You can enter a drawing for — this is really going to thrill you all — a copy of Expelled! Please do enter, I’d like to see someone rational win it, so they can use it as a coaster or something.
I’ll try to find a better contest next time. Anyone know of any drawings for a handful of dung?
It’s annoying. I got another copy today of Joan Carroll Cruz’s Eucharistic Miracles, a typical collection of credulous fables about crackers behaving oddly, and I don’t need any more. This very silly book sent someone back about $16.50, plus postage, and it was a total waste since I already have several copies, and I just laugh at each of the ridiculous stories, anyway.
I’m going to get rid of them, though. I’m going to bring one copy along with me on my trip to Kearney, Nebraska tomorrow, and the first person to tell me he reads the blog and wants this book will get it. I’ll even desecrate it with my signature, if you want.
I’ll also bring a copy with me to Philadelphia next week, same rules.
I am not coming home with this trash. If nobody wants ’em, they’ll find their way into a hotel dumpster. Take note, devout Catholics: if you keep sending me this kind of stuff, it will just end up in a landfill somewhere, or worse, in the hands of laughing heathens.
That would be one simple suggestion I’d make in a letter to Obama. When did a god-walloping meathead get the idea he can make informed contributions to government?
Fresh off the British Humanist Associations’s successful bus campaign, the American Humanist Association has fired up its own set of big signs on buses in the Washington DC area. Their message is “Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness’ sake”.
Of course, CNN considers this another salvo in the War on Christmas. Silly news organization. Didn’t you get the word? The war on Christmas is over. We won. It’s a secular holiday, atheists can celebrate it any way they want, Christians can continue to pretend it’s baby Jesus’ birthday, and everyone has the freedom to interpret the meaning of the day in whatever way they choose. The freethinkers of America are victorious.
The only people left fighting it are desperate holdouts who look sad and comical when the emerge from the jungles of their own making. Like the American Patriarchy Association.
In mid-October, the American Family Association started selling buttons that say “It’s OK to say Merry Christmas.” The humanists’ entry into the marketplace of ideas did not impress AFA president Tim Wildmon.
“It’s a stupid ad,” he said. “How do we define ‘good’ if we don’t believe in God? God in his word, the Bible, tells us what’s good and bad and right and wrong. If we are each ourselves defining what’s good, it’s going to be a crazy world.”
Guess what, Tim? It is OK to say “Merry Christmas”. Even I have been known to say it. Go ahead, have a good time with the greeting, although it does rather rip the spirit out of it if you say it through clenched teeth with furrowed brow, looking like you’re daring everyone to object so you can punch them in the throat. It’s also OK to say “Happy Solstice,” “Season’s Greetings,” “Happy Holidays,” and “Merry Cephalopodmas,” whatever feels right to you.
But I’m sorry, this Biblical god fellow is not a very good source for goodness. If we went by that definition, Christmas would be a time when we’d slaughter Amelekites, get drunk and have sex with daughters, stone gay people, and treat molluscs as abominations. None of those things sound very merry to me. Wouldn’t there be a better source for goodness that doesn’t rely on archaic xenophobia and delusion from bad old books? How about empathy and the general principle that we should do to others what we would like them to do for us? Atheists can follow that one, and they don’t believe in god at all.
There is a maddeningly vague press release floating around, and I think everybody has sent me a link to it now. It contains a claim by some chemists that they have discovered a new organizing principle in evolution.
A team of Princeton University scientists has discovered that chains of proteins found in most living organisms act like adaptive machines, possessing the ability to control their own evolution.
The research, which appears to offer evidence of a hidden mechanism guiding the way biological organisms respond to the forces of natural selection, provides a new perspective on evolution, the scientists said.
The researchers — Raj Chakrabarti, Herschel Rabitz, Stacey Springs and George McLendon — made the discovery while carrying out experiments on proteins constituting the electron transport chain (ETC), a biochemical network essential for metabolism. A mathematical analysis of the experiments showed that the proteins themselves acted to correct any imbalance imposed on them through artificial mutations and restored the chain to working order.
If true, this would be an extremely remarkable claim. An amazing claim. Something that would make all biologists sit up and take notice. Unfortunately, the puff piece writer and the scientists involved seem incapable of actually explaining what they found, which makes me extremely suspicious. This is just empty noise:
The research, published in a recent edition of Physical Review Letters, provides corroborating data, Rabitz said, for Wallace’s idea. “What we have found is that certain kinds of biological structures exist that are able to steer the process of evolution toward improved fitness,” said Rabitz, the Charles Phelps Smyth ’16 Professor of Chemistry. “The data just jumps off the page and implies we all have this wonderful piece of machinery inside that’s responding optimally to evolutionary pressure.”
How? What is the mechanism? What kind of data suggests this peculiar notion? I’m unimpressed, so far, and unfortunately, Physical Review Letters hasn’t yet put the paper online. I’ll also point out that the history of statistical claims for exceptional mechanisms that extend evolution is littered with “never mind” moments — some clever dick comes along and points out the ways in which the result is an epiphenomenon, a product of the same old rules all along.
The other problem that often occurs is that one of the investigators opens his mouth and reveals that he is completely out of his depth, and that the team has absolutely no conception of how evolution actually works. This time, there is no exception.
“The discovery answers an age-old question that has puzzled biologists since the time of Darwin: How can organisms be so exquisitely complex, if evolution is completely random, operating like a ‘blind watchmaker’?” said Chakrabarti, an associate research scholar in the Department of Chemistry at Princeton. “Our new theory extends Darwin’s model, demonstrating how organisms can subtly direct aspects of their own evolution to create order out of randomness.”
Dear gob. Is this an indictment of Princeton, of chemists, or is Chakrabarti just a weird, isolated crank? That first sentence is not even wrong. Darwin answered the question of how complexity can arise, so no, we haven’t been puzzled by that general question; evolution is not completely random, so that part is a complete non sequitur; randomness easily generates lots of complexity, so even if we accept his premise, it invalidates his question; and how does he reconcile his assertion of “completely random” with his use of the simple metaphor of the “blind watchmaker”, which implies non-randomness? That’s a sentence that contradicts itself multiple times in paradoxical ways.
Anyway, I’ll be looking for the paper. My bet would be that it says nothing like the claims made for it by the press release, or that it will be an embarrassing error of interpretation by the authors.
…he uses a Mac laptop. We have something in common!
One curious fact at that link:
Clinton sent a grand total of 2 emails while in the White House – which was two more than Bush.
These people live in a strange and different world than mine.
They really had to twist the language to come up with this question: Do you think the majority of Americans are okay with this sort of ‘change’ — an expansion of special protections for federal employees based on their sexual behavior? I think what they really mean is, “Do most Americans think it is okay to treat people equally, and that they should disregard their private sexual preferences?”
Sadly, only 4.38% agree, and 93.69% think discrimination is hunky-dory.
The bigotry is going too far. Now the Diocese of Bath and Wells has banned garden gnomes from their cemeteries. What are we to do with the poor wee buggers, then? Let them rot in the streets?
I do appreciate the excuse given, though.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Bath and Wells said: “There is no such thing as a real gnome so why should we have such unnatural creatures in churchyards?”
Indeed. And what of the unnatural creatures that stock the interior of the churches?
Twelve year old Motl Brody has died. A tumor destroyed his brain, and the consequences are unambiguous.
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.
His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.
This is sad, but final…except for one little problem. The boy’s family belong to a sect of Hasidic Jews who cling to an archaic belief that life is determined by the presence of a beating heart, and this particular body is hooked up to drugs and machines that keep the tissue flailing away futilely, and so the parents are taking the hospital to court to keep prodding the corpse into this semblance of life.
There’s another weird twist to the story. The parents are not in denial. They know there is no hope at this point. They are sticking to their insistence that the hospital must tie up their facilities in this useless endeavor entirely because they must dogmatically follow their religion’s laws.
Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions.
He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover.
In other words, they know their religious beliefs are invalid, but they’re going to abide by them, and damn the pain and grief and expense and waste. It’s zombie religion.
No way am I going to get sucked into this little physics-based game, Assembler. I know a black hole of time when I see one.
