. I know this. I am eager for every moment I have left to spend with him.

Barack Obama on church-state separation

Here's Barack Obama's statement on the separation of church and state. It's not surprising given that he is the former editor of the Harvard Law Review and is a constitutional law professor.

I went to a Catholic school in a Muslim country, so I was studying the Bible and catechisms by day, and, at night, you'd hear the [Muslim] prayer call. My mother was a deeply spiritual person. Her view always was that underlying these religions was a common set of beliefs about how you treat other people and how you aspire to act, not just for yourself, but also for the greater good. I am a follower, as well, of our civic religion. I'm a big believer in the separation of church and state. I am a big believer in our constitutional structure. I'm a law professor at the University of Chicago teaching constitutional law.

[To read more of Obama's and other candidate's statements on a breadth of issues go to onthissues.org.]

House Resolution tries to rewrite history

Here come the would-be theocrats trying to jam religious revisions of history into the public square with a H. R. 888. It's a good one...if you want to take a step toward a Christo-fascist state that is.

It reads:

H. RES. 888

Affirming the rich spiritual and religious history of our Nation's founding and subsequent history and expressing support for designation of the first week in May as `American Religious History Week' for the appreciation of and education on America's history of religious faith.

It then goes into a litany of quotations from the founding fathers, some of their actions, some of their beliefs, some of their statements some of which are totally out of context, and tries to prop up the notion that we are a Christian nation. We are a nation whose populace identifies itself primarily as Christians. But nowhere in the founding documents of the United States do we find that Jesus, the Holy Spirit, or our heavenly father turn up.

We do get the four mentions of the Creator and cited thusly in H.R. 888:

Whereas in 1776, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence with its 4 direct religious acknowledgments referring to God as the Creator (`All people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness'), the Lawgiver (`the laws of nature and nature's God'), the Judge (`appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world'), and the Protector (`with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence');

You might ask yourself, "Who wrote this document? Ah yes! Thomas Jefferson!" Jefferson was a deist who rejected the miracles of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus, and the idea of an interceding deity in the affairs of humanity. The notion of "nature's God" is in line with the belief of Benedict de Spinoza who was excommunicated from Judaism because of his belief that God and Nature were one and the same. The Lawgiver was not the God of the Bible and nor was "Divine Providence" the execution of intercessory plans. Jefferson's God of nature is the watchmaker who wound up the universe and set it upon its way, not the petty and jealous God of the Old Testament.

Have you heard of the Jefferson Bible? Having found the supernatural and dogmatic elements of Christianity untenable and the source of much "monkish ignorance," Jefferson compiled the ethical teachings of Jesus that he found so compelling.

And have these people read the Treaty with Tripoli?

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries. [Emphasis added.]

Have they read Thomas Paine's Age of Reason?

But though speaking for myself, I thus admit the possibility of revelation, I totally disbelieve that the Almighty ever did communicate any thing to man, by any mode of speech, in any language, or by any kind of vision, or appearance, or by any means which our senses are capable of receiving, otherwise than by the universal display of himself in the works of the creation, and by the repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and the disposition to good ones.

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries, that have afflicted the human race, have had their origin in this thing called revelation or revealed religion...

That sure is a far cry from the religion that we are supposed to swallow from H.R. 888.

And what is the point of all of this anyway? Chris Rodda at Talk To Action has some thoughts:

This resolution, which purports to promote "education on America's history of religious faith," is packed with the same American history lies found on the Christian nationalist websites, and in the books of pseudo-historians like David Barton. It lists a total of seventy-five "Whereas's," leading up to four resolves, the third of which is particularly disturbing -- that the U.S. House of Representatives "rejects, in the strongest possible terms, any effort to remove, obscure, or purposely omit such history from our Nation's public buildings and educational resources," a travesty of the highest magnitude, considering that most of the "history" this resolve aims to promote in our public buildings and schools IS NOT REAL!

As if the fight against science weren't bad enough, they have to try to create false history to catapult themselves into power and maintain it. Totalitarian regimes and would-be totalitarian regimes have to revise history and control the textbooks to ensure that their particular version of history maintains their view into the future and maintain their hegemony. Think about Iran or North Korea. To see a fairly comprehensive take down of many of the 75 "Whereas" statements in their Orwellian glory, please visit the Rodda site.

But remember that the beginning of H.R. 888 said that we have a diverse religious history? That's a lie shown plainly by this statement:

"Whereas the United States Supreme Court has declared throughout the course of our Nation's history that the United States is 'a Christian country', 'a Christian nation', 'a Christian people', 'a religious people whose institutions presuppose a Supreme Being', and that 'we cannot read into the Bill of Rights a philosophy of hostility to religion';"

We don't all presuppose a Supreme Being and those of us who do don't agree on who it is or who they are or might be, what it or they say, which book is more divinely sanctioned than the others, who should be punished for alleged sins, non-belief, or apostasy.

H.R. 888 is religious intolerance at work in the government and it should be stopped. There is no secular purpose to be served by “our Nation’s public buildings and educational resources” reflecting an invented Christian history that serves the myths of people who think that wishes=reality. It's a movement of delusions.

Please take action through the Council for Secular Humanism by going here.

Taylor County, Florida: The next Dover

The same ignorance. "[T]heory...fact...fair and balanced treatment...origins of the universe." See the Taylor County school board meeting minutes of Nov. 20 for more.

Upon motion by Danny Lundy, seconded by Darrell Whiddon the Board adopted/approved the: 1.) Resolution regarding the new Sunshine State Standards for Science.

The adoped resolution is as follows:
Whereas, the Florida Department of Education has drafted and is now proposing new Sunshine State Standards for Science, the Taylor County School Board opposes the implementation of the new standards as currently presented.
Whereas, the new Sunshine State Standards for Science no longer present evolution as theory but as “the fundamental concept underlying all of biology and is supported in multiple forms of scientific evidence,” we are requesting that the State Board of Education direct the Florida Department of Education to revise/edit the new Sunshine State Standards for Science so that evolution is presented as one of several theories as to how the universe was formed.
Whereas, the Taylor County School Board recognizes the importance of providing a thorough and comprehensive Science education to all the students in Taylor County and to all students in the state of Florida, it recognizes as even more important the need to present these standards through a fair and balanced approach, an approach that does not unfairly exclude other theories as to the creation of the universe.
NOW THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED by the Taylor County School Board of Taylor County, Perry, Florida, that the Board urges the State Board of Education to direct the Florida Department of Education to revise the new Sunshine State Standards for Science such that evolution is not presented as fact, but as one of several theories.

Agents of God and the state

I've just read a New York Times book review by Ayaan Hirsi Ali of Lee Harris's The Suicide of Reason. The book's premise seems to be that Islamic fanaticism drives Muslims and their cultures into a total subjugation to God and the state for God and threatens all other civilization while a kind of fanaticism for reason hamstrings the West and could well lead to the fall of our civilization. Hirsi Ali takes Harris to task for his definition of reason which seems right and she shanks relativism, the inheritance of Romanticism, not the Enlightenment, for the weak-kneed tolerance of destructive nonsense that can undo civilizations.

There's a quotation that I'd like to share with you because it applies to the American Christo-fascist as well. She writes, "Each Muslim is a slave, first of God, then of the caliphate." The hope of the American rapture-rousers is this same thing, merely done in the name of Jesus and instead of Allah and using the full weight of the American military to bring about its goals at home and in Israel (see John Hagee).

Look. Listen. Kneel. Pray. Accept the teachings of your fictional extra-dimensional sky god and demand fealty. Bury your doubt. Tolerate senselessness in your public policy.

I'll see. I've just recalled the book at the library and hope to tell you about it later.

The Bible gets the mentally ill to do some sad things

When I was growing up, my best friend's mom assured us that playing Dungeons & Dragons, reading Stephen King or H.P. Lovecraft (the coolest horror author ever!), watching horror movies, or listening to Iron Maiden would get us possessed by demons. Satan was quite literally everywhere to her and the members of her church.

There were the suicide trials related to Judas Priest and so on. Satanism was all the craze as the underlying reason of problems in America. It was whacko. People with severe mental illness can turn anything into fuel for twisted activity. That does of course include the Bible.

The Associated Press just reported the following:

HAYDEN, Idaho (AP) - A man who believed he bore the "mark of the beast" used a circular saw to cut off one hand, then he cooked it in the microwave and called 911, authorities said.

"It had been somewhat cooked by the time the deputy arrived," sheriff's Capt. Ben Wolfinger said. "He put a tourniquet on his arm before, so he didn't bleed to death. That kind of mental illness is just sad."

It was not immediately clear whether the man has a history of mental illness. Hospital spokeswoman Lisa Johnson would not say whether an attempt was made to reattach the hand, citing patient confidentiality.

"What," you might ask, "could possibly convince someone who is probably mentally ill to do such a thing? The Iron Maiden album Number of the Beast (pictured left)?"

You'd be wrong. It was the Bible.

The Book of Revelation in the New Testament contains a passage in which an angel is quoted as saying: "If anyone worships the beast and his image and receives his mark on the forehead or on the hand, he, too, will drink the wine of God's fury."

The book of Matthew also contains the passage: "And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for you whole body to do into hell."

So even the most holy book can drive people to do evil things to themselves. I hope this man recovers and receives the best care that he can get.

[Note: I don't mean to imply that the Bible is thus globally bankrupt.]

The deconversion of a clergyman

This was just forwarded to me. It's from noted liberal clergymen Bishop John Shelby Spong. He is skeptical of the claims that Jesus was the incarnated son of God, that he was resurrected from the dead, that he was born from a virgin, or that he ever performed miracles. Best, Spong advocates social justice for all people everywhere, seeking reconciliation between us all so that our species can exist peacefully. This manifests in his fight for gay rights, saying "the obvious fact is that homosexuality, like slavery, is a moral issue and thus not amenable to compromise. Once again today's debate pits an emerging consciousness against a dying definition." All in all he is a historically informed man with a deep sense of compassion, mercy, and justice.

One of his fellow clergyman, tired of the bigotry of the old church and its dogma as an impediment to understanding and compassion, that he has decided to leave.

LEAVING HOME

I'm off!
I must leave the political and ethical compromises that have corrupted the faith of my Jesus.
I must leave the stifling theology, the patriarchal structures.
I must leave the enduring prejudices based on our God-given humanity, the colour of my skin, my gender or how my sexual orientation is practiced.
I must leave the mentality that encourages anyone to think that our doctrines are unchangeable.
I must leave the belief of those who insist that our sacred texts are without error.
I must leave the God of miracle and magic.
I must leave the promises of certainty, the illusion of possessing the true faith.
I must leave behind the claims of being the recipient of an unchallengeable revelation.
I must leave the neurotic religious desire to know that I am right, and to play at being God.
I must leave the claim that every other pathway to God is second-rate, that fellow Hindu
searchers in India, Buddhists in China and Tibet, Muslims in the Middle East and the Jews of Israel are inadequate.
I must leave the pathway that tells me that all other directions will get me lost.
I must leave the certain claim that my Jesus is the only way to God for everyone.
I must leave the ultimate act of human folly that says it is.
I must leave the Church, my home.
I must leave behind my familiar creeds and faith-symbols.
I can no longer stay in an unliveable place.
I must move to a place where I can once again sing the Lord's song.
I must move to where my faith-tradition can be revived and live on.
I must move to a place where children don't tell me what I believe is unbelievable but tell me they can believe what I believe.
I must move to a place where they are not playing at moving the deck chairs on the decks of an ecclesiastical Titanic.
I can never leave the God experience.
I can never walk away from the doorway into the divine that I believe I have found in the one I call the Christ and acknowledge as "my Lord."
I must move to dangerous and religiously threatening places.
I must move to where there is no theism, but still God.
I'm off! But to where, God only knows.

David Keighley, An English Anglican Priest

Best of luck.

Happy Birthday Alfred Russel Wallace

Today is Wallace's 185th birthday. He is best remembered as the guy who came up with the theory of evolution at the same time that Darwin did. Upon learning that Wallace had done so, Darwin quickly put together his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, and garnered the accolades and scorn that could have gone to Wallace as easily.

Mike Dunford has an excellent bio-celebration blog over at The Questionable Authority. He calls special attention to an article Wallace wrote while he was in Borneo, "On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species" (S20: 1855) for Annals and Magazine of Natural History in September 1855.

Of late years, however, a great light has been thrown upon the subject by geological investigations, which have shown that the present state of the earth, and the organisms now inhabiting it, are but the last stage of a long and uninterrupted series of changes which it has undergone, and consequently, that to endeavour to explain and account for its present condition without any reference to those changes (as has frequently been done) must lead to very imperfect and erroneous conclusions.

It then presents ten observations and predictions in biogeography and geology that have survived for over a century-and-a-half into modern evolutionary theory. Number ten, though, is the evolutionary prediction:

10. The following law may be deduced from these facts:--Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a pre-existing closely allied species.

There it is: a pre-natural selection statement of descent with modification. And surely knowing the vitriol that would be heaped upon his naturalistic explanation by Victorian Christians, he says the following:

Why are the genera of Palms and of Orchids in almost every case confined to one hemisphere? Why are the closely allied species of brown-backed Trogons all found in the East, and the green-backed in the West? Why are the Macaws and the Cockatoos similarly restricted? Insects [[p. 190]] furnish a countless number of analogous examples;--the Goliathi of Africa, the Ornithopteræ of the Indian islands, the Heliconidæ of South America, the Danaidæ of the East, and in all, the most closely allied species found in geographical proximity. The question forces itself upon every thinking mind,--why are these things so? They could not be as they are, had no law regulated their creation and dispersion. The law here enunciated not merely explains, but necessitates the facts we see to exist, while the vast and long-continued geological changes of the earth readily account for the exceptions and apparent discrepancies that here and there occur. The writer's object in putting forward his views in the present imperfect manner is to submit them to the test of other minds, and to be made aware of all the facts supposed to be inconsistent with them. As his hypothesis is one which claims acceptance solely as explaining and connecting facts which exist in nature, he expects facts alone to be brought to disprove it; not à-priori arguments against its probability. [Emphasis added]

Wallace knew what was coming. That the Bible thumpers of his day would try to use a priori arguments and threats of damnation to silence him. The creationists of the past came out in force ("Soapy" Samuel Wilberforce) and tried to take Wallace and Darwin down. 150 years later, their arguments are still the same and they are still unable to account for either the diversity of life, its distribution in space and time, or for the mechanisms that have driven the rise and evolution of life on earth. They have contributed nothing to the scientific enterprise. Luckily, ingenious and tenacious people like Wallace have been working on the puzzle for all of that time and helping us learn about nature in all of its fascinating and beautiful forms.

Check out Dunford's post and the Wallace article. Thanks Mike!

The land of the free...

[Man stands in front of crowd. He cues Lee Greenwood's tune, "God bless the U.S.A." and starts singing.
"I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free..."]

A new poll shows us how mammothly ignorant we in the United States are on the topic of evolution compared to those abroad. Over at Discover Magazine online they have some new info up on it.

Adults were asked to respond true (in blue), false (in red), or unsure (in yellow) to the statement "Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals."

Look at that. Second to last. Only outdone by Turkey, the former seat of the Ottoman Empire and Islamic extremism. Turkey has the second largest creationist industry in the world after the United States.

We are the land of the free: free to literally believe archaic myths, deny science, and embrace ignorance.

"And I proudly stand up next to you!
God blinds the U.S.A.!"

Pat Roberton is the gift that keeps on giving

When you need someone to make crazy and moronic claims, turn no further than the Rev. Pat Robertson.

On Wednesday's "700 Club" broadcast, the founder of the Christian Broadcasting Network predicted that evangelism will increase and more people will seek God as the chaos develops. Robertson said, "We will see the presence of angels and we will see an intensification of miracles around the world."

Last year, Robertson predicted that a terrorist act, possibly involving a nuclear weapon, would result in mass killing in the United States. Noting that it hadn't come to pass, Robertson said, "All I can think is that somehow the people of God prayed and God in his mercy spared us."

Robertson actually said last year,

The attack, which Robertson claims is scheduled to occur after September, will affect major cities and millions of people. Robertson added, “The Lord didn’t say nuclear, but I do believe it’ll be something like that; that’ll be a mass killing, possibly millions of people, major cities injured.”

Robertson told his “700 Club” audience Jan. 2, “There will be some very serious terrorist attacks. The evil people will come after this country, and there’s a possibility – not a possibility, a definite certainty – that chaos is going to rule.”

Others?

How about Operation Supreme Court Freedom? God said to Rev. Soothsayer in 2004, "I will remove judges from the Supreme Court quickly, and their successors will refuse to sanction the attacks on religious faith."

The landslide election of 2004? "I think George Bush is going to win in a walk. I really believe I'm hearing from the Lord it's going to be like a blowout election in 2004. It's shaping up that way."

These two from 2005 and 2006 respectively are pretty good. When I say good I mean batshit inaccurate:

"Well, the Lord has some very encouraging news for George Bush ... What I heard is that Bush is now positioned to have victory after victory and that his second term is going to be one of triumph, which is pretty strong stuff. ... He'll have Social Security reform passed. He'll have tax reform passed. He'll have conservative judges on the courts. And that basically he is positioned for a series of dramatic victories which I hope will hearten him and his advisers. They don't have to be timid in this matter because the wind is blowing at his back, and he can move forward boldly and get results."

“Bush is going to strengthen in 2006. The [midterm] elections will be inconclusive, but the outcome of the war and the successes of the economy will leave the Republicans in charge. The war in Iraq is going to come to a successful conclusion and we will begin withdrawing troops before the end of the year."

The best was, of course that he would become the anti-Christ...err...the president.

"I heard the Lord saying 'I have something else for you to do. I want you to run for president of the United States."
...and...
"This is where God wanted me to be. ... Here I am in New Hampshire, before a major primary." He then said, "I assure you that I am going to be the next president of the United States."

Right. Why doesn't Robertson spare us? He's either a liar or a would-be-sorcerer or...I don't know...a glorified call-in psychic. Why would anyone go for such transparent idiocy and hucksterism? When you believe in magic you are prone to utter quack thinking.

Do we fly toward or away from reality?

In Robert Pennock's book Tower of Babel (highly recommended), he explains in what sense science and evolution are atheistic: "[E]volution is godless the same way plumbing is godless!" One needn't posit that gods exist in order to fix your sink, how a heart pumps, why the sun rises every day, or why life descends with modification. To appropriate LaPlace, "[We] have no need of that hypothesis." To place God on all of that is to guild the lily so to speak and make a mess where there isn't one. But more importantly, do we fly toward reality and observe it and accept or try to

Some theists, especially the more fundamentalist, believe fervently that we need to derive hope from the facts of the observed universe. Consider David DeWolf, former fellow at the Discovery Institute, writing an opinion piece for the Boston Globe:

Those with the courage to challenge reigning orthodoxies ought to be able to follow the scientific evidence where it leads. Some may study the scientific evidence for Darwinian evolution and conclude that there is no God. Some may study the evidence for intelligent design and conclude that atheism is irrational. Some may reach the conclusion that Darwinian evolution and religious faith are perfectly compatible. The question of how best to explain the appearance of design in the universe should be fair game; scientists, teachers, and students should have the right to reach the answer that each finds most satisfying.

How is it courageous to stand up for the most prevailing dogma in Western culture? Bizarre. But orthodoxy canards aside...

Satisfaction isn't the goal of science. Sometimes what we find is deeply troubling to our sense of personhood, ethical and moral beliefs, sense of purpose, common sense (think quantum mechanics), or religious suppositions. If the hope is to satisfy the cultural orthodoxies that we seem to share, science is inevitably going to whittle away at your hopes and dreams and turn them from the carved statuette your grandfather made for you and carve them into something else that may not be what you wished for.

This is precisely its power. Dan Dennett called the theory of evolution "a universal acid." Really, the scientific method is a universal acid because it necessarily challenges our cherished notions about our place in all of existence and it says (to anthropomorphize it):

You humans are special because you are sentient and sapient animals unlike any around you. The tools you make, remake, and refine - from levers and motors to sculpture and literature to agriculture and the scientific method - are far beyond the capabilities of any animal around you. But your existence came about by the accidental occurrences in a cosmos governed by its own physical laws. You are special but not destined. Perturbations in the system could have changed everything. They just didn't.

There is much beauty and meaning to be discovered in all of this but it seems that God doesn't necessarily have anything to do with any of it. The material universe offers its own explanations and they have been consistent.

And hope in God or the emotional satisfaction of the discernment of facts ends up being irrelevant to refuting hypotheses like, "Modern homo sapiens emerged from primates in Africa," or "Stars are supermassive balls of fusing gas." They either did or they didn't or are or aren't. The best evidence we have now shows that it did and that they are. Though the picture is necessarily difficult to piece together because of the rarity of fossilization (as we know very well from geology and palaeobiology) or the vast distances to and extraordinary heat of stars, they are the best explanations we have that have been corroborated repeatedly. If that isn't comforting to you, that's not the facts' problem. It's yours. But it isn't about you or me - it's about the data of the natural material universe that our myths, whether we like it or not, are not privy to change.

Sean recently commented as follows:

If the theory of evolution were a piece of software, it would be crashing as often as it does anything. If science were really self-correcting, we would have dropped the theory of evolution by now.

It's about predictions and explanation. Evolution makes sense of Tiktaalik, therapsids, the Type Three Secretory System, "The Panda's Thumb," whale hips, embryonic development, archaeopteryx, the bird- and lizard-hips of dinosaurs, and the changes in the fossil record. The predictions repeatedly pan out (Tiktaalik please). Creationists can deny them as much as tehy want to because it doesn't satisfy their anthrocentric beliefs - i.e. that the universe was created with human beings as the goal of the universe. Apparently, that's a deal-breaker for some and any proposition or line of inquiry that uses any philosophical, religious, artistic, or scientific method to challenge it is necessarily cast away for you. Fine. It doesn't change accurate analysis and prediction.

One of the differences between creationists and scientists are that creationists are unwilling to move their position away from the belief that the Bible is the inerrant word of God. It is in some ultimate sense, absolute. We rationalists supported by scientists understand that knowledge is not absolute, immutable, and eternal but inextricably linked to what we understand now as it relates to what we have understood before and that it will necessarily change in the future as new evidence comes in.

Creationists have built their epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, and ethics on a pseudo-literalist interpretation of the translation of a conglomerated book . Those philosophical stances demand that everything they do support archaic non-explanations.

It is a flight from reality. It is to accept a tower of Babel where there is an intelligible explanation.

Accepting evolution is to fly toward reality and observe it for what we see that it can be.

In the spirit of fairness

I've found a good quotation from Mike Huckabee at his campaign website. After the stuff I don't care to read...that his faith is his life...he says this:

The First Amendment requires that expressions of faith be neither prohibited nor preferred. We should not banish religion from the public square, but should guarantee access to all voices and views. We should share and debate our faith, but never seek to impose it. When discussing faith and politics, we should honor the "candid" in candidate - I have much more respect for an honest atheist than a disingenuous believer.

So I can agree with some of it. The preference issue is something we'd surely have to argue out but at least he doesn't lord his belief in a Christian nation over us. Not too much anyway. Well...there was that ad.

I agree that people should declare their faiths especially when they are as nutty as his seems to be. Candidness is a most important thing and for that, I can respect him. He and I, as honest Christian and atheist could look one another in the eye and smile and know that we are honest. Or can we?

Except that it strikes me that here he uses the atheist as a bogeyman. As a pariah. As that thing that stands as liar and perjurist and deceiver. The nemesis. Satan.

Atheists are no more liars, hypocrites, or stupid than Christians. In fact, a study I read this past year indicates that we are, in fact, honest, if rigidly constrained by that which we accept as true or real, and are, on average, better educated than the average plebe. So I'd hope that Huckabee would respect us. Though we differ (rather seriously) on evolution, we can at least agree that honest people deserve some respect.

Let's just hope that the politician is honest.

Where are the dinosaurs?

We should all wonder. What a funny and differential bigotry the alleged lord of the universe had for extinguishing the fucking coolest animals that ever walked the earth! Except maybe humans.



And this just in from Celbrity Wit:

Question: If Noah and his family were the only people to survive the flood, then how did the world get other races?

Pat Robertson: When Noah and his family left the ark, they split up and went around the world and then, I don't know, got tans or something. I don't know exactly how it happened.

Thanks for verifying that you and your book of secrets are totally incapable of answering the questions that we hope to answer.

How do the candidates stand on science?

This just in from the journal Science. Because science is such an enormous force in our culture and around the world, we need someone who is both ethical and informed to be in the White House.

In a world that daily faces change that was literally unimaginable 100 years ago, we need a forethinking man or woman as our chief executive. Given what we've heard so far, some of the candidates are clearly better equipped than others while some (read Huckabee and Paul) are willfully ignorant of certain basic concepts. So far as I know, the total global warming deniers (like Tancredo) are gone. But there's always room for nuttery.

Science Daily reports:

"Science felt that it was important to find out what the presidential candidates think about issues that may not be part of their standard stump speeches but that are vital to the future of the country--from reducing greenhouse gas emissions to improving science and math education," said Jeffrey Mervis, deputy news editor, who oversees election coverage for the magazine's news department. "We hope that the coverage may also kick off a broader discussion of the role of science and technology in decisions being made in Washington and around the world."

I've read the global warming stuff from Obama (yes!), Clinton, and Edwards and have pieced together that McCain is also good about it from some of his public statements. The link above quotes him as saying "the most urgent issue facing the world." Thank goodness. If only he didn't have that war position. When I can get access to the whole article via my online subscription from the PSU libraries I'll post more (I haven't worked there and attended school there for nothing!).

Once again, please take time to call for the Science Debate 2008 and ensure that the issues of science and reason are at the forefront.

Bill Maher

Oh thank you Bill.
Thank you.

A pre-Cambrian "explosion"

The "Avalon Explosion" appears to have been an evolutionary "event" that pre-dates the Cambrian explosion. The above-linked article from Science Daily reports on "The Avalon Explosion: Evolution of Ediacara Morphospace," by Shen, Dong, Xiao, and Kowalewski, appears in the Jan. 4 issue of Science.

The Cambrian explosion (the most explosive portion was 542 to 520 m.y.a.) was thought to have been the generating period of the "upper-level" taxa that we see presently. But it seems that the Avalon explosion, which predates the Cambrian by 33 million years, might well have supplied more morphologies (body plans) than we originally knew about.

The authors explain that this "explosion" (we are talking about millions of years here) points to occasionally accelerated rates of evolution, what Stephen Jay Gould called "punctuated equilibrium," during times of speciation. This contrasts with a strict role of accumulated gradualism via slow rates of mutation and natural selection that Dawkins metaphorically called "climbing mount improbable." Both views appear to hold a good deal of possibility (a little more on that below).

"The explosive evolutionary pattern was a concern to Charles Darwin, because he expected that evolution happens at a slow and constant pace," said Shuhai Xiao, associate professor of geobiology at Virginia Tech. "Darwin's perception could be represented by an inverted cone with ever expanding morphological range, but the fossil record of the Cambrian Explosion and since is better represented by a cylinder with a morphological radiation at the base and morphological constraint afterwards."

[...]

But paleontologists have not found such evidence, and recently scientists have learned that biological evolution has not been moving on a smooth road. "Accelerated rates may characterize the early evolution of many groups of organisms," said Michal Kowalewski, professor of geobiology at Virginia Tech.

It's not entirely accurate to say that Darwin in The Origin of Species was a total gradualist as the following quotation shows:

That natural selection will always act with extreme slowness, I fully admit. Its action depends on there being places in the polity of nature, which can be better occupied by some of the inhabitants of the country undergoing modification of some kind. The existence of such places will often depend on physical changes, which are generally very slow, and on the immigration of better adapted forms having been checked. But the action of natural selection will probably still oftener depend on some of the inhabitants becoming slowly modified; the mutual relations of many of the other inhabitants being thus disturbed. Nothing can be effected, unless favourable variations occur, and variation itself is apparently always a very slow process. The process will often be greatly retarded by free intercrossing. Many will exclaim that these several causes are amply sufficient wholly to stop the action of natural selection. I do not believe so. On the other hand, I do believe that natural selection will always act very slowly, often only at long intervals of time, and generally on only a very few of the inhabitants of the same region at the same time. I further believe, that this very slow, intermittent action of natural selection accords perfectly well with what geology tells us of the rate and manner at which the inhabitants of this world have changed.

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his powers of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change, to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection.

"Slow" here was predicated on Darwin's ignorance of many things: though he could infer possible mutation rates from artificial selection, he didn't know about genetics or DNA; the fossil record was a shadow of what we have today with our understanding of transitional features barely an idea; and the actual age of the earth at 4.5 billion years which would have to wait another twenty years or so after Darwin's death to be established with the discovery of radioactive isotopes and the subsequent method of radiometric dating. Slow is a relative term; no evolutionary event should be thought of as a single blip but an time stream on the river of evolution that takes hundreds of thousands and millions of years. When we think in geological time, a punctuated event is almost unimaginably slow to human beings living in Dawkins' "middle world."

The article explains that there were three events. A diversity of organisms emerged 575 mya, subsequently diversified, and then declined. Interestingly, it appears as though the organisms present in these three periods share a standard ancestor-descendant relationship but do not with the Cambrian explosion. I am tentatively inferring that this means that this initial rise of life was aborted and that the Cambrian was a later and quite similar event to that of the Avalon during which life evolved in a similar though far from identical manner. Why this happened is unclear to me at this point (the Science article isn't available yet through the Penn State databases).

Going on:

Scientists are still unsure what were the driving forces behind the rapid morphological expansion during the Avalon explosion, and why the morphological range did not expand, shrink, or shift during the subsequent White Sea and Nama stages.

"But, one thing seems certain -- the evolution of earliest macroscopic and complex life also went through an explosive event before to the Cambrian Explosion," Xiao said. "It now appears that at the dawn of the macroscopic life, between 575 and 520 million years ago, there was not one, but at least two major episodes of abrupt morphological expansion."

This is so cool. We have two explosions of morphological diversity at geologically rapid rates and the driving forces are still not solidly understood. But there is some interesting material out there that might explain the relatively "abrupt morphological expansion."

We will probably hear some sort of nonsense from creationists about this. They will declare a victory for sudden emergence theory - read: creation - while they simultaneously attack the geology that shows that these are two distinct events. Too bad there is some solid work out there on the topic.

Recently, Aaron Fuller posted a blog at Oxford University Press titled "Redefining the word “Human” – Do Some Apes Have Human Ancestors?" where he discussed abrupt changes in morphology. He writes,

Only a tiny fraction of our DNA is concerned with organizing the physical shape of our bodies, but these “morphogenes” are very important in evolutionary biology. For one thing, their effects are virtually all we can see when we look at a fossil. Two other aspects of morphogenes are quite stunning relative to many other genes – firstly, they are spectacularly conservative across time – the gene complexes that determine the organization of insect segments have an astonishing level of similarity with the ones that control the organization of mammalian vertebral segments. Secondly, a very small change in a single morphogene can have astonishing effects on the appearance of the resulting adult animal. A single DNA base-pair changes and a fruit fly has fully formed legs on its face, etc.

This second issue pertains to the fact that morphogenes control the organization of complex body modules. The result is that a small single genetic change can generate an entirely new type of animal in a single generation. For this reason the role of sudden change in biological evolution and the evolution of morphogenes have become bedfellows. In our new definition of humans, I propose that our body plan arose through a small change in a Pax morphogene and that the upright bipedal body form arose suddenly in a single generation rather than gradually under pressure from natural selection across millions of years.

The second part is most instructive, specifically that "a small single genetic change can generate an entirely new type of animal in a single generation. For this reason the role of sudden change in biological evolution and the evolution of morphogenes have become bedfellows." It could follow that mutations, inversions, deletions, duplications, or mirrorings occur on Pax genes they could significantly modify the morphology of an organism and kick off new speciation events. Through a sudden shift, new "forms most beautiful" can emerge and evolve.

Fuller argues that symmetrical bilaterian (those who have a left-right body plan like insects, arachnids, fish, amphibians, reptiles, archosaurs, dinosaurs, birds, and mammals) life came about this way. He also postulates that vertebrate life arose this way.

Prior to the Bilaterian origin there were animals with no particular symmetry (unicellular), branched animals (sponges) and radially symmetric animals (jellyfish). No one really argues that the original “Ur-Bilaterian” arose gradually, across millions of years as a unilaterally structured animal lineage gradually grew a right side attached to its already fully formed left side. No – as I show in my PLoS ONE paper, our morphogenes are subject to duplication and mirroring. The first bilaterally symmetric animal in the Bilaterian lineage was one individual born with a right-left body duplication. Suddenly, without any roll for variation, natural selection, shifting gene frequencies etc – we had the first Bilaterian. The ancestor of all the bilaterally symmetric phyla including insects and us.

The second major event I point to is the origin of vertebrates (technically – deuterostomes). In most Bilaterians, the nerve cord is along the front surface of the animal and the digestive tract is along the back. Geoffroy argued that vertebrates emerged from invertebrates by being flipped 180 degrees. We now know that the ‘dorso-ventral read out gradient’ in the embryo was indeed inverted at the time of vertebrate origins. It was not a matter of gradually shifting a few degrees every million years until 180 degrees were reached. No, a single offspring was born with a small morphogenetic gene change that resulted in an upside down animal – natural selection played a role in that this “hopeful monster” survived and founded a lineage.

It follows that changes of these kinds that boost fitness would be naturally selected for and that their replication would manifest in the sudden appearance of new forms in the fossil record. It would also seem that "events" of this kind are not common and for good reason. Unstable morphogenetics might not support survivability. Too much chaos could prevent procreation (though that is rather armchair of me).

So the general trend appears to be the gradual and almost unimaginably slow process of "climbing mount improbable" during which most phenotypic changes occur: think of the seismoid bone in the therapsids and the steady changes in the changes of the five digits in mammals or the beak changes in Galapagos finches. But there also seems to be the additional and rare occurrence of changes at the morphogenetic level that can create incredible phenotypic changes in the modules. Perhaps this is what occurred during both the Avalon and Cambrian explosions.

To conclude, I will quote Fuller:

In this way, not only Bilaterians, but then Vertebrates came to be through non-Darwinian events. Like Newtonian physics and Einsteinian physics – these two modes of biological change appear to co-exist. Most of the time we see only Darwinian evolution, but this is just an approximation of the fine tuning effects of natural selection upon the body plan generating capabilities of the morphogenes.

The best debate I have seen on the debate about science and religion

Does God Exist? A debate between best-selling authors Rabbi David Wolpe and Sam Harris.
This is absolutely the best debate out there. Wolpe uses Hume in a rather shady way but besides that it's great.

The discussion of intuition and revelation is fantastic and Sam Harris gets it right on at the end that the argument of the majority, that most people have believed in God, constitutes no evidence that god(s) actually exist. And the ensuing conversation on religious moderates is thoughtful.

There are no gotchas in all of this. While they clearly and strongly disagree, there is little vitriol. That said, Wolpe's got some serious epistemological admixture going on.

Best quotation from Sam Harris:
"Is too much skeptical inquiry really the problem with North Korea? The North Koreans are a cargo cult armed with nuclear weapons...This is not a paradise of rationality."

Congrats men.

More Huckabee on evolution

Read the whole spiel here:

ABC's "Good Morning America" grilled Huckabee about his evangelical ties, making Creationism the issue.

ABC's Robin Roberts mentioned a new book from the National Academy of Sciences that says Creationism has no place in the classroom -- given the overwhelming evidence in favor of evolution.

"Do you agree with that -- that Creationism should be kept out of our classrooms," Roberts asked.

"In ten-and-a-half years as a governor, I never touched it," Huckabee said. "It's not an issue for a president. It wasn't even an issue for me as a governor, and governors do deal with education - but not the curriculum." Huckabee said his focus as governor was on music and arts in education.

"Should creationism be banned from the classroom, yes or no?" Roberts persisted.

"Banned? Well, banning sounds like sort of a censorship," Huckabee said. "I don't think most people agree with censorship. Should we teach it as a doctrine? Of course not. Should we teach that some people believe it, some don't? I think that's academic freedom."

I'm glad he never touched it. Best to let scientists teach science.

The Obamania increases

Here is Obama's Iowa victory speech. I love the inclusive language. As much as I get on people for their ideologically-driven anti-science, I do think that there is much that we have in common. We need good health care for all of us. We need to protect our communities and our environment. It's a we endeavor.
Anyway, without further yammering...

Quackery - The real name for alternative medicine

Stephen Barrett recently appeared on Point of Inquiry to discuss Quackery in the so-called "alternative medicine" field. For personal reasons, I have avoided this topic, but it is one that I have followed for several years as a light hobby.

Check it out here.

In this discussion with D.J. Grothe, Dr. Barrett defines complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), the responsibilities of the healthcare consumer, whether or not CAM is growing in mainstream healthcare, and the types of people who are susceptible to CAM claims. He also explores various CAM therapies including Therapeutic Touch, Chiropractic and myths about water fluoridization, and how a skeptic might most effectively confront family members who are consumers of complementary and alternative medicine.

I am highly skeptical of the claims of homeopathy, intercessory prayer, some things claimed for acupuncture, massage, and chiropractics, and herbal medicine. Between the work of Dr. Barrett, Carl Sagan, Michael Shermer and Skeptic Magazine, Free Inquiry, Steven Novella (also here), James Randi, Richard Dawkins, and others, I have come to determine that most of what is out there touted as alternative or complimentary medicine is unsubstantiated and potentially dangerous because it is built on wish-thinking and the exploitation of false hope similar to much of religion. The studies either aren't there or they are gunned down.

Anyway, I hope you'll check it out.

Erem and Durrenberger book signing

Shameless promotion Suzan Erem and Paul Durrenberger who are my co-editors at Voices of Central Pennsylvania.

Just wanted to make sure it's on your new calendars- Thursday, Feb. 7 Webster's from 6 to 8 p.m. Paul and I will be doing a book reading and signing for our latest book, On the Global Waterfront (www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org) the 2000-2001 story of a black longshoremen's union in South Carolina beating back efforts of the right wing state's attorney to destroy it.
We expect to take over the cafe area and to have some refreshments. So let us know if you plan to come so we can plan well. Webster's makes its money off the books, so we hope you'll support our local bookstore (and encourage future book launches) by purchasing it that night. If you've already ordered online, please do bring your copy and we'll be happy to sign it.

Get more info on On the Global Waterfront: The Fight to Free the Charleston 5:
www.lastdraft.com
Excerpt available at: www.ontheglobalwaterfront.org

Obama on R & D

This just a repost from Chris Mooney's blog Intersection. It's taken from Obama's Audacity of Hope:

There is another aspect of our educational system that merits attention. Institutions of higher learning have served as the nation's research and development labs. These institutions train the innovators of the future. Here too, our policies have been moving in the wrong direction. Each month, scientists and engineers visit to discuss the federal government's diminished commitment to funding basic research. Over the last 30 years, funding for the sciences has declined as a percentage of GDP. If we want an innovation economy, then we have to invest in our future innovators--by doubling federal funding of basic research over the next five years, training 100,000 more engineers and scientists over the next four years, or providing new research grants to the most outstanding early career researchers in the country. The price tag is $42 billion over five years. We can afford to do what needs to be done. What is missing is national urgency.

I'll say that there's a lackluster sense at least. I am not a market-driven individual but I am a literacy-driven individual and one thing Obama is is literate and he wants us all to be so. And he doesn't buy into the ignorance:

“Evolution is more grounded in my experience than angels.”

'Nuff said.

Obamania!

YES!

Last night, Obama took the Iowa caucus handily. This is a good sign. In chats I had predicted that he would win Iowa because of the message of change, fine speaking skills, and a progressively pragmatic approach that combines passion, intelligence, and the will to say that some of our choices are not going to be comfortable. It seems that the young people of Iowa heard him. Let's hope that he can push this through New Hampshire and South Carolina and on to "super Tuesday" to take lots of states. I'll be volunteering at the headquarters Im sure. He's also a secularly-minded religious person (a UCC attendee) who respects separation of church and state.

Whether it was because they were eager to leave behind the bitter divides of the last two decades or because they wanted to send a message that a small white state could transcend the issue of race, Iowa voters handed Senator Barack Obama a victory here Thursday and supported his improbable candidacy in defiance of those who warned he was too inexperienced in world affairs.

Instead, what seemed to drive them was the idea that Mr. Obama would present a new face for America in the world, with a coalition of Democrats and independents dispelling skepticism and flooding caucuses in all corners of the state to support a man who came to Washington only three years ago.

“We are one people,” Mr. Obama said. “And our time for change has come.”

He's rolled out a good plan for climate change (though I wish it could move faster). Obama's odyssey from boyhood to being the first black President of the Harvard Law Review, working in communities in New York and Chicago, to state senator where he openly opposed the invasion of Iraq, and then as U.S. senator bespeaks of a man motivated as much by communal good as personal ambition.

And Huckabee won too. I am not so plussed about that. His social conservatism and past as a preacher give me great pause. He has written repellent things about gays and lesbians, has had some really ignorant beliefs about what to do with HIV+ people, and doesn't accept the theory of evolution and doesn't understand why scientific literacy might be an important quality in the chief executive of the powerful nation in the world. As great a speaker as William Jennings Bryan was, he fell in history because of his bronze age ignorance at the Scopes Trial.

Huckster has been pragmatic though and gotten things done in Arkansas. If somehow he kept his theocratic buddies in check, we'd be better off. Focus on your own damn family.

All that said, he probably won't win the nomination. Secular people and religious moderates have about had it with the sectarian grandstanding in politics. McCain or Romney will pull it out and the Huckster might run as a third-party social conservative candidate pushed by Dobson and his ilk.

The nearly final numbers from Iowa (New York Times):

ELECTION RESULTS
Iowa
Democrats Vote %
Obama 940 38%
Edwards 744 30
Clinton 737 29
Richardson 53 2
100% reporting
Full results »

Republicans Vote %
Huckabee 39,814 34%
Romney 29,405 25
Thompson 15,521 13
McCain 15,248 13
96% reporting
Democratic vote totals are based on an estimate of the number of state convention delegates a candidate would receive.

Let's keep it going!

For more analysis, take a look at Dispatches latest post.

NAS publishes new book on evolution and creationism in education

Thank goodness! The National Academy has a new book out, Science, Evolution, and Creationism the summary is available for free at this download location.
From the Description link:

How did life evolve on Earth? The answer to this question can help us understand our past and prepare for our future. Although evolution provides credible and reliable answers, polls show that many people turn away from science, seeking other explanations with which they are more comfortable.

In the book, Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a group of experts assembled by the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine explain the fundamental methods of science, document the overwhelming evidence in support of biological evolution, and evaluate the alternative perspectives offered by advocates of various kinds of creationism, including "intelligent design." The book explores the many fascinating inquiries being pursued that put the science of evolution to work...

Inferences that should be extinct

Inferences are important. We all inductively and deductively infer based on experience and it tends to serve us well. But some inferences are...well...insipid. How inane you might ask? Just ask Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis. He said this to Stephen Asma (read article here at Beliefnet via Skeptic).

Asram asked Ham, "How many sheep would a dinosaur need to eat per day while living on the Ark?" Why?

John Wilkins's 1668 An Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, where I learned that "atheistical scoffers" had been rolling their eyes at the notion that so many animals could fit on so small a boat (300 cubits = 450 feet long, 75 feet wide, and 45 feet high, says Genesis 6:15). Bishop Wilkins, who acted as the first secretary of the Royal Society, set about demonstrating once and for all that the ark could indeed hold the menagerie. Creating elaborate charts based on scriptural descriptions of Noah's craft and cargo, Wilkins established that the middle floor of the three-floor ark was just under 15-feet tall and held foodstuffs for all the passengers, including 1,600 sheep for carnivore consumption. So naturally when I learned that Ham's new exhibit diorama would show visitors how the dinosaurs lived on the ark (something Wilkins couldn't have predicted), it seemed reasonable to ask how many sheep they'd be digging into.

This is one of the questions we should ask (the others are listed below and come from a previous blog). Besides the rather embarrassing problem of 1,600 sheep on a vessel that was to carry only two of each "kind," how many sheep did they need to eat?

Ham's response?

"Well, that's an interesting question," Ham replied nonplussed. "We don't know for sure, but from a biblical perspective we know that all animals were originally herbivores." (Carnivore activity only happens as a result of the Fall — animals did not experience death before Adam's sin.) "So it is possible that carnivores ate plants and grains while they lived on the ark. Even today we know that grizzly bears eat grass and vegetation primarily, so it's not true that an animal with sharp teeth and claws must eat meat or must be a carnivore. At the very least, the carnivores could survive on vegetation for a significant time span."

Sorry. You don't know that they were herbivores. Presumably this belief comes from Genesis 1:29-30 in the Old Testament and Romans 5:12 in the New Testament that seem to back up a belief that God created plants with seed and fruit and gave it to the animals for food and there was no death before the fall of Adam and Eve (read more here). Even though I find theology no more connected to the description of reality as a field of study than fantasy fiction criticism, serious theologians find this level of attempted literalism to be bonkers: both philosophically bankrupt and ahistorical.

But the grizzly bear comment is the real kicker. Grizzly bears are omnivores and their teeth show it. The dentition of a grizzly bear and other omnivores is varied so that they can consume a breadth of foodstuffs. They are primarily carnivorous - eating salmon, elk, caribou, and moose - but also grasses, sedges, roots, berries, insects, and carrion. Looking below you can see that the molars and pre-molars are evolved for omnivoros diets.


Compare that to the diet of a lion which is a pure carnivore eating wildebeest, impala, zebra, giraffe, buffalo and wild hogs to sometimes rhinos and hippos. Then consider leonine dentition which is adapted to both stabbing and ripping. They have evolved into a niche which is entirely carnivorous.

Considering the pure carnivorous diet of lions, wolves, etc. and then the compare them to the jaw of T-Rex...

...or Deinonychus...

...we find that the most reasonable inference would be to assume that there was no way that the carnivorous dinosaurs or lions or wolves were vegetarians. Every tooth in the jaw of those two dinosaurs is even sharper than those of the lion pictured above. These are real grippers and tearers.

And doesn't eating vegetables still cause death? They are just vegetable deaths, not animal deaths.

So if you want to make an inference, make it reasonable. If you want to make an absurd inference just do it the way it should be done - all things are possible with God. Don't window dress it in utter absurdities.

Following that we all know that elephants, rhinos, hippos, horses, giraffes, zebras, musk oxen, buffalo (which must have traveled from North America to get on the ark...they had frequent flier miles), water buffalo, caribou, reindeer, oryx, camels, polar bears, grizzly bears and moose all get really really big and live on land. So they had to go on the ark. Feeding two breedable adults for 150 days causes a bit of concern. Right? I mean elephants eat 100-200kg a day in the wild. So, maybe Noah put them on a diet because they were inactive during that time. Maybe he could get away with 80kg. 80kg x 2 elephants x 365 days = 58,400kg of grass and veggies! What! That's just elephants.
Imagine the rest of the mammals.
Now imagine pairs of breedable adult dinosaurs from the sauropod order. These were the elephants of their day. They include the following:

Apatasaurus (Brontosaurus):
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 30 feet (9.1 meters)
Length: 75 feet (22.9 meters)
Weight: 66,000 lbs (29,937 kg)

Barasaurus:
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 40 feet (12.2 meters)
Length: 79 feet (24.1 meters)
Weight: 50,000 pounds (22,680 kg)

Brachiasaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Brachiosauridae
Height: 50 feet (15.2 meters)
Length: 100 feet (30.5 meters)
Weight: 120,000 lbs (54,432 kg)

Camarasaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 30 feet (9.1 meters)
Length: 75 feet (22.9 meters)
Weight: 66,000 lbs (29,937 kg)

Cetiosaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 20 feet (6.1 meters)
Length: 50 feet (15.2 meters)
Weight: 19,850 lbs (9,004 kg)

Diplodocus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 30 feet (9.1 meters)
Length: 89 feet (27.1 meters)
Weight: 55,000 pounds (22,680 kg

Malawisaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Titanosauridae
Height: 14 feet (4.3 meters)
Length: 30 feet (9.1 meters)
Weight: 24,030 pounds (10,900 kg)

Mamenchisaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Euhelopodidae
Height: 35 feet (10.7 meters)
Length: Total length 69 feet (21 meters);
Neck 36 feet (11 meters)
Weight: 60,000 pounds (27,216 kg)

Seismosaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 84 feet (25.6 meters)
Length: 150 feet (45.7 meters)
Weight: 200,000 pounds (90,720 kg)

Supersaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Diplodocidae
Height: 65 feet (20 meters)
Length: 120 feet (36.6 meters)
Weight: 120,000 pounds (54,432 kg)

Ultrasaurus:
Infraorder: Sauropoda
Family: Brachiosauridae (not confirmed)
Height: 53 feet (16 meters)
Length: 100 feet (30.5 meters)
Weight: 140,000 pounds (63,504 kg)

Right now we are at about 1,842,000 pounds (I've rounded because I am doing this in my brain while I type) of mated sauropods. That's 921 tons of animals. Well maybe they were juveniles. Sure. So divide that (totally arbitrarily) by 10 to get it down. That's 92 tons of animals! How long and tall are these? Much too long and tall to consider that each of these, and the ceratopsians, the therapods, the thecodonts, ankylasaurs and the rest of them were going to fit into the ark? What about the giant mammals of prehistoric times? Balugatherium? Megatherium?
And really (as if reality had anything to do with this?) how would eight people deal with the predators? Lions, tigers and crocodiles are pretty hellish. T-Rex? Deinonychus? Megalasaurus? Ceratasaurus? Hmmm.
Let's look at artistic renditions and think about bronze age shepherds feeding them.
Deinonychus?

This looks like a good way for Noah's kids to become lunch.

Ceratasaur?

Hmmmm.

T-Rex?

This looks like what I want to be stuck on a boat with for months on end! Sign me up!

Noah's Ark. The precursor to bedlam.

There is one other thing I didn't mention. Beetles. There are hundreds of thousands of species of beetles. Where did they go? Spiders?
I know I know! This is too easy. But people believe this madness. I don't really understand very well how they get to such insanely unreasonable ends but they do.
Please vote. Keep them out of office. Keep them from teaching our children and make sure that you teach your own children about reality.

What is Christmas?

Blow it up here.

Evidence please.

A comment came up from Sean:

Instead I'll say something very similar: what about evolution makes you feel that you are so superior to us? It's easy to pick up the air of superiority (read: arrogance) in your posts. How much have you really thought these issues through? I'd love to know, but unfortunately our conversations don't get very far before you're back to not answering the points I bring up. A?

We are not "better than you" in any ultimate universal way. Accepting the theory of evolution doesn't de facto make someone a good person. Far from it. Understanding, explicating, and working through the nuances of descent with modification as operated on by natural selection will not make me or anyone else an ethically superior or more loving person. I have never claimed to be a superior life form to an "cdesign proponentsist". That's not what this blog is about. I don't love my family any more or less than the average Christian does because I accept evolution. You don't love your family any less because you believe in a literal reading of Genesis.
As far as my not dealing with your points: you'll notice I've been dealing with the ICR a fair bit and, unsurprisingly, finding their arguments unpersuasive and built on houses of cards, a priori thinking, straw men, negative argumentation, and dead science. The facts of the matter are that their version of natural philosophy fell to the scientific floor when T.H. Huxley gutted Samuel Wilberforce in 1860. It's just not a scientific argument.

Regarding prayer and raised points:

Personal statements mean nothing in the aggregate. When there is a comprehensive double-blind study of the House of Prayer where they take hundreds of patients who suffer from any chronic debilitating disease and study whether the effect of the bathing is curative or palliative in the long-term, I'll accept it. For now, I don't see and medical science has never found, any positive evidence for it. In the overwhelming absence of evidence, it is justifiable not to believe in the healing power of intercessory prayer. It is not better than chance. (In one study it was even found to be worse.)

I can't run down every example you send to me nor can you run down every example I post or reply to in the short amount of time. I'm sure you'll have plenty to read about and I'll learn plenty after I return from my spring break trip to the AiG Creation "Museum."

Finally, regarding arrogance:

I think it is not arrogant to demand evidence for any proposiition which is stated as truth. Evidence needs to be corroborated and the testing of that evidence needs to be jeopardizable. Just because someone says "x" and a lot of people agree with it doesn't mean that "x" is true in the explicate order of the universe outside of the human imagination or wishes. In fact, I think it is the religious person who is arrogant to demand that those of us who accept a standard of evidence presentation suddenly change the rules that prove so useful in everyday life, in court, and in labs. Let me repeat: just because you say so, doesn't make it so.

In general, I am not going to respond in depth to comments (as I stated here).

Another shot of postmodern drivel?

Norman Levitt has written an interesting review of Steve Fuller's new book, Science Vs Religion?: Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution at eSkeptic titled "The Painful Elaboration of the Fatuous." I haven't gotten a chance to check out the book myself and so this elaboration is necessarily limited.

On a side note, what is it with Fibonacci forms on the covers of these books?


Fuller was one of the three expert witnesses at the Dover trial who actually showed up (Michael Behe and Scott Minnich were the other two while William Dembski, John Campbell, and Stephen Meyer sat the round out despite Dembski's promise of using the "vise strategy"). His testimony was confused and confusing no doubt for its relativistic postmodern circumlocution. One was left with the feeling that he didn't really have anything to say: an analytical method and no way to apply it or a lot of content and nothing to apply to it. It was very strange.

Levitt, it appears, has had a similar experience reading Fuller's book. But he's also found in it the fulfillment of postmodernism's perniciousness:

Now I would like to consider the question of whether Fuller’s ideological flight into the embrace of the theocratic right bespeaks a wider tendency within the postmodern academy to trade its vaunted left-radicalism for the honor of riding shotgun on behalf of the new breed of creationist theocrats. Certainly, Fuller is not the first “science studies” scholar to put forth a brief on behalf of creationism. A few other figures, some even more prominent than Fuller, have done so within the past decade. Still, they all seem to have pulled in their horns as soon as it became clear that creationism is not simply the cultural self-assertion of a repressed minority trying to defy the brute scientism of modern society, but rather the tool of a well-funded and deadly serious political movement able to call upon the near-majority instinctively sympathetic to creationist ideas. Fuller, so far as I know, is the only member of this academic clan to have unreservedly taken the plunge, irrevocably committing himself to the creationist cause.

The wider lesson, if there be any, is that animosity to science as such and to its cognitive authority still pervades academic life outside the dominion of the science faculty. The compost that nurtured Steve Fuller and many of his associates in their development of “social constructivist” theory consisted principally of these doubts, resentments and antagonisms. This soil put forth a host of noxious weeds, quite varied, and sometimes taxonomically linked only by the common bitterness they exuded. Each in its own way — literary theory, cultural studies, cultural anthropology, women’s studies, ethnic studies, and a long-standing Marxisant approach to sociology — joined the tacit alliance of antiscientific intellectuals whose imprecations grew all the louder even as their influence over the practice of science and public science policy shrank to imperceptibility.

Anyone who reads Phillip Johnson's Wedge of Truth or Reason in the Balance would see that postmodernism was hard at work. He used its absurd relativism, epistemological double-talk, and distrust of the scientific method to try to wedge creationism and ID into scientific discourse. Johnson uses Orwellian language to get us to see these creationist or evolutionary narratives as being equal but with some narratives (read: creationist) as being more equal than others. It seems that Johnson has found a secular champion in Fuller.

I don't pretend to think that the scientific method tells us all there is to experience and love in the universe. Not by any means. Literature, art, music, myth, toys, play, eating, having sex, talking with friends, dreaming...all of these things are part of the experience of life and full of meaning and are not, themselves science. Entertaining our minds with labyrinthine modes of thought - whether postmodern literary criticism or Augustine's theology - may be meaningful. But they are not adept at dealing with discerning reality just because someone thought of them. That doesn't make the experience of literature or religion (to take two examples) as devoid of merit.

Don't use a Rodin statue or Mahler symphony to determine the distance to the sun. Don't use Faulkner, Homer, or a Papuan shaman to tell us how life evolved on earth. Don't use the Bible to determine the age of the universe. They are tools in their own right capable of giving us meaning, beauty and lessons about how and why human beings do what they do and how they feel about doing it. But they can be inappropriately applied.

So our fight against creationism is assuredly not a fight against personhood. Nor is it necessarily fueled by contempt, though sometimes all sides get vitriolic. The goal, though, is to use the appropriate tool in the appropriate context to accurately live with our families, in our communities, in our nation, on our planet, and in the universe. Postmodernism and fundamentalist Christianity work well enough in very limited contexts of communal narrative and bonding but are absolute disasters at dealing with reality. This is why we fight creationists and their apologists like Fuller.

Human evolution is accelerating

I just stumbled on this at a blog group posting from Science Daily. Interestingly, the man quoted in the study, Henry Harpending is the father of an old friend of mine. I'm glad to to see he's still running around.

So are humans evolving faster than we used to?

"We aren't the same as people even 1,000 or 2,000 years ago," he says, which may explain, for example, part of the difference between Viking invaders and their peaceful Swedish descendants. "The dogma has been these are cultural fluctuations, but almost any temperament trait you look at is under strong genetic influence."

-- "Human races are evolving away from each other," Harpending says. "Genes are evolving fast in Europe, Asia and Africa, but almost all of these are unique to their continent of origin. We are getting less alike, not merging into a single, mixed humanity." He says that is happening because humans dispersed from Africa to other regions 40,000 years ago, "and there has not been much flow of genes between the regions since then."

"Our study denies the widely held assumption or belief that modern humans [those who widely adopted advanced tools and art] appeared 40,000 years ago, have not changed since and that we are all pretty much the same. We show that humans are changing relatively rapidly on a scale of centuries to millennia, and that these changes are different in different continental groups."

Read on.

Interesting post on a Christian nation

Over at Positive Liberty there's a good post up regarding the allegation that the U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence are Christian documents. To any good reader, they are assuredly not as the Constitution omits any mention of any god at all and the Declaration uses "our Creator."

In the hundreds of pages comprising Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention (and those of the others who kept notes), there is no mention of biblical passages/verses in the debates/discussions on the various parts and principles of the Constitution. They mention Rome, Sparta, German confederacies, Montesquieu, and a number of other sources — but no Scripture verses.

In The Federalist Papers, there is no mention of biblical sources for any of the Constitution’s principles, either — one would think they could squeeze them in among the 85 essays if they were, indeed, the sources; especially since the audience was common men who were familiar with, and had respect for, the Bible. The word “God” is used twice — and one of those is a reference to the pagan gods of ancient Greece. “Almighty” is used twice and “providence” three times — but neither is ever used in connection with any constitutional principle or influence. The Bible is not mentioned.

For those of you interested in reading more on the revisionism of Christian Reconstructionists et al, check out Alan Dershowitz's Blasphemy: How the Religious Right is Hijacking the Declaration of Independence.

Happy New Year!

Just want to give a cheers to all of you for a happy new year. May you love, be loved, enlighten, and become more enlightened.