Hey, St Petersburg, Florida!

You’ve got a real winner running for mayor down there. Bill Foster is another ignorant creationist running for political office.

“Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak,” Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. “This is a slippery slope.”

He continued: “One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site, ‘You know what I love? Natural selection! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms.'”

Rather than reducing our kids’ exposure to evolution, let’s increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they’ve swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.

Maybe if the Columbine killers had gotten a more accurate version of evolution from a science teacher rather than the idiot’s version they got from people like their conservative preachers and the Bill Foster’s of the world, they wouldn’t have held those ridiculous distortions of the idea.

I hope all you St Petersburg residents are planning to vote for some other person. You don’t really want an ignoramus in charge of your city government, do you?

Goodbye, Vampira

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Sad news…Vampira has died. She was very young for a vampire, only 86, and there’s no word on whether it was a stake or sunlight that ended her long career as one of the rare Finnish vampires (real name: Maila Syrjäniemi). You may recall her from her important role in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It’s the last sad whimper to the lingering death of an old tradition. When I was a young’un, there were horror hosts everywhere—you knew that if you turned on the TV anywhere at about 11 on a Friday or Saturday night, there’d be somebody in a Halloween costume introducing some old black-and-white horror movie. It was campy, it was predictable, the movies tended to be awful (although when one of the old Universal classics with Karloff or Chaney, or anything with Vincent Price, was scheduled, I made a special effort to watch it), and it was always fun. Rmember those cheap Japanese monster movies? Roger Corman’s low-budget rip-offs of Edgar Allen Poe titles, with content completely divorced from anything Poe ever wrote? That phenomenal wave of British horror coming out of Hammer Studios? Them, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Blob—all that 50s paranoia about nuclear bombs?

Many of us godless people still identify as cultural Christians because that was the background of our upbringing, but I think my late night inoculations with classic horror and sci-fi movies had a deeper, more long-lasting influence on my life than those boring, unentertaining, unengaging Sunday mornings spent in church pews. I am a cultural Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Morbius, Pretorius, Phibes, and even Vampira — and they were all the more important as shapers of my perspective because there was no pretense that they were real, and because their portrayals were open to criticism and mockery.

The Atlas of Creation has found a destination

OK, you can all stop trying to win a copy of the Atlas of Creation now — the owner has decided who is to be afflicted with punished with tormented with given the copy. Scott Hatfield, I’ve passed your email address along. Look for a message. Get ready, it might take a month’s worth of a public school teacher’s salary to cover the shipping.

By the way, if anyone else wants to dispose of their copy, browse that thread — I can connect you up with recipients.

You know you’re a biology nerd when…

…you think the PCR song is kind of catchy.

The PCR Song

There was a time when to amplify DNA,
You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells.

Then along came a guy named Dr. Kary Mullis,
Said you can amplify in vitro just as well.

Just mix your template with a buffer and some primers,
Nucleotides and polymerases, too.

Denaturing, annealing, and extending.
Well it’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do.

PCR, when you need to detect mutations.
PCR, when you need to recombine.
PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is.
PCR, when you need to solve a crime.

(repeat chorus)

A clever compromise

Texas has been considering this application from the Institute for Creation Science for approval to offer a degree in “science” “education” (a double misnomer!). Now there’s an excellent idea afloat by the Texas commissioner of higher education — go ahead, give ’em a degree, only call it “creation studies”. Perfect! It removes the problem of false labeling, and allowing people who aren’t actually qualified to teach science get jobs in the public school system. And it actually gives the graduates of programs in creation studies an edge in acquiring high paying jobs in the Baptist Sunday School sector. Everyone wins!

How bad could Huckabee be?

Jason Wiles delivers a lovely smackdown of Huckabee’s position on evolution. First, he hits him hard on his record as governor of Arkansas.

During Huckabee’s tenure as Governor, evolution education in Arkansas languished in an environment of general hostility and insufficiency. Two anti-evolution bills were introduced in the state’s House of Representatives; textbooks in the Beebe, Arkansas public high school carried disclaimer stickers denigrating evolution; the state’s science curriculum earned a grade of “D” overall and an abysmal “zero” for its treatment of evolution; a creationist “museum” enjoyed state-funded advertising; and evolution was systematically and broadly squeezed out of schools and other educational institutions across the state. Huckabee did nothing to deter any of this – in fact, some of his public statements might indicate his tacit support.

Then he pops him one on what Huckabee has said about evolution — the man is a misinformed moron. Here’s part of an interview with a student…a student who is smarter and better educated than the governor.

Student: Many schools in Arkansas are failing to teach students about evolution according to the educational standards of our state. Since it is against these standards to teach creationism, how would you go about helping our state educate students more sufficiently for this?
Huckabee: Are you saying some students are not getting exposure to the various theories of creation?
Student (stunned): No, of evol … well, of evolution specifically. It’s a biological study that should be educated [taught], but is generally not.
Moderator: Schools are dodging Darwinism? Is that what you … ?
Student: Yes.
Huckabee: I’m not familiar that they’re dodging it. Maybe they are. But I think schools also ought to be fair to all views. Because, frankly, Darwinism is not an established scientific fact. It is a theory of evolution, that’s why it’s called the theory of evolution.

I’d like to think this gibbering sphincter is going to crash and burn in the primaries and doesn’t have a chance of getting elected to the presidency, but remember, he won the gubernatorial election in one state…and the electorate of conservative ignoramuses is nationwide.

Detectives needed — in Florida

This is getting weirder all the time: the Miami Herald claims that 12 Florida counties have passed anti-evolution resolutions in their school boards. They all sound awfully similar, too, as if…

…as if there is intelligent design behind this campaign.

…as if there is some money backing this effort.

…as if someone has specifically targeted Florida as a good venue for the next evolution-creation trial, and is sowing the seeds.

So, anyone out there on a Florida school board, or knows someone who is? Have you got any information on the source of the anti-evolution boilerplate that’s being disseminated in your state? Let me know!