Common Descent

I'm going to be completely preoccupied with another project for the next several days, but I just could not resist passing on this delightfully wacky site. Here's a little excerpt, from one of their posts titled "WHY ALL EVOLUTIONISTS ARE CRIMINALLY INSANE":

Well, first, for this edition of this web page, we will not be addressing the criminal nature of evolutionists’ insanity. That we will do at a future time. So, for now, why are all evolutionists insane? They are all insane because they have no “legend of empirical advent.” What is a legend of empirical advent? It is “one or more things that demonstrate or imply the existence of something unseen.” And keep in mind it doesn’t matter whether these things are real or imaginary.

OK, just in case you haven't seen this over at PZ's or elsewhere, here's a hilarious and brilliantly done satire:

It takes some deconstructing, but the consensus is that it is indeed pro-science/skepticism.

UPDATE: Here are the lyrics, and here is a brief bit on the 'cast' - kudos to both authors!

Jim Downey

Back in 2005, Stephen Darksyde published a fantastic article here at UTI called "Ancestral Magnitudes". It used the metaphor of the "generation", and colorfully described human evolution in terms of our ancestors.

[DarkSyde] If the idea of a flat-earth or the Sun-god is a part of that faith then you either ignore the science and live in willful ignorance-at least in regard to that conflict-and trust to faith, or you adjust your theology. Those really are your only two choices as far as I can see.

What your objection more than likely reveals is that you don't like the idea of being the product of 'random' physics and biochemistry, that you feel there is no room for a Creator in such a scenario. I cannot imagine greater natural evidence for the Brilliance of a Creator than complex process unfolding over billions of years through countless steps in exquisite order spanning the entire Cosmos. The technical skill and artistic vision of such is to be admired in awe, and in that context evolution should be worthy of your devotion, not your disdain.

I encourage you to read the whole thing if you haven't already. It'll blow your mind.

A few days ago, Xavier Onassis from the blog "Doubting Faith" published the same sort of mind-blowingly cool article about our universe, and it puts our place in that universe into stark, unflinching perspective.

[Xavier Onassis] Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that a universe this vast, and this spectacular could not be a random occurrence. Personally, I don't have a problem with it being one big coincidence. But, let's just say it's not.

Do you really think that a hypothetical all-powerful, all-knowing God, responsible for the creation of EVERYTHING in this incredibly vast universe would really give a flying fuck how you voted in the last election? Whether or not a couple of gay guys get married? Whether or not you keep Kosher or go on The Hajj?

Get over yourselves. You're not that fucking important. You need to look at the Big Picture and put things in perspective.

Just excellent. Highly recommended. Great job, Xavier.

I wrote this personal item for my blog this morning, but then realized that it was in many ways a perfect summation of how I see the world. Feel free to ignore.

Jim D.

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I commented via email to a close friend yesterday about the persistent fever my MIL has been running, 2 to 2.5 degrees above her normal. We'd seen fevers come and go for the last several months, but this one seems to have settled in for a while. I got back this:

Any particular reason for it, or is she just being like a star that's going into its final flameout?

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

I, for one, welcome our new super-intelligent Chimpanzee masters.

[link] Young Chimp Outscores College Students in Memory Test

Malcolm Ritter in New York
Associated Press
December 3, 2007

Japanese researchers pitted young chimpanzees against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.

That challenges the belief of many people, including a number of scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.

"No one can imagine that chimpanzees—young chimpanzees at the age of five—have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.

Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.

Damn dirty apes!

Brilliant:

About Project Pterosaur
Mission Statement

The goal of Project Pterosaur is to mount an expedition to locate and bring back to the United States living specimens of pterosaurs or their fertile eggs, which will be displayed in a Pterosaur Rookery that will be the center piece of the planned Fellowship Creation Science Museum and Research Institute (FCSMRI). Furthermore, the rookery facility will establish a breeding colony of pterosaurs in order to produce specimens that could then be put on display by other regional institutions or church groups.

By doing all this, we hope to accomplish three goals:

1. Support Creation Theory by showing the incorrectness of the philosophy of Evolutionism.
2. Educate the population about Creation Science.
3. Create excitement about Creation and the Bible in the public.

Absolutely brilliant satire. Here's another taste:

Ah, some Lewis Black on "Fossils: The Devil's Handiwork":

Hat tip to Ken! Thanks!

Jim Downey

OK, before I head out for the Heinlein Centennial, I had to share this little piece of the puzzle showing that we are, indeed, heading for the Crazy Years, as Brent recently mentioned:

Our Claim

Orbo produces free, clean and constant energy - that is our claim. By free we mean that the energy produced is done so without recourse to external source. By clean we mean that during operation the technology produces no emissions. By constant we mean that with the exception of mechanical failure the technology will continue to operate indefinitely.

The sum of these claims for our Orbo technology is a violation of the principle of conservation of energy, perhaps the most fundamental of scientific principles. The principle of the conservation of energy states that energy can neither be created or destroyed, it can only change form.

Roy Abraham Varghese, theistic apologist and god-bothering author from the "Institute of Metascientific Research", was recently interviewed by the Dallas Observer. Varghese is widely credited as "the man who won over Anthony Flew", and is now currently working on a book called "There Is A God" with Flew.

Varghese is an interesting character because his contention is that without a meta-intelligence, all science devolves into incoherence if you drill-down deep enough, or pull back far enough.

It's a lot of pseudo-scientific nonsense of course, a philosophically slick update to the theistic evolutionist's mantra.

More below the fold...

On the drive home today I caught Terry Gross's entire interview with Richard Dawkins. I should be able to hear her interview with Francis Collins tomorrow.

I think he was fantastic. Terry's questions led Dawkins in many different directions and he was able to address a good number of arguments for atheism. To my dismay, they didn't get to my current favorite(s) the Problem/Question of evil.

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From CNN:

SISTERS, Oregon (AP) -- During his eight days as a part-time high school biology teacher, Kris Helphinstine included Biblical references in material he provided to students and gave a PowerPoint presentation that made links between evolution, Nazi Germany and Planned Parenthood.

That was enough for the Sisters School Board, which fired the teacher Monday night for deviating from the curriculum on the theory of evolution.

"I think his performance was not just a little bit over the line," board member Jeff Smith said. "It was a severe contradiction of what we trust teachers to do in our classrooms."

Helphinstine, 27, said in a phone interview with The Bulletin newspaper of Bend that he included the supplemental material to teach students about bias in sources, and his only agenda was to teach critical thinking.

Evolution is a fact. It happens. It has happened. It continues to happen.

This is not in question. Those who protest either don't know what the heck evolution actually is, or they are lying to themselves and to you.

What I would like to talk about today is the perception that people have about what evolution is and is not, as well as what I believe we can do about it.

I have been arguing the creation/evolution debate for a long, long time. Back in 1986 I jumped into the infant online world with both feet, learning how to think critically and how to construct arguments. I have been an atheist since I was about 17 years old. I have been interested in science and the scientific method for much longer than that. The idea of a personal invisible imaginary friend seemed ridiculous to me even at the age of ten.

So, when the virtual world of the the new online services presented itself to me, I was floored. Here was a pure realm consisting of exact meaning. A world where people talked to each other almost mind-to-mind - cutting away the traps and the pitfalls that usually accompanied face to face conversation. Nervousness, apprehension, emotion, forgetfulness, shyness - none of this mattered when you were composing your thoughts off line in a text editor. You were able to edit and vet your words, making sure that they flowed well and made sense.

But those things which so attracted me to online text-based communication seemed to make others dumber than they would have been otherwise. Time and again I witnessed ostensibly intelligent people stumble and rush through a message or a rebuttal, making themselves sound like fools due to incoherent rambling, spelling and grammar errors, and faulty, fallacious reasoning.

It's almost as if they didn't care how they were perceived when they were online.

I didn't understand it then, and I don't understand it now. Online communications in this day and age - YouTube notwithstanding - is primarily text based. That is to say that if you cannot form cogent and thoughtful sentences, spelled correctly with the meaning coming through crystal clear, then why the hell are you arguing online - using text to try and get your meaning across to the other guy?

But that is neither here nor there - except as a base for my thoughts about evolution and the way that I have observed that people look at it.

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Last night I was watching a National Geographic program with my son about the hippopotamus called ‘Ultimate Hippo’. A large part of the show revolved around its behavior and habitat, but they also spent some time discussing the evolutionary history of the hippo. What they proved was both astonishing and very profound, at least to me

In the show, they showed that the closest relative to the hippo was in fact the whale! Scientists showed that hippo DNA is closer to whale DNA than monkey DNA is to human DNA. In fact, whale skeletons share similar bones to hippos, the blowhole of a whale functions in exactly the same way as the nostrils of a hippo, and whales even have stubs of hind leg bones inside their bodies.

The first thing that came to my mind as I watched this was the human tailbone, and how that bone is to us what those tiny leg bones are to the whale - physical evidence of ancient ancestry.

As science discovers and learns from more and more fossils, they are finding irrefutable evidence that shows one species transitioning into another. The amount of evidence, combined with the scientific accuracy of the tools we have leaves me baffled as to how anyone can doubt the accuracy of the theories of evolution……AND YET…

This is a very cool development. I love the interwebtubes. Heh.

[link] The complete works of Charles Darwin will be available on the internet over the next two years as part of a project described as the first of its kind.

Creators of darwin-online.org.uk said the public would be able to listen to and read works including the Origin of Species free.

Much of the material has come from the Darwin Archive, which is housed at Cambridge University, and the project is being overseen by Dr John van Wyhe, a researcher based at Christ's College, Cambridge.

“In the first-ever undertaking of its kind, the complete works of one of history's greatest scientists are to be made available for free on the world-wide web,” said a university spokesman.

From the site itself:

[Darwin Online] This site currently contains more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images of both publications and handwritten manuscripts. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from secondary reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, published descriptions of Darwin's Beagle specimens and important related works for understanding Darwin's context.

(Tip of the ballcap to Hank!)

Commenter "bhl" on Thinking Christian responded to my earlier post about Chris Campbell's take on relativism. I asked for facts. Not wishful thinking, not divine revelation, not anecdotes, but facts.

What did I get from the only person in the entire thread who actually attempted to give me any facts?

What do you think?

More below the flip...

Duane Gish, VP of the hoary old ICR trotted out the same, tired creationist apologetics at a church fundraiser in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania that he's been bleating about for years.

[link] Gish said the fossil record also corroborates creation instead of evolution. In the Cambrian strata, no ancestors or transition forms of living organisms could be found. "You ought to find billions of ancestors and intermediate stages, but not one has been found," Gish said. Living organisms were "created fully formed, just like the Bible says."

Holy crap, Gish, give it a rest already. Why keep spewing this already-debunked hogwash?

Ah. Now I get it. P.T. Barnum was right; A sucker is born every minute. The quote below is from the comments to this story in the Lancaster Online:

[link] I agree with you, there are just too many unanswered questions when it comes to evolution. I think evolution does a pretty good job of describing how environmental conditions effect biological changes but doesn’t definitively describe how life was formed from a collection of chemicals. By what mechanism did these early groups of chemicals become self propagating? Very primitive organisms still exist, why didn’t they move up the evolutionary latter, how is it possible that these primitive organisms were not challenged by the environment during 5 billion years of existence?

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This is going to make a lot of evangelists apoplectic. Hopefully, that is.

[link] The close relationship between man and chimp has just got cosier, according to a study which suggests that ancestors of the two species interbred at some point in the distant past to form fertile hybrids.

Interesting article, though. It explains why human and chimp genomes are so similar - we're very, very close cousins.

Kissing cousins, one might say. Heh.

Tom Ritter is a high school chemistry teacher with a dilemma. How to reconcile his duties teaching public high-school students chemistry and physics when those fields depend so heavily on evolution?

Did I mention that Professor Tom is a creationist? And that he has issued a $1000.00 "challenge" to "evolutionists" to debate him in mid-May on the topic; "Is evolution the only rational explanation to explain life and the existence of modern organisms?"

Apparently, Tom Ritter is Lebanon Pennsylvania's rather shopworn version of Dr. Dino.

Ritter, a chemistry and physics teacher, is astonishingly ignorant when it comes to evolution.

[link] “Personally, I don’t have much interest in evolution, creation or ‘intelligent design,’” Ritter said. “I’m interested in science. I believe teaching evolution as fact perverts science. You could teach evolution as a theory, and I’d have no problem with that.

Evolution is both a fact and a collection of theories. The fact is that evolution occurs. No sane person would even think of denying this. The theories are attempts to best explain how evolution occurs. A science teacher who doesn't understand this should be fired. It's inexcusably ignorant - willfully ignorant.

Happy Darwin Day, everybody!

Oh, uh, and Happy Birthday to my dear wife who shares Darwin's birthday - although to be honest, she could care less. Heh.

I decided to write a letter to the editor of my little, local newspaper the "West Valley View" the other day and was pleasantly surprised when it was published. It was in response to a series of ignorant pro-ID letters by my fellow community members, here, here, and here, and in support of the one letter from a rational human being named Mildred McNeil here.

In any case, battles fought in 300 words or less the "Letters" section of a local newspaper can be fun! Not always very productive, but at least the folks who read them know that there are two sides to the issue and that not everyone in their little community happens to be a Christian.

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