Release the hounds!

Carl Zimmer has this lovely post on the Lenski lab work on E. coli evolution, and look! The first author on that paper, Zachary Blount, showed up with an offer to answer any questions!

But sadly, you should also look at who the first person to take him up on the offer is: Larry Fafarman. If you don’t know of him, you’re fortunate. He’s a mentally ill, permanently obtuse, persistent freakazoid creationist who, given a chance, will run the rational discussion right off the rails.

If you’re interested, get on over there and counter Loony Fafarman with some intelligent discussion, ‘k?

The annoyance of the local weather

You may have heard that the midwest, my little corner of the universe, has been hit hard by storms. My specific little area has avoided the worst, and we’ve been watching the major storms fly by on the television, just clipping us as they rip past, but we have been inundated — on Wednesday, in particular, it was one of those days where you huddle inside while the thunder rattles the windows and the water gushes out of the sky. There is a lot of construction work on the road in front of my house, and they had to stop while the roadbed turned into a sea of mud.

So where we are, it’s uncomfortable but nothing more, which means that our greatest affliction right now is the epidemic of dumbness on the news.

“We’re just kind of at God’s mercy right now, so hopefully people that never prayed before this, it might be a good time to start,” Linn County Sheriff Don Zeller said. “We’re going to need a lot of prayers and people are going to need a lot of patience and understanding.”

I guess god really hated those people who died or had serious property damage then, huh, Dumbass Don?

I really can’t stand public officials who think they are being helpful by telling people to waste their time.

Hey, how about this one?

“I believe that this is God’s way of doing things, and I’ve got insurance, so I’m not worried about it,” said Tim Grimm, who was forced to leave his home in the city’s Czech Village area.

And they call atheists unfeeling, arrogant, and amoral…

If you’re reading this, I guess the world didn’t end after all

Yisrayl Hawkins predicted that the world will end on 12 June. He’s in Texas, so I presume he was using Central Time…and since it is now the early hours of 13 June here, I guess we can safely say that we dodged a bullet. Whew. I was getting worried. Hawkins, after all, is an expert prophet, well practiced in predicting the end of the world — he has done it twice before.

Of course, if the world did end, I hope you left some messages for your loved ones, or sent me your power of attorney, or something.

Tainted by its authorship

Many people have been sending me this article about how high IQ turns academics into atheists. I’m afraid I don’t trust it at all: the author is the infamous racist, Richard Lynn, and carries all the baggage of his peculiar notions of genetic determinism and narrow views on the significance of IQ.

I don’t think the religious are necessarily stupid, and I most definitely do not believe they are born stupid. I do believe they are saddled with a set of foolish misconceptions that can throttle their intellectual development and send them careering off into genuinely weird sets of beliefs, but this doesn’t make them stupid. I also think that IQ tests are written by people who promote an implicitly scientific perspective (which is a good thing!), and it’s therefore not surprising that a group in which a significant fraction of its membership actively reject science will do poorly on such tests.

While I can see where accepting the handicap of faith might lead to poor performance on non-faith-based tests and scientific thinking, I reject Lynn’s usual premise of a biological basis for such ability.

We have our nuts up north, too

Minnesota pastor Gus Booth is using his pulpit to promote candidates for political office, claiming that “God wants me to address the great moral issues of the day”. Which is fine with me, even though I disagree with him on just about everything. He clearly wants to commit himself to crusading for his causes, even though (or because) he is an idiot.

How do I know that? Because he now wants to claim that he’s being persecuted by the IRS and Americans United for Separation of Church and State, since they argue that such political activity is a violation of the rules governing his church’s tax exemption. They are not saying he can’t speak out against abortion or for his dangerously loony political candidates, they are saying he can’t both speak out and demand the privilege of not paying taxes on his political headquarters. He doesn’t get it.

I think that if he wants to fight a god-mandated war, he ought to expect to make a few sacrifices in his struggle. It’s worth it, right?

The AU has put out a nice letter on the subject.