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Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Ha!
Page 2!
Maybe that will enliven this place.
Bored, bored, bored…. what this place needs is some life.
*sigh*
As a spiritual successor to an Undead Thread, I’m not sure the Dome needs life…
…it needs BRAAAAAINNNNZZZZ!
No, India, noooooooooo!
Teh Grauniad: Indian LGBT activists outraged as supreme court reinstates gay sex ban
Fuck fuck fuck… Religion and nationalism, promoting human misery since times imemorial.
First Croatia, now this. Just goes on to show how some victories can be easily reversed. :\
Hi there.
Some common smears I hear of evolution by fundie Creationists/IDers is that evolutionary theory is a “fraud” and/or a “sham”, labels that make me wince not only because it’s demonstrably not the case, but also because of how lightly they seem to throw the labels around. To call something a fraud, one is by definition labelling it as “wrongful or criminal deception intended to result in financial or personal gain”, and similarly with “sham” one would be labelling something as “not what it is purported to be” and being “falsely presented as the truth”.
So in other words, they’re accusing scientists working in biology as well as other evolution-related fields as people who are committing crimes by acts of lying and cover-ups. Again, this is the sort of accusation that feels really irresponsible to throw around, especially since considering the nature of other people and organisations in major news stories and what has happened to them, one would expect that if the scientists truly are lying, then it’s a massive scandal absolutely worth pursuing to the fullest extent so as to expose it, and yet the fact that I’ve never seen a single creationist/ID individual or organisation go to such efforts to reveal evolutionary theory as “fraudulent” is extremely revealing about how weak their case is.
What I’m here for is for some thoughtful input about entertaining a hypothetical situation where the fundies wind up being right and it turns out that scientists have been hiding evidence that has falsified evolutionary theory and it turns out they’ve been lying and covering-up the truth in favour of protecting a false scientific theory. Could some people give me some thoughts about what kinds of ramifications such an exposure would have in the scientific community as well as politically of course?
doki:
I share your frustration.
To make matters worse a same sex marriage law was shot down in Canberra, Australia.
Spiny softshell turtles are incredibly beautiful. So are spotted pond turtles. And pancake turtles.
@Tony!
is as perfect a slogan for this place as any of which I could ever think.
Let’s immortalize it.
While I make tea and procrastinate my papers.
dõki,
re. Croatia
We lost the referendum, but a civil partnership should soon become possible for gay partners.
Still, I think gay folks here have gotten the message about their own worth in this country loud and clear. I’m ashamed.
BRAAAAIIIINZ!!!!
And yellow-blotched map turtles.
Cute!
Tony!
Yeah, I had seen that, too. Not a particularly good fortnight for equal rights.
Well, I guess there’s still some hope for Scotland? And, I don’t know, erm, maybe Luxembourg?
* * *
Beatrice
I appreciate the feeling, but no need to feel particularly ashamed of your country. It’s not like it was a localized problem, anyway. It’s something that has to be tackled globally.
* * *
Random link to something I’m listening to now, provided for absolutely no good reason: Madredeus – Palpitação
I was accidentally listening to catholic radio today, and heard this gem. They were talking about how great of a time it is to be a catholic. There are tons of catholic apps, the internet is full of cool catholic stuff, you can get apologetics on your smart phone and “there is even a text to speech app on the kindle. I mean, you don’t even have to be literate to know what the church says today!” Yay! lets all be illiterate and just listen to what the church has to say! It will be just like the dark ages!
Did a little research today after finishing some end-of-the-year crap for work. I thought I would need half a year after the Redhead qualified for Medicare before I could officially retire with the “official age” SSA bump. Turns out, I can retire with the bump before she qualifies for medicare by two weeks. Unofficial date of my retirement, the last day of the month after the Redhead qualifies for Medicare. Yep, less than one handful of fingers….
Time-lapse video of London at night.
I think I have been physically present at pretty much every ground-level location featured (I can’t claim for the long-range skyline shots!) except for the underpass at 1:10. Anyone know where it is?
It also features four different office buildings in which I have worked. All for the same firm, and all in the right order. It’s like he’s following me. ;-)
In light of the season, some recent events in France and a few other place, and U.S. politics generally:
Go Move Shift (Ewan McColl, performed by The Exiles)
There’s a bit of tangential relevance to the santa thread too.
Another school shooting :-(
Not clear yet how grim the situation is.
Anyone able to help me out with #505?
There is no need to even consider a hypothetical. There are a million or so scientific papers that back the Theory of Evolution, both directly and indirectly. If the ToE was falsified, there would be a Nobel prize, accolades, etc, waiting for the scientist showing that conclusive evidence. Actually, the odds of that happening are far less than the godbots showing the equivalent of an eternally burning bush for their imaginary deity. If it isn’t there, why are they covering it up?
Evidence of that nature cannot be covered up. Because to be valid it would have to be out there, in nature, and reproducible, such that anyone who looks for it, will find it. Even if some scientists tried to cover it up, they would fail. Even if ALL scientists tried to cover it up, they would fail, because it doesn’t take a scientist to do science. Anyone can. Everyone can.
Conspiracies of that nature simply not possible in science. If even a single person with a vested interest in revealing that evidence existed (and there is just no one out there with a vested interest in wanting to see evolutionary theory fail, right?), it would come out.
just another topic
For those in a position to be a “volunteer”:
when did you cross the line?
how did
“Yeah, I can work a casino once every 17.5 months.”
morph to
“If I am not at the Hall every Tuesday at 8AM, the Universe is at risk.”
Chigau
I don’t flatter myself that I’m that indispensable, but after several months of intermittent volunteering at the Tool l Library front desk, I overheard two of the board members discussing how the volunteer coordinator was leaving for the South Pacific in a month or so, and they needed to find a new one. I said I could do that, and they told me when the next board meeting was. I turned up and was unanimously voted onto the board, and after a couple hours and a load of email documents from my predecessor, I became responsible for making sure that at least 5 people turn up for 2.5 hrs a week so we can stay open.
Dalillama
in one sense, well done and thank you for helping to keep a light burning so people can read.
in another
in my experience, in Canada, Board members are not paid.
Oh, I’m not, it’s a volunteer position.
JonMilne, if the creobots try the conspiracy theory, hit back with one of your own. Like god exists, and there is evidence for it, but the god there is evidence for is a woman, who believes in feminism, communism, and males do what they are told. The priesthood knows the evidence exists, but won’t show it because they will lose everything and be replaced by women….
@cm’s
Thanks for posting the video. I think I’ve pretty much cycled all those places at one time or another, though I am a bit rusty on the names.
Cycling about Marble Arch was surreal, what with the massive surge of steel, of the vehicles about one. The same adrenaline rush I would imagine one gets from white water kayaking.
Fond memories of the Big Smoke.
jobnmilne: Evolutionary theory comprises a suite of mechanisms by which evolutionary change is thought to happen. I can’t imagine any study that could falsify all of them. If evolutionary theory were soemhow falsified (again, unlikely to happen in toto), we would still be left with the problem of explaining the fact of evolution, which is an observable phenomenon.
It might be interesting to consider just how big such a scam/coverup would have to be. Take it seriously and see where it takes you. E.g. it can’t simply be a matter of hiding some evidence. The evidence we have is sufficient to make it all but certain that some kind of evolution must be occurring. If some evidence had been suppressed, at most it could result in a revision of evolutionary theory.
So, we would have to assume that false evidence had been disseminated. This is no small undertaking, though, since research is so spread out and easily verifiable by labs in various countries. E.g. simple phylogenetic analyses alone provide strong support for common ancestry, so the conspiracy would have to control which sequences were available in databanks and prevent people from doing independent sequencing. This itself is problematic because a single individual who could be bothered to save up for it could buy the necessary machinery, gather the samples and sequence the genes, to verify the facts.
So, in order for evolution to be faked, we’d have to postulate a world-wide conspiracy, controlling universities, publications, facilities and even private access to machinery. It would have to be truly staggering in size, having operatives in every country and every institution. After all, it would only take one unsupervised undergrad to sabotage the entire project.
It’s simply out of the question that something of this size could be kept secret. In the real world, the secrecy of a conspiracy is inversely proportional to its size. As the saying goes: “Three can keep a secret, if two of them are dead.”
Well, I brought up the issue in a private forum. I got this response from someone called Dragonfang:
Oh, you mean your imaginary diety/creator/phanstasm? Nothing but a figment of your imagination. Absolutely no conclusive direct physical evidence for one…..
In science, a theory is not a hypothesis.
Nor is the “theory of evolution by natural selection” a hypothesis of any kind. It is a conceptual framework that describes what we know about and how we understand the consistent tendency of certain biological hypotheses to be confirmed by experiment while certain other hypotheses have been consistently disconfirmed.
The hypotheses themselves not only are testable, they have been tested. The conceptual framework is tested by deriving new hypotheses that *should* be true (though some are framed as a “shouldn’t” this is just a different kind of should) if the toebns is true. Where the toebns fails, we are shown the conceptual limits of the theory. For instance, the conceptual framework can describe things that demonstrably do happen, but that doesn’t mean that it is impossible for things like unselected genetic drift to alter a population. Such things are described by theory outside of toebns, but they do not, when tested, violate toebns
…not least because toebns is the framework of what we know to be true from experiment, not a framework of things we think or wish might be true. The latter are hypotheses or religions, the former are theories.
garden-variety ignorance.
Also seems to think that a ‘light-year’ is a unit of time.
DISmissed.
JonMilne
I went ahead and took that post apart that you passed on, so:
For Dragonfang:
Only people who haven’t got enough evidence to make their case honestly.
Non Sequitur. None of those frauds were ‘small lies in service to a greater truth’. They were quite big lies, in service to the self-aggrandizement of their perpetrators and perpetuators.
Fractally wrong. History is a science (quite a lot of interrelated sciences, actually). The ToE is not a hypothesis; many, many hypotheses have been made and confirmed within the framework of the ToE. Many other hypotheses have been made, falsified, and discarded, both within and without of the current ToE. The discarded hypotheses which were part of previous iterations of the ToE are no longer part of the current theoretical structure, as they have been falsified. Meanwhile, the hypotheses advanced by advocates of other theories regarding the diversity of life have been consistently falsified or shown to work with the framwork of the ToE.
The falsification of a sufficient number of the aforementioned hypotheses would have required a sufficiently large reworking of the aforementioned theories as to make the current ToE obsolete, thus ‘falsifying it.’ At this time, it is effectively not possible to falsify the nucleus of the current framework, as the existing body of evidence is overwhelming in its favour. A partial list of the evidence can be found in any college-level biology textbook, a large number of popularized science books written dozens of authors, and a vast number of scientific journals.
Classic apologist projection. Too absurd to respond further.
That would be news to the plaintiffs in Kitzmiller, who quite plainly said the opposite. It would also be news to the Court that heard Edwards,, who said that “teaching a variety of scientific theories about the origins of humankind to school children might be validly done with the clear secular intent of enhancing the effectiveness of science instruction.”
One wonders what this person does believe to be science.
There is no scientific consensus as to how abiogenesis occured, because the presently available evidence is insufficient to distunguish between several equally likely models. The evidence is sufficient to indicate, however, that it was one of the current models, or at least a process quite close to same. This also has nothing whatsoever to do with the theory of evolution.
When there are astronomically many chemical events occurring over an astronomically long period of time, astronomical improbabilities happen incessantly.
As far as we are presently aware, this is the case.
The conditions which would allow for abiogenesis are incompatible with the widespread presence of life. The types of complex organic molecule involved do not exist free-floating in large quantities, because some life form will consume them.
Getting quite close, actually.
Life is metabolism, reproduction, growth, and response to stimuli. Assorted chemical processes, many of which relate to proteins, make life.
As noted above, the theory of evolution is entirely neutral on the subject of the origins of life, and serves only to describe the adaptations of existing life. None of the hypotheses regarding abiogenesis require any deviations from known and demonstrable physical laws and processes, and thus require no a priori faith, although firmly asserting that, say Manfred Eigen’s hypotheses is the one true one would require a leap of faith. I’m not aware of anyone who does that, though.
Nah, you haven’t garnered enough of my attention yet for me to demean you.
It seems to me that Dragonfang suffers from the same problem as most people who are critical of evolution; a complete lack of education on the subject. While he claims to not be a creationist, he’s pretty reliably regurgitating creationist talking points. Strange coincidence, isn’t it?
Anything not a century old? No? Okay, then.
What an immense load of bollocks. First, evolution isn’t solely historical. If evolution is true, it’s something that’s going on right now. The fact that it was also going on back then doesn’t put it in a different category, no more than the fact that gravity was always around makes that a “historical hypothesis”.
Second, it can be falsified. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that it could have been, since the facts are now so overwhelmingly in favor that it’s really not up for debate anymore. However, the theory could have been disproven a hundred times over. It just wasn’t.
Dogmatic attitudes are indeed problematic. That’s why we’ve come up with this nifty idea called the scientific method. Among it’s many ingenious features is the principle that evidence should be open to scrutiny. This allows anyone to go over the evidence and conclusions and check if they’re valid.
Ring any bells?
I actually did a bit of debunking of his crap myself, but mucho thanks for the input. He responded later on, but I’ll start off with how I responded, so that there’s not too much quotation in one post:
The existence of small lies does not equate to one big conspiracy in the scientific community. If you believe there is a conspiracy, prove it with hard evidence.
Nonsense. There are plenty means to falsify evolutionary theory: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211.html as well as http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/CA/CA211_1.html and http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Disproving_evolution. Since there are means to falsify it, it’s therefore a scientific theory
The evidence is there in nature regardless of whether we wish to apply evolutionary theory to it or not. The theory explains the evidence. Oh, and learn your scientific terms: nothing is ever “proved”, we simply find “evidence”. We’re more than aware that something could turn up that would overturn evolution and fit far better into the evidence, but in the meantime, beyond reasonable doubt, evolution is the best explanation for the evidence we have. And again, if you’re alleging some super secret conspiracy where scientists are suppressing any evidence of evolution being false and lying and covering up the truth in favour of protecting a false scientific theory, then the onus is on YOU to demonstrate this with hard evidence.
Again, if you allege such a massive conspiracy exists to silence rival beliefs of equal legitimacy within the scientific field (because Kitzmiller v Dover especially were to do with what is actually allowed to be taught as science in the classroom), demonstrate it with hard evidence.
Read the Index to Creationist Claims, specifically the sections under “Abiogenesis”: http://www.talkorigins.org/indexcc/list.html#CB0 . These should cover all areas of your complaints. We’re more than able to explain abiogenesis. Your accusations are baseless.
And now, here’s how Dragonfang responded to what I’ve detailed to have written to him in Post #536:
The biggest issue, really, with the fraud argument is that even if Charles Darwin were a terrible horrible no good very bad man who faked all his data, cheated on his taxes, and stole candy from children,
(1) That does not mean that every other scientist who came after him and worked to expand on the theories of evolution were also frauds.
(2) That does not mean that the Christian creation-myth is an accurate description of human origins.
Ask him to explain where his imaginary deity arose from. Don’t let them change the subject. Either they provide the evidence they expect for abiogensesis, or they shut the fuck up about their imaginary deity/creator.
Fair is fair after all….
Rats below, it’s good to be off the floor.
Caine #540
Cryptic.
What did I miss?
Everything OK?
Caine
The tree is vertical rather than horizontal?
Chigau:
I’ve been scribbling. Had to lay it out on the floor. My old body doesn’t like that sort of thing these days. Mmmm, yeah, it’s more horizontal. I’m gonna do the toucan now. Yeah, it’s gonna have a toucan. With incorrect colours.
Ah, creativity at work. ‘Nough said.
Evidently I did something to hurt my right shoulder yesterday or last night. Got up in the middle of the night with it hurting. The motion with pain is lifting my arm with weight in the middle of my body above the shoulder, like lifting a tankard of grog to my mouth, or putting dishes away/taking them out from the upper cupboards.
Nerd
That’s terrible.
Leave the dishes on the counter and save the few shoulder moves for the grog.
@chigau:
Present.
What did you want to discuss?
The dishes were put away this morning (ouch), and as more grog is consumed, the less the pain. And I get a bit of rest before I need to assemble the plate of planovers. With plates/glasses from the upper cupboards I refilled this morning (dang).
@Cripdyke: I sometimes ask people from the US or Canada to name as many indigenous peoples as they can, suggesting 12 as a goal.
Moving this here for off-topicness. I’m going to be utterly sloppy about it and simply name any group that I have ever heard identified as a group (tribe, people, language group, etc) rather than trying to determine whether these groupings are real or not, so may end up giving a distinctly European-influenced list. But here goes anyway:
Maya
Incan
Aztec
Navajo/Dene (I probably misspelled that name)
Hopi
Seminole
Cherokee
Cree
Iowa (were they a real distinct group or what a bunch of refugees got named?)
Dakota
Lakota
Maori (or is this supposed to be American indigenous peoples only?)
Apache
Nakai
Biliganna
CD
Your
“I sometimes ask people from the US or Canada to name as many indigenous peoples as they can”
Made me think
Band?
Nation?
Linguistic group?
Self-identified or gummint-classified?
I have worked with many First Nations people and have learned through bitter experience that they way I ‘classify’ them doesn’t always agree with how they ‘classify’ themselves.
@theophontes:
Eeek!!
For a short while, I lived south of Tower Bridge (0:26) and cycled Tooley Street (0:20) and London Bridge (1:43) then King William Street to the intersection at Bank (0:44) and beyond.
After three weeks some fuckers nicked my bike from the apartment block car park, and I was forced to revert to Shanks’s Pony.
On the upside, it probably increased my life expectancy by about 10 years.
@Dianne:
The point is to name groups whose history is connected with yours and be aware of those connections.
When I use this exercise, I don’t criticize people for using government/white imposed names. Frankly, in not limiting it you get to see just how ignorant the majority of non-indigenous folk are.
I can name bands by band names. I can name “national” groupings that share a common culture and history even if they did not (in historical time) have any kind of formal unifying structure. I can name language groups (though there are fewer of these of which I’m aware, though obviously the largest, highest-level groupings (NaDene and the like) are familiar). I can name super-cultures like the Salish who can be categorized as having multiple nations within their scope.
The names (or lack thereof) aren’t useful in and of themselves, but people come up with one or two and then others come up with a different one or two and pretty soon as a group we might have 20 or more before I speak at all. I don’t have to criticize them for ignorance – they tend to do that themselves when the names that they can’t access are nonetheless mostly very familiar to them (since although most non-indigenous people can only remember one or two when the spotlight is on, it’s not like they haven’t heard news reports or seen movies that involved names of many different peoples).
I started using this as a tool when I heard a statistic that some test group (which I think was college students, because aren’t they always?) in the US could, at Median, name fewer than 10 African nations. I think the median was around 4-6 and you had a z of at least 1.5, probably 2+ if you could name 10.
It reminded me of how ignorant I am about, y’know, the entire world. I can’t cure all of it, but I can make an effort to see beyond my own local perspective (local geographically, local demographically, local temporally). Although I’d done anti-racism work before, this “name 10” (did I type 12 in the other thread as a goal? That’s a typo, I normally ask for 10) format exercise was deliberately chosen because it would seem easy but be accomplished only rarely. I want people to think of themselves as both
a) ignorant of far too many things
but
b) able to learn an amount which puts them out of the ordinary.
I use the motivation of joining the few, the proud, the not 100% ignorant to get people to try to learn on their own. If they can see in a workshop that naming 10 African countries (or 10 indigenous peoples, or 10 rivers vital to human life, etc.) is rare, but they also see it as a goal that they can accomplish, they won’t become experts in how the lives of southern Africans are affected by the Orange or the Limpopo, but they’ll pick up a bit more knowledge. And if the concepts stay with them while the names don’t (Was that Lake Albert or Lake Victoria?) the fact of the discussion will make them prick up their ears when they have an opportunity to learn something. I have been told by 2 different people that after this exercise they caught themselves listening more closely to a news story b/c they heard the names of one of the peoples we discussed and wanted to know more, whereas they both reported that before, when hearing the name of an indigenous people, they tended to do the opposite – tuning out b/c they didn’t know enough to care. The people involved were entirely too abstract. Even being able to place the Wallowa Valley as something other than vaguely in the US West was enough to make someone from Oregon listen more closely to the news when they caught the name Nez Perce.
No, Nez Perce obviously isn’t their self-identified name, but it’s nonetheless useful to know since you’ll hear it in media, read it in books.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a starting point both for judging your current level of awareness and for gauging whether you are growing in knowledge over time.
(Many!) More than 2 people reported that they just said names (and maybe pictured stereotypes) when they first tried the exercise. But later when they tried it again, even if they didn’t remember that many more peoples right away, they thought of them differently -“The people who lived in X part of my native country, where I went [camping/shopping/whatever]” is a different way of thinking and shows more connection as well as just more basic knowledge (you have not only a who, but a where). They also continued thinking of names over the next hours or days, “Oh yeah, I should have thought of X”. Even if not a great education in who a given people are, the focus on indigenous peoples as a part of the current world – not an anachronism, not people who once were, not people too strange to share a connection – is, sadly, a step up for a lot of non-indigenous folk.
While I’m not comfortable with that level of education as an end goal, I know how horrifically awful it is for me to try to teach Trans* 101. If the non-trans* people teach each other trans* 101 and I can be useful in bringing people to a truly different level of understanding of themselves and their gender later, we make a good team and I save myself a lot of pain which non-trans* people don’t have to worry about speaking in complex areas where they are very likely to get it wrong.
I see my pitiful-in-the-grand-scheme,-but-unfortunately-necessary anti-racism work as the kind of work for PoC that I want non-trans* people to do for trans* folk.
Testing myself on the Ps only:
Powhattan
Penobscott
Pueblo
Passamaquoddy
Crap, that’s all the Ps I’ve got right now. Don’t know why I can’t get my brain to function tonight. Harrumph.
Oh, wait, Potawatomi & Pensacola, not to mention the Pequod/Pequot (I’ve seen it spelled both ways).
I know there’s the Popoloca in Mexico (though I’m not proud to say that the reason I remember it is that it is connected in my brain to “crazy pope” which has nothing to do with that people at all).
Okay, I think I’m going to give up. I spent 5 minutes on it – oh, Paiute – but that’s just Ps, and I haven’t done this exercise in a little while (and for some reason, there seem to be a lot more M’s up here in Canada, though the Cs As and Os seem to be common everywhere).
Looks like 9 in 5 minutes. It should be more, I feel, but on the other hand, I don’t know if I could name 9 US cities that start with P in 5 minutes, so it isn’t like it’s a perfect test of anything.
And, because I’m bored!
Heh. Link:
0:00: South Bank looking towards the old City of London School for Boys, Unilever House, Blackfriars Bridge
0:14: Museum of London roundabout looking east along London Wall to the twin Pizza Expresses of 125 London Wall
0:20: Tooley Street, passim
0:26: Tower Bridge (can’t tell if it’s north or south side)
0:32: Piccadilly Circus, looking west to the old Virgin record shop (not sure if that what it is now)
0:35: London Wall again
0:40: Westminster Bridge, south side, looking north
0:44: Bank of England, Royal Exchange, Bank intersection passim
0:47: The bright blue glass thing is the IMAX; it’s from the footbridge from Waterloo station over the A3200 to Shell House
0:50: Covent Garden (somewhere)
0:53: Docklands from the O2 side of the river
1:00: The Shard, from its base! Amazing piece of architecture; it occupies a site the size of about six tennis courts and just goes up and up and up and …
1:04: O2 Arena from the Docklands side of the river
1:07: MYSTERY UNDERPASS. WHERE IS IT? :-)
1:14: Parliament Square looking east over Bridge Street and Westminster Bridge
1:20: see 0:53
1:23: South Bank looking NE at (I think) the railway bridge from Waterloo into Charing Cross
1:25: My first thought was High Holborn going over Farringdon Road, but I’m not sure. A40 further west, maybe?
1:29: Leicester Square
1:32: London Wall, again, I think
1:36: Waterloo to Charing Cross pedestrian bridge
1:40: Covent Garden again
1:42: London Bridge from the south looking north
[various long shots]
2:04: Liverpool Street station
2:05: Millennium (wobbly!) bridge, south bank, looking north to St Paul’s
2:12: Piccadilly Circus (again)
2:20: Liverpool Street station (again)
2:26: Intersection of Regents Street and Oxford Street
2:33: Intersection of Regents Street and Great Marlborough Street
[fin]
(You know, I actually enjoy doing this!)
@553: I don’t know if I could name 9 US cities that start with P in 5 minutes
Given that you have just named at least 2 (Pensacola and Pueblo), you probably could.
10 African countries…let’s see…
Nigeria
Niger
Democratic Republic of Congo
That other Congo
South Africa
Egypt
Sudan
Liberia
Madagascar
France (part of it’s in Africa–Reunion is a French department)
Senegal
Angola
Sierra Leone
Ethiopia
Eratria
Somalia
I have to admit that most of those were countries that I’ve heard of when disasters or civil wars strike them, but that took me all of about 1.5 minutes (even if you discount the cheating) and I’m not particularly strong on the geography of Africa and am sadly ignorant of the politics and culture. I’d do pathetically if asked to name African tribes. Hmm…
!Kung
Zulu
Tutsi
Hutu
?Egyptian
?Pygmy
?Arab
That’s it. That’s all I’ve got and the last three are pretty much guesses.
Regents -> Regent, apparently. Should pay more attention to les maps du Google.
@CripDyke: My thought process in listing names of indigenous tribes went something like this: 1-3 people I learned about in American history class (and I do mean AMERICAN, not US history in this case), 4 probable relatives*, 5 possible relatives*, 6-8 other tribes I’ve heard about from general knowledge of US history and/or geography, 9 people a place I lived once was named after, 10 another place name (no personal connection), 11 riffing off 10, 12 people whose health problems I’ve read about fairly extensively, 13 oops, should have thought of them earlier and family meme-connection**, 14-15 I wonder if anyone will get the joke and call me on this one. Probably not what you were looking for since most of the connections are connections to the past.
*Successful cultural genocide means that I don’t know for sure.
**Probably of interest to no one else.
Pueblo is a city? Oh, yeah, Colorado, right?
I don’t know many peoples of Africa, but I don’t live there. I don’t need to be disabused of notions such as that the area belongs to my ethnic group, etc.
In front of a blank map, I can now consistently name every independent African nation (though I had forgotten that France has national territory in Africa), even Sao Tome & Principe. Listing them abstractly would be a bit different, but in the past I’ve been able to visualize and name them all, in part b/c I also tried to learn regional clusters (overlapping, of course) that connect to other bits I’ve tried to learn (like Countries that border Lake Chad – that kind of thing).
I can do likewise for Asia and Oceania, and South America. Sadly, there are Caribbean nations I still forget and some of the smaller European nations drive me a bit mad (San Marino, I’m looking at you). But I’m much better at appreciating where a named country is (and in a few of the larger countries, like Brazil, China, Canada, the US and Russia, where some of the major major states/regions are) than I was 10 years ago, which lets me connect better to news of the day. Like: “Oh, something is happening here? That means it’s next door to this other place – and wasn’t there an earthquake in that other place last year? What did I learn about availability of resources in the region when that earthquake story hit?” My appreciation of what people are facing is always inadequate and self-centered (in the sense that it is always compared back to my experience in an attempt to understand it), but it is richer, more complex, and better amenable to education than it was when I couldn’t contextualize a country or a people quite as well.
@dianne, #557:
I just looked up biligana/ biligaana. Very funny.
I found nakai to be a botanist that published on samples, naturalist style, collected during roaming around parts of Japan and parts of Korea. So that one was beyond my google-fu.
========
As for what I was looking for, well, what I look for in my workshops is a starting place to talk about those connections. What I was looking for on TD wasn’t anything at all, since I’m not your teacher. I was just talking about it b/c chigau and you seemed interested in exploring this.
@CD: I think Nakai is the Dene term for Spanish, but I could have it wrong. Very easily.
Philadelphia,
Portland, (can I count it twice?)
Pittsburgh (where you go after you die, if you believe Calvin & Hobbes, with the main point of debate being whether that’s where you go if you’re good or if you’re bad)
Pensacola
Pueblo
Panama City
Pacific City
Providence
Is Paxatucent River a city or just a military base? (also, I now remember that there was a band named Paxatucent)
Paradise
Palo Alto
Paramus….(and I know that there are a bunch of cities in NJ that start with P b/c a friend of mine joked about this once, but I couldn’t come up with any more)
Well, that was a bit over 5 min, but i wasn’t looking at the clock when it turned. Still, you were right. i got over 9.
@561: Everyone goes to Pittsburg after death, good or bad. The difference is whether you get Pittsburg at a good economic period or a bad economic period.
What? It makes at least as much sense as any other description of the afterlife.
Passaic
Paterson
Perth Amboy
Parsippany
Princeton
uh
Also, Pittsburgh is a fine town (where, btw, I’m from). Not like it’s, like, Cleveland, or Detroit or some shit.
Paterson!
That’s the one that was on the tips of my fingers. Argh.
Thanks, Chas.
And condolences on being from Pittsburgh ;-)
A good skewer with bad aim.
Check out the 5th on the list.
Grilled cheezus, why is it sexist to say that rigid gender hurts everyone?
Environment Canada, are you shitting me?
0°C tomorrow?
The roads will be a bloodbath.
Native American Nations I can think of:
Lakota
Iriquois (does a confederation count?)
Mohawk
Delaware
Gay Head (Martha’s Vineyard – I forget their real name)
Lumbee
Tuscorora
Seminole
Cherokee
Tonoho O’odham
Yavapai
Havasupai
Apache
Creek
Navaho
Hopi
Ute
Chumash
The latest installment of The Great Pharyngula Movie ™ has come to an Interwebz near you!
This is basically the back story of how Ken Ham’s AIG and Atheism plus came to be at loggerheads. It features everybody’s favourite Benevolent Dictator for Life, Tony!, Ms Molly (incarnated as a human) and Ken Ham. The main scenes are from 20 years ago, so everyone looks very young and sprightly.
Link to Movie. (9:20)
chigau, this will be of interest to you as it is the first time that the official
TZTThunderdome uniforms are on display.theophontes
A triumph.
Eight … er … “thumbs” up.
Found it! Piccadilly. *relief*
LOL. ? Is that (quotation marks not intended the second time)?
Nebraska Man wasn’t a fraud. It was a completely honest mistake. The fossil is genuine and has never been tampered with, and it really was found in that place and that layer, not planted – it just happens to belong to a peccary, not to an ape. The teeth of apes and pigs are quite similar, I once confused them at an exam.
Piltdown Man was a fraud. But the idea behind it wasn’t to support the theory of evolution. It may have been patriotism (if Germany has Heidelberg Man, we need our own!!!!1!), or simply a quest for personal fame, or any number of stupid reasons, but that humans are descended from apes hadn’t been questioned by any biologist in decades. FFS, On the Origin of Species came out in 1859, The Descent of Man came out in 1871, and Piltdown Man was “discovered” in 1912!
Ernst Haeckel interpolated to fill in holes in the growth series available to him. That was dishonest, even though his interpolations have, AFAIK, turned out to be pretty much correct.
…and the motivation may have been nothing more than to (over)simplify the picture. Haeckel was, however, an ideologue.
There are no fucking veggies that fucking kill fucking stomach fat!
Yeah. I said it.
If you drop a pumpkin off the empire state building and it lands on someone’s head, I bet that person’s stomach fat would die….
I have a silly question.
Why has the stalker who fancies himself to be a “human rights investigative journalist” switch most of his attention from FtB to trans women? Not that this is a recent development nor does really surprise me. But there are a lot of people on Twitter who hear from that assclam and his supporters. But they know little to nothing about FtB, “Guys don’t do that.” and the founding of the pit.
Links for 575, GEJanine?
I am sure that any link I make to ElevatorAssclam’s Storify site will trip the filters here. But that should give you enough to look it up.
Paso Robles
plenty.
Thanks.
…..click, whirrrrrrrr…..
Hmm. I’m looking and the storify doesn’t even make sense. There are important bits left out. Even if the “man” elected to head a feminist student union is really a trans person, what actually happened? Who is it? Is it Kevin? What did Kevin ask CCP and friend that resulted in being blocked?
All I see is people saying entirely undramatic things. “I got blocked” “A man got elected” “the jury system sucks for trials” and on and on.
Seriously, what’s with this? Why is this even here? This is journalism?
Bizarre and entirely beyond my ability to figure out.
@ chigau
You tell me this AFTER I’ve paid a small fortune for a large pallet of canned pickled turnips ‽‽‽
I’ll trade you some canned pickled beets. I actually like them, but the moment I open the 10 litre can they’ll become perishable, and I’m not sure I can store that much beets in a small refrigerator.
theophontes:
Yes, but look at the bright side. You have a large pallet of canned pickled turnips.
Alright, I need help with the latest response from Dragonfang. I let him know that you guys had questions for him, and he agreed to address them:
I also had another guy called “Sadolite” say this:
@ Sadolite via jonmilne
False. ToE has not made this claim. Once again, abiogenesis is being confused with evolution. They are quite different. That you are making this mistake informs us that you should not be commenting on this topic and rather get thyself to a library.
Which advanced life form would, in turn, need a creator.
Evolution is all about small changes. These agglomerate over great reaches of time to lead to very substantial changes. We have many speciation events on record. Would you care to give your own ideas as to what constitutes “a species”?
ToE does not seek to explain abiogenesis (“the origin of life”) – you are rather confused on this issue. As to “species”, ToE explains both morphological changes and speciation extremely well.
Life evolved from earlier life. Evolution does not relate to non-living matter coming to life.
There is no such claim being made. Snowflakes are extremely complex, yet form spontaneously on the basis of simple underlying conditions. What you specifically mean to refer to (I gather) is the increase in complexity of living forms. (Which are likewise based on relatively simple underlying principles and conditions.)
You are making this claim based purely on your ignorance of the subject under discussion. Have you any evidence supporting the position you hold in this regard?
You are not even wrong here.
If the odds were likely, life could not emerge (at least not as we know it) as conditions would be too unstable. We are dependent on the unlikelihood of spontaneous emergence. Fortunately, anything that does ever emerge is instantaneously relegated to “food”, and so the problem disappears (down a very teensy gullet.)
@ nigelTheBold aka Avo
This————> Linky
Ah, but a pumpkin, tis a fruit! Might I suggest a beet?
theophontes: Wunderbar! I laughed, I cried. It was a delightful romp, rich in pageantry, a must-see for the season. However, may I recommend either a belt or a cod-piece for our new unifoms? Or both? Or alternatively, whatever the monkey was wearing at least for engineering and security?
But it isn’t important. I’ve seen this argument, and it’s just goal-post moving. Abiogenesis still needs an explanation–this explanation is aided considerably by ToE, in that any system that replicates with error is subject to selection. The first instance of selection likely preceded cellular life.
nonetheless, jonmilne: Your antagonists may be too far in the dark for the light of knowledge to reach them. One strategy may be to adopt a less defensive position. Attack their beliefs. Engage in mockery and ridicule. Make it funny, and report back.
@ AE
But my character WAS wearing a codpiece!
(The movies I sampled were Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Brave New World and … of course … Ken Ham – Why Won’t They Listen Part Deux.
That last is in three parts, totalling 50 minutes. It is rather drole in its own right, but also goes a long way to explaining why he does what he does wrt ID and creationism. He believes in creationism through necessity. By letting science into ones life, you are undermining YHWH’s word. Facts and stuff cannot way against That.
He notes that indoctrination is easier if everyone (that is: society – in its entirety) just goes along with his worldview. The whole enterprise would have been so much easier if those pesky Hellenists (he calls them “Greeks”) hadn’t ruined it all by considering the nature of reality rather than simply accepting “Jewish” spiritualism and YHWH. What he fails to mention – and it is innevitable if we went along with him – is the level of violence that would be required to keep his world views in place as the dominant paradigm. Linky.
(Note: His “lost in translation” problem in selling YHWH is not what we find with reality based narratives, maths, science, logic … etc)
wayweighWhat a polite way to point out that they’re ignorant blowhards. Their supercilious bullshit isn’t worth dignifying.
I will make one factual point:
Dumbass didn’t notice that the art in question is labeled “adapted from M.K. Richardson 1997”? Or didn’t look up Richardson 1997 to learn that it features photographs of the embryos depicted?
You are too kind. We tried and failed.
Day saved.
Why don’t he and Sadolite simply come here? Invite them! This indirect conversation is becoming tedious!
Fraud happens where money is involved. In most of evolutionary biology, no money is involved whatsoever.
It’s rather breathtaking to claim these drawings are from Haeckel. Go look at them and at the figure legend.
Also: Ernst, single syllable; Haeckel – “Heckle” would end the same way as “kitteh”.
*sigh* One more idiot who believes he gets to make up his own definition of a technical term. Evolution = descent with heritable modification.
By finding a better explanation for the detailed fossil record of just that happening. :-|
colorless green ideas sleep furiously
Not light years. Years.
Well, no. By definition, evolution requires inheritance, so it can only begin once there’s a self-replicator. Whether the first self-replicator was a cell is an entirely separate question.
Note the leap from “detailed […] origins not known” to “without even knowing anything about their origin”. I’m afraid Sadolite needs to learn to read for understanding.
Depends on your definition of life.
Yes. We would use physics to date sedimentary rock layers. We would then investigate as many of those layers as we can, as widely in each as possible. We would look for the appearance of hummingbirds in a rock layer older than the evolution of theropods (circa 230mya). If we think we’ve found it, we would double check the structures of the fossil bones under discussion to make sure it is the remains of a hummingbird. Contemporaneously, we would double and triple check the date – in different labs, using different equipment run by different people.
We could also closely examine the expected relationships between animals based on similarities in fossils. With a pattern of expected relationships in hand, we would run genome sequences of hummingbirds, crocodilians, mammals (especially including bats), insects (especially including winged insects), frogs. lizards, snakes, tuatara, turtles & tortoises, bony fish, and sharks. If evolution by natural selection operating on undirected variation is true, we would expect to find fewer sequence differences between snakes and lizards (who split off from each other 100mya according to rocks) than between birds and crocodiles (who split off from each other 250-265mya) and both would be expected to contain fewer sequence differences than would be found between bats and birds (split circa 300-350mya) or between bony fish and sharks (who split circa 400nya). Especially interesting to our analysis would be these last 2 comparisons where function and body plan have gross similarities, and bodies achieve similar results through similar means, but nonetheless should show independent genome evolution over a very long time. We would then ask if any of the genetic evidence contradicted the fossil evidence. If it did, we would ask if the two evidence bodies contradicted each other in small ways, where interpretations were arguable or data was thing, or in large ways, finding fundamentally different relationships that are better predicted by a designer reusing parts that achieved similar function than by descent with modification (sharks closer to bony fish than bats to people; birds closer to bats than snakes to lizards).
We could also reexamine every hypothesized descent link in the bird family tree, excruciatingly verifying that the similarities in structure are, in fact, present in the fossils. We would use verified dates to test whether or not its impossible for certain relationships to exist.
We would then either win a Nobel and ruthlessly mock more than a century of scientific incompetence, or we would concede that the theory of natural selection acting upon descent with modification does in fact well explain the data and is in fact confirmed by experiment.
Go collect your million bucks, buddy. You already know the answer, all you have to do is the work.
I’ve said the same thing about gravity a million times. People keep wanting to say that mass attracting other mass is a fact not up for debate.
Religious nut jobs.
My mind is open. My mind is open to anything. My mind is open 15cm by 20 cm. That’s how open it is. That’s how I know I’m superior: because I refuse to accept any evidence that would be difficult to argue against, since if it makes something difficult to argue against, it’s a violation of free speech promulgated by totalitarian religious nut jobs.
And may I say…
…hey, what’s that squishy gelatinous thing on the ground there, looking like like a roundish mass of wiggly intestines congealed into a gelatinous shape that could fit through an opening 15cm by 20cm?
Dragonfang also responded to another post I made. I’ll include what I said when responding to a previous post of his:
Dragonfang also said this:
JonMilne
Any thing but provide evidence, like liars and bullshitters who ask dishonest “gottcha” fuckwittery simply can’t do. Like the solid and conclusive evidence for your imaginary deity….Nada, nil, zip, zero, nothing. Just like the idea of deity.
Prove this.
I assume you’ve had several “nothings” under observation? I won’t ask you for how long you observed the nothings, since time would not exist in a nothing, since nothing has nothing, not even time.
But I would like to see the data that you use and the mathematics deployed to extrapolate to the number of nothings that (don’t) exist at all non-points in non-time and non-space.
Or were you just making shit up?
Bwaahahahahaha!
It could not be clearer that you are incompetent to engage in this debate. ***All science*** is ad hoc. That is both the point of science and the strength of science. Let’s look at some definitional information from wikipedia:
“Ad hoc” is a subset of “a posteriori” knowledge. It is “a posteriori knowledge formulated to assist in solving a problem”. It is not the entirety of all possible antonyms to “a priori” but is included as a portion of that global antonym. In other words, while you can come up with examples of knowledge antithetical to a priori knowledge that are not included in “ad hoc”, you cannot come up with examples of of knowledge that are **more** antithetical to a priori knowledge than “ad hoc”.
So, science should design its solutions only “for this” specific circumstance on which we have previously gathered data, not generalizing it beyond where we have data…though of course it is permissible to guess that it might be generalizable to a new circumstance, but then we’d have to test it in that new circumstance or it wouldn’t be science (alternately, we could demonstrate somehow that the “new” circumstance does not, in fact, constitute a new circumstance).
Science should not assume in advance how things work – in fact, this is the sin contained within your accusation.
Science should look at the data and only then decide how things work – this is the data you used to prove that we have used to “prove” that scientists decided in advance what is true.
If there is a more moronic debating tactic in the world than:
“You decided in advance what’s true and then, when you got new data, you changed what was true to fit the data!”
I have no idea what it might be. Perhaps you have some a priori knowledge on this topic?
Not true. The traditional concept of God has had her being spawned from a void, or from chaos, or from her father’s head, or as an emergent property of mountains, lakes, rivers, trees, and oceans.
If you mean the traditional Christian concept, well there you’re up against the mythology of the early Christians. Only John, who is very, very different from the other gospel writers, says, “in the beginning was the word, and the word was god”. The pseudonymous John also writes much later than Mark, Matthew and Luke. So, here you’re wrong again.
If you mean the post-Aquinas concept of a Christian god, I’ll give it to you, but now you’ve narrowed the field considerably. Why should the fact that 1/8th of humans over the last 750 years belonged to groups that were nominally adherents to a creed espousing a particular concept of god, whether or not 1/8th actually conceived of god in that way, prove anything about this god or any other? Concepts of buddha have been consistently indicating that he was born on earth for even longer, and involved at least as great a segment of the population. Does that prove Buddhism?
Moreover, animism has had far more adherents over time than Christianity. Does that prove that mountains have souls?
You’re engaging in “I believe X, therefore you should be believe it’s true”.
I believe you’re an idiot that embraces false ideas whose life would be better if spent with a healthy respect for a posteriori knowledge and even handed application of critiques of a priori knowledge.
Follow your own logic, if you will.
The Great Crayola Gnaw. Oliver, Amelia, Agnes and Artemis.
Caine:
(not sure if you keep up with the Lounge at all)
My parents gave me a Nexus 7 for my birthday and the first thing I bought was A Brief history of Misogyny: The World’s Oldest Prejudice, thanks to your recommendation. I’m finding it a captivating, though saddening read.
Hello everyone (and PZ)! I’m just popping in to point you all towards Skepchick’s new endeavor Grounded Parents aka THE BEST PARENTING BLOG EVER
(Someone here might be blogging for GP. *cough*)
X-posted from Ed’s blog, where he has a post up asking about being an atheist Jew.
If I haven’t written anything else of value lately, I do think this might have some, and TD is a good place for it to live.
================
Why do I identify as Jewish despite having come to a firmly atheist understanding of myself?
It’s simple: you fuckers murder us.
No one in my family was murdered (or a murderer) in the holocaust, but as someone who didn’t grow up Jewish and found it in fits and starts, alternating with my questioning the whole religious enterprise, or just apathetically ignoring both atheism and Judaism, I could easily have chosen to say that there was nothing significant enough about Judaism to continue to identify me after I completed my evaluations of the evidence for god.
But when I was first considering that maybe it was important for me to say that I was Jewish – not every time I’m introduced, but when such things come up making it clear that Jewish applies to me – my lack of firm belief in God held me back. And yet, it was clear that I participated in a shul where the ritual was comfortable and familiar, the congregation my friends, and the community very homely: I gave money, I sat on a committee or two, I went to visit the sick and the bereaved. Then I went to a conference and found that I was really going to miss having Shabbat with my honey. So there I was, pretty far along a path of evaluating the evidence for god and coming up empty, contacting other Jews and asking them if they wanted to daven some on shabbat.
I realized how much I was getting out of the community, and enjoyed getting that much out of the community. And it’s not like I wasn’t giving back, it’s not like I was a moocher, but why would I just tell people, “I’m a jew”? There were plenty of reasons, and many of them good ones.
But then a problem that had long been lurking in my experience bit me again: anti-semitism. The west coast of the US doesn’t see a lot of organized anti-semitism, but that’s in part because Jews aren’t as visible. It was clear that anti-semites were, in some sense, attacking me. But were they attacking me as a Jew? What would it mean if they were?
Finally I concluded that I may or may not be a real Jew by any number of definitions, but in a world where my Judaism is arguable, where it might-or-might-not be, I have choices. If people are going to choose to engage in anti-semitism, with the history of Partner’s family (though I didn’t know her then), with a world history of ghettos and murders, of blood libels and immigration restrictions, of child abductions and pogroms, I realized that my complicated, nuanced thoughts about atheism, agnosticism, community, identity, religion, and, finally, Judaism all got in the way of just this statement:
It comes with other moral implications, of course, and I must wrestle with those. As long as Israel is a Jewish state, i must pay particular attention to its acts regardless of whether or not I have visited, or have lived within, or have become a citizen of Israel.
But in a world where my status as a Jew is arguable and confusing, I remember that the German government from 33-41 would not have been likely to be forgiving, I remember that people I love have lost people that they loved, and most of all, I remember that the destruction of an entire people starts with making people question whether or not they want to be associated with them.
I stand for moral courage. I stand between danger and those less prepared than I to face it. I stand without a god to save me while I do.
And yet I stand a Jew.
Crip Dyke,
As (very Gentile) I understand you, whether or not someone is religiously Jewish (in any sense, from the Haredim to the bacon-eating-go-to-Temple-on-special-occasions-only and everything in between), whether or not someone is Jewish under Jewish law (matrilineal descent from a Jewish woman, or converted in an acceptable manner), whether or not someone is of one of the various Jewish ethnic groups, the identity of “Jewish” cannot be divorced from the cultural context of centuries of ghettos, pogroms, etc etc etc.
I’m reminded that Benjamin Disraeli, baptized as a child and raised Christian, by all reports a doctrinally orthodox Anglican (for all that an Anglican can be “doctrinally orthodox”), referred to himself as a Jew, because other people saw him as one.
I’m reminded that the children and grandchildren of Jewish people who married non-Jews and raised their children outside of Judaism were shipped to the camps by the Nazis alongside everyone else.
Am I understanding you properly?
thanks for the respectful engagement, Esteleth:
I don’t know about “cannot” in the sense that I could choose or not and my last name isn’t “Cohen” or “Levi”.
but “cannot” in the sense:
This is the sense in which it can’t really be divorced. Even if I wasn’t raised to fear this, what does it mean for someone you go to shul with (or did) to decline to identify as a Jew when we know that anti-semitism still occurs? I can see it as a principled stand about non-appropriation of Jewish experience when I don’t actually believe Adonai gave me 613 mitzvoth whose fulfillment is my greatest enterprise. I did see it that way. But, even though the Godwin thing is real and Hitler is invoked in all the wrong ways, there are huge numbers of families who have a oral history, occasionally even a living memory, of what was done, of how it was done.
Pastor Niemoller’s famous statement is applicable here. I don’t make a lot of noise about being a Jew as in many times and places it doesn’t matter. Although I like lighting candles on Fridays, I clearly don’t prioritize it or I would do it more often. But if there’s even a possibility of an anti-semitic attack, no matter how small, I don’t want the people with whom I went to shul thinking I won’t stand by them. In fact, because of how I was raised, anti-semitic attacks *do* hurt me less than for many others. So I even risk less than they by putting myself in the line of fire.
Jewish relationships with whiteness, with religious privilege, with class, with so many things are very complicated. Saying I am an atheist Jew doesn’t render any easy answers, and I might not want to take time to deal with all those questions, but in a context where anti-semitism still exists, I don’t want those unjustly targeted to feel like people from their own community are walking away.
Although I felt all this before meeting Partner, learning the history of Partner’s non-Jewish Jewish family is such on one side b/c that side not only left judaism, but hid any details of Jewish past for fear of anti-semitism. In other words, Partner is non-Jewish b/c Hitler literally scared the Judaism out of her family. This is an effect on my own family life, a practical one, since Parner doesn’t know the hebrew alphabet even enough to know the 4 letters on a dreidel, or how you play the dreidel game. Hitler literally robbed me of a shared cultural experience 70 years after he died.
I’m an atheist, but I choose not to let fear of any kind come between me and the other Jewish people in my life. If that creates awkwardness for me at times explaining my complicated relationship to Judaism and the Jewish people, or if that creates a moral obligation for me to be more involved in helping bring about a just peace in Israel, Gaza, and Palestine, I pay that price so that I can look myself in the mirror. I can’t bear the thought of my lack of courage contributing to another generation’s estrangement.
Argh. Still can’t post anything at other blogs.
There’s so much fail in the above comment by StevoR. Not that that’s anything new, but especially when Mano is trying to discuss ‘reverse racism’, this isn’t the time for his denialism.
Tony:
Ooh, what a lovely gift! Yay, you. I’m glad you’re enjoying the book.
I’ve missed you Caine.
Glad you’re around.
SO is back from India!
Not dead!
CD, thank you. Sorry to be so scarce, I’m working my fingers off on the tree, trying to get the Crayola Quilt done. I’ll be scarce for a while yet.
Chigau:
*Phew* Glad to hear it! Mine is missing in action this week, learning about crane safety, in the cold, snow and ice. Makes all manner of sense, that. :eyeroll:
Caine
Nice toucan!
Thanks, Chigau! I was fair pleased with it.
Seriously, bring Dragonfang here.
That’s not actually clear.
@David Marjanović
I thought John being the later gospel was pretty much universally accepted. Can you give a bit more info on that?
@jonmilne
Regarding this point:
I’d ask Dragonfang to describe exactly what’s wrong with that picture, because as far as I know, it’s completely accurate. These organisms do all have pharyngeal slits during their development.
It sounds like he’s been listening to creationist nonsense for too long. They seem to have a knee-jerk reaction to anything that compares embryos of different species. Haeckel was wrong about the degree to which organisms recapitulate past development, but that doesn’t mean that there are no such embryonic similarities and that all pictures that compare embryos are frauds.
Dare him to present an example of an actually fraudulent picture in a modern text book.
And then get ready for thundering silence, followed by a quick change of subject.
I’ve recently read (thanks to Esteleth!) parts of the book discussed here.
Luke is probably the last of the canonical gospels, its final form and its sequel Acts being (possibly) products of the Marcionite controversy of the mid-2nd c. The dating and order of the gospels simply isn’t known with anything near the certainty that some will pretend. The priority of Mark I view as all but certain. Beyond that, simple scenarios are likely to be wrong. In particular, notions of John’s independence from the Synoptics are not sustainable in my view. And I note a tendency on the part of NT scholars to date Matthew practically as early as it possibly could have been written (~10 years following Mark), and I see no particular evidence for it, it’s treated as a given that it’s the product of the 80s CE. It could well be the case that Mark dates to around then and Matthew Luke and John were all produced in the 2nd century.
My first thought when seeing this was that “?” represented a glottal stop. You know, ‘Arab
</threadruptcy>
Filed for reading. Thanks.
The caption for the picture says only that “The common structure [pharyngeal slits] is evidence that all five evolved from a common ancestor”, not that the embryos are identical.
And the image is not Haeckel’s, but: “Adapted from M. K. Richardson, 1997”. Which appears to be this paper:
There is no highly conserved embryonic stage in the vertebrates: implications for current theories of evolution and development. Anat Embryol (1997) 196:91–106.
It’s kind of ironic that he’s arguing against Haeckel. That is, he argues that embryos of different species exhibit quite a lot of variation (there’s a table towards the end that lists some of the extremes). Of course, he’s not arguing against evolution , nor that the differences imply any sort of problem for evolution — just that Haeckel went too far in saying that they were the same.
From Richardson’s conclusion:
(emph mine)
Didn’t PZ cover this?
[pray to Google]
I think this is what I was thinking of:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/08/24/the-politically-incorrect-guid/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/11/06/well-well-wells-jonathan-wells/
Look what Ally has linked to.
This is painfully funny.
http://freethoughtblogs.com/hetpat/2013/12/18/trollololol-bmj
(xpost)
http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2013/12/18/mens-rights-activists-battle-misandry-on-college-campuses/
Interesting article about the MRA’s foray onto american colleges.
Over in this post: http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2013/12/17/david-brooks-still-has-a-job/#comments , PZ put down some skewering satire of a column by David Brooks. At the beginning of it is the following:
PZ:
I commented, @15 in the thread, saying that that was an unfunny joke and PZ should find a better one. PZ replied, @23:
In reply to that and some other comments on the thread, I said @27:
Several other people have also replied over there. But since this is not related to Brooks or his column, and to avoid a more massive derailment of that thread, I move my question here:
Why is anyone saying that it is either (1) acceptable/funny to make jokes about someone “needing to be put on suicide watch” or (2) appropriate to remote-diagnose someone as “deeply lost in despair and self-loathing” or (3) the time to write skewering satire at someone’s expense if you have serious concerns about their safety?
(in reply to The Vicar, in the Brooks thread)
To clarify, I have no interest in defending “michaelbusch”. For all I know, he might be an old troll you all are acquainted with… or maybe Ken Ham’s best friend, or Arpaio’s deputy undercover. *shrugs*
I also don’t dispute any blogger’s right to post whatever they want. Nor the right of any person to call out another for what they wrote. This is all very trivial.
My point is very modest, really: I don’t want fans’ overzealousness to trump the need to have consideration for the bystanders. Because you seem to be defending PZ’s right to write a joke he says he didn’t make… by making suicide jokes of your own. And, well, I don’t know, I have a few friends with mental health issues who are sensitive about this sort of thing*, and I’d like to be able to point them here to Pharyngula and show them a place where they can read intelligent commentary and where religious bigots and scammers are mocked, not a place where they are made to feel worse because somebody has the need to make a point about free speech.
I realize I’m new here and don’t have the right to demand what the discussion should be like, but, if there’s a concern about being inclusive, I believe some simple measures like this can help to make the place more welcoming.
Anyway, sorry for the long-windedness. tl;dr If we can agree in trying to reduce collateral damage, I’ll gladly pursue this no further.**
*which is, of course, not the only way one can feel about that.
** actually, I’ll probably let it go anyway, because I don’t think I have the energy to go on with this.
I now realize I made an unwarranted assumption about michaelbusch’s gender in my previous comment.
I’m very sorry about that.
*hits head repeatedly against a wall*
dõki:
I had assumed that you’d clicked through my nym to my Facebook profile – I post under my real name, which happens to be a strongly male-coded one, so your assumption was entirely correct. So head-walling is not necessary.
Because the target of the joke was a person who is not widely respected around here. See? So it’s OK. Oh. And black humor. Why do you want to take away our precious black humor?
oh my: teh ECO shuts down the Wilford thread.
How will Nerd pass the time of day now?
You’re particularly sour today, Chas. Things not going well?
Chas @ 629:
All good things come to an end, but it was fun while it lasted at least.
:groans: It would be wonderful if some people learned how to shut the fuck up. Oh well. Guess I’ll go work.
The usual. Taking care of the Redhead and running errands; today post office, bank, drug store, and work (to return the laptop to its docking station and water the cactus).
Heh, that word begins with the other thing.
…which is why it shows up in Tatar as Гарап Ğarap. Years ago I found the Tatar Wikipediä and spent entirely too much time just looking at it. :-)
The later it is, the faster time passes. :-(
*grin* Told you you wouldn’t get the last word. ;-)
—
In unrelated news, from the Department of Why Was I Not Informed of This Before, Rob D – Clubbed to Death samples Elgar. (Seriously, I was working my way back from Nimrod and was like, whoa!)
(FTR, Best Nimrod: Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Shiny. Literally.)
Now, also, Smokebelch II turns out to be a cover. Although it doesn’t achieve classic status until the David Holmes fourteen minute remix.
*ciao*
What would Hong Kong (Or New York, or Paris…) look like if the lights were switched off?
Cliquez pour la réponse.
Dragonfang hasn’t responded since when last I responded to him. However, later on in the forum, I got talking about “common sense” and how actually in history what “appears” to be common sense actually tends to get debunked quite a good bit by thorough scientific investigation, and so “common sense” cannot be used as an appeal to Creationism’s apparent truth value. A poster called Medic took exception to this and responded. I’d really appreciate some help on this one:
@ jonmilne
I support what David M. said earlier about bringing the people here for the discussion rather than our dealing with them through degrees of seperation.
However, regarding this materialism thing, I am worried that he underestimates the ambit of science. Gods certainly fall under its scope. He seems to be trying a sophistimicated version of the “non-overlapping magisteria” gambit. Essentially he is talking out of his arse, for pretending that science does not go beyond the (so called) “materialism” of which he speaks. What he seems to be ignoring is the whole field of Psychology, which more than adequately fills in the gaps that he so desperately feels “science” has neglected.
It is perhaps to much to drop onto his tender psych at this stage, that it is in fact materialism all the way down. On the other hand, there is nothing to stop you reading up on Kahneman and Boyle (discussed upthread, see also Pharyguwiki) to improve your own understanding of how the mind works, and why it is so easily seduced by fairytales.
Nerd of Redhead from INFECTING thread:
Well, that was demeaning. Thanks, Nerd.
Demeaning in what way? Denying your ability as a person or a group to protest against the homophobic Russian laws?
Or saying the the official US political response is limited in what it can do in protest against those laws, and that those limitations need to be taken into account when making criticism of official policies?
cm @ 636:
Forget about it Jake, it’s Chinatown, er, the internet.
Don’t play coy, Nerd. I bolded the problematic part of the exchange. I don’t have any perspective? I have no concept of practical policies? Those statements were hostile, unnecessary, and didn’t add anything to your point, only your impression of me. Almost like you were attempting to intellectually bully.
Don’t stress about it throwaway, it’s all just Nerd’s OPINION anyway. And we all know what St. Hitchens said about that.
who, Nerd?
David Marjanović:
Thanks for correcting my ignorance. I think I’ve encountered the voiced pharyng
ulareal fricative from hell before, probably when I was trying to figure if I could have some aspirated glottal stops, please, but evidently I failed to learn my lesson.Also, pretty impressive your incursions into Tatar territory.
Turtles in amusing seasonal costumes!
I’m pretty sure its actually a tortoise. Behold the Easter Tortoise! *relurks*
Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:
Cotton Mill Colic, written 1926. The numbers are different, but the situations aren’t.
Gee, some find my opinion distasteful to to them. Look in the mirror folks, especially dysomniak. Your statement about food stamps was intellectual bullying, as when I lived in Dah YooPee, food stamps wouldn’t help in buying decent vegetables. All we had was the dried over produce rejected from “down below”, like where I live now. Not everybody has access to decent produce at all times.
Hey everyone, raise your hand if you can recall a comment by Nerd that contained actual substance!
And raise yours if you actually have an argument yourself. I did with substance show your attitudinal point was wrong. Care to show me wrong, and that the YooPee has better fresh produce year around than the Chicago area?
That’s just your OPINION, which can be dismissed as per St. Hitchens.
*snicker*, no evidence, just attitude. Why should I believe a word you say if you won’t back up your attitude with evidence. Come one, show me that somebody living in a food desert without transportation has an easy time buying fresh produce. You are challenged to present real evidence, or acknowledge your attitude needs an adjustment.
Well. This should be tedious.
Nerd being tedious? Unheard of!
What makes you think I’m referring only to Nerd?
In case somebody hasn’t heard of food deserts, some background about the Chicago area food deserts from the Trib.
Welp. I’m sorry that my complaint is being used as a springboard to mount the pommel horse of past grievances. Though it is Festivus, after all, maybe that’s appropriate?
In the spirit of both Festivus and Thunderdome: Fuck you all.
LykeX
That’s the Spirit!
Feh, Humbug!
It seems y’all are in need of something of substance to chew the fat over, so here it is:
http://prospect.org/article/homeschool-apostates
In the meantime, remember on Christmas Day not to shoot your eye out.
DW, if you have a point, why not just say “this is what I believe, and this (link) is the evidence to back it up”. Trying to say “chew over this” is a sign of intellectual cowardice on your part.
SQUEAK O Ratmas Tree SQUEAK
Aawwwww. That blue smear all over their little faces is just too cute.
Those rats are squeeetastic! =D
* * *
On another note, I feel like I’ll have to read the Unapologetic thread to understand what’s going on. sigh… And I was hoping I could avoid going through all those hundreds of comments…
Thanks, LykeX and Doki. :D
Eh, you don’t really. David Wilford is all in favour of the wonders of religious belief and annoyingly incorrect in accommodationist assumptions, and everyone else attempted to argue actual facts and sense. As for the rest, it’s just people driving by to be sniping asses. Just wish ’em a merry mishmush and leave them be. Not worth hassling.
Oh, okay, thanks, Caine, you just saved me a lot of trouble.
I think I have developed a very nasty allergy to crayons.
:sigh: The flip side thread is making me uncomfortable. So much othering going on, with the rider that “yeah, they don’t do as much harm, yada, yada, yada”, while never realizing at least part of that is because it’s still automatic in most cultures to dismiss anything a woman says. Eh, I had more, but I think I’ll close out and get a little work done. Merry mishmush, everyone.
Why are you such a condescending arsepimple, Wilford?
NEW THREAD.