I expect Carl Zimmer must have already seen this, but it’s cool anyway: Attenborough shows us some of those freaky parasitic fungi destroying insects.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I expect Carl Zimmer must have already seen this, but it’s cool anyway: Attenborough shows us some of those freaky parasitic fungi destroying insects.
Jebus, but I am in the wrong business. Benny Hinn is getting his flock to buy him an airplane.
As a result, we have recently taken delivery on our Gulfstream G4SP plane, which we call Dove One. I have enclosed a beautiful photo-filled brochure to explain more about this incredible ministry tool that will increase the scope of our abilities to preach the Gospel around the globe. Now we must pay the remainder of the down payment, and I am asking the Lord Jesus to speak to 6,000 of my precious partners to sow a seed of $1,000 in the next ninety days. And I am praying, even as I write this letter, that you will be one of them!
“Sow a seed”…of six million dollars? So he can buy a fancy new jet? This is what Christianity is really good for: providing an environment in which grasping, greasy-haired, forehead-thwacking freaks can prosper, where piety is measured in dollars and the moneychangers have inherited the temple. Faith is just another word for credulity, and preacher is a fancy name for parasite.
If you need help figuring out how to irritate me, here’s a long, long list.
Those godless heathenish Scandinavians…I think you can figure this one out even if you don’t know Norwegian.
Thanks, Kjetil Åkra!
If you really must have something in English, Kristine uncovers a Chick parody: Mommy burns in Hell. That’ll cheer you right up.
Thanks, Hank Fox. Now I’ve been damned, officially.
Why would the state of Maine ban such a classy beer label? Do they hate Christmas?
By the way, Dave Puskala has told me he has a homebrew he calls “Angry Evolutionist”—that’s a label I’d like to see.
(via The Science Pundit)
Sometimes, I get something other than hate mail from creationists—I get crank mail, too. I got a letter recently from Lin Liangtai, asking me to help disseminate information about his amazing paleontological discoveries. He has photos of what he calls a 300 million year old penis, along with other organs.
There are also close-ups of sectioned material: it quickly becomes obvious that anything that has a vaguely circular profile is called a cell, and anything with a reddish tint is called blood, and anything with that elongate anteater look is a penis (they apparently did not practice circumcision in the Carboniferous). It’s all crude and wrong and very, very silly.
I’ve seen it all before, too: Lin Liangtai is a Chinese Ed Conrad! Conrad (whose site seems to have vanished, unfortunately) also spent his time puttering around among old mine tailings in coal country, collecting Carboniferous rocks that resembled, to his untutored eye, fragments of body parts, and then spammed various internet sites with claims that he had evidence of “man as old as coal”, and that his “fossil” organs clearly reflected fragments of a catastrophic disaster that splattered people everywhere, and somehow preserved their bones and kidneys and penises and lungs for later discovery.
I think those two ought to get together and share their findings. They are clearly kindred spirits.
This cute kid makes a nice rant that I completely agree with, but yeesh—those aren’t her words. She’s playing dress-up and prancing in front of a camera, and reciting with child-like enthusiasm words someone else wrote for her. That bugs me.
My kids were brought up without religion, and I know what a genuinely godless kid is like. They’re interested in Where’s Waldo and Dr Seuss, not Richard Carrier and Robert Ingersoll and Richard Dawkins. They play video games and like the swings at the local park. They run into religious practices when they visit their friends, and they’re curious, but it’s not a big deal…it’s exactly like discovering the different foods their friends’ families eat. They don’t care about religion.
So sure, this kid is cute, but she rings false. Please, atheists, don’t use your children as props in this kind of anti-religious tirade—speak for yourself.
(via Echidne)
Can I possibly bear another bucket of gobbledygook from Deepak Chopra? One must soldier on, I suppose, even as Chopra becomes even more vague. I’m going to keep it short, though.
Dawkins, along with other arch materialists, dismiss such a search [for “god”]. Are information fields real, as some theorists believe? Such a field might preserve information the way energy fields preserve energy; in fact, the entire universe may be based upon the evolution of information. (there’s not the slightest doubt that the universe has an invisible source outside space and time.) A field that can create something new and then remember it would explain the persistence of incredibly fragile molecules like DNA, which by any odds should have disintegrated long ago under the pressure of entropy, not to mention the vicissitudes of heat, wind, sunlight, radiation, and random mistakes through mutation.
Well, no. We can see the chemical processes involved, we can measure rates of degradation, we can calculate how selection would maintain a viable DNA sequence. This is all very silly; we don’t need his “invisible information field” to account for the characteristics of DNA. He’s fond of conjuring up these magic sources for phenomena we do understand, so maybe we should all be a little skeptical when he invents them for phenomena we don’t.
As for his lack of doubt about an “invisible source outside space and time” for the whole universe—I have my doubts, but I’ll defer to the physicists on this one. I don’t see why a source for something before which there was no space or time is at all necessary.
The man gets grandiose:
The entire universe is experienced only through consciousness, and even though consciousness is invisible and non-material, it’s the elephant in the room so far as evolutionary theory is concerned. This is a huge topic, of course, and I’ve offered earlier posts on the many flaws in current evolutionary theory. under the topic of Intelligent Design. It’s difficult threading one’s way through the battlefield, with fundamentalists firing smoke on one side and skeptics arrogantly defending the scientific status quo on the other, but earth-shaking issues are at stake. When we understand both intelligence and design, a quantum leap in evolutionary theory will be possible.
Actually, since most organisms lack any kind of consciousness yet evolve just the same, consciousness has almost no applicability to evolution at all. It’s a very narrow topic limited to a relatively tiny lineage, and the question isn’t how consciousness contributed to evolution, but how evolution produced consciousness. I don’t quite understand why he’s got that dangling sentence fragment splat in the middle of the paragraph, but his message is clear anyway: he’s just another Intelligent Design creationist, asserting that his god must have played a role in our origins, but he has no evidence, no real theory, and his ignorance of biology is pathetic.
Maybe he should ask the Discovery Institute for a membership application. He’d fit right in.
The Tangled Bank will be at Down to Earth next Wednesday—send those links in to me or host@tangledbank.net.
