One of our more popular commenters now has a couple of more letters he can tag on the end of his name in addition to the Order of the Molly. You can cheer loudly here — I don’t recommend going up to his place in Boston and ringing the doorbell, since he might be recovering from the celebration still.
There was a good suggestion in the comments that I have a thread dedicated to suggestions for a new car. I do have criteria: it should be amphibious, it must have tentacles, and the ability to fire a cloud of ink is desirable; it must also at least have mounts in place for a bank of lasers. I need a squidmobile.
Unfortunately, any new vehicle is not for me, but for my wife, Mary (I get to inherit her decrepit Honda Civic). She has different requirements. This would be a commuter car to get her to and from work every day; our first need is for safety, then good gas mileage and efficiency, and of course, price and availability. We’ve heard about Smart Cars, but we are automotive ignoramuses. I call upon the collective wisdom of the Pharyngula hordes to give us car shopping advice!
(Oh, and if it does have squidlike properties…well, maybe she’d let me drive it on weekends.)
I had a harrowing morning. I got up at 5 to make the long drive to the airport, only to discover that last night, after several days of rain, it had frozen. And snowed. Uh-oh, you say…at least in my usual caution I had given myself 5 hours to make a 3 hour drive, so I figured I’d have no problem.
It wasn’t bad; little traffic, the roads were icy, but I was taking my time and coping like a real Minnesotan. Then, as I was leaving lovely Glenwood, I saw a truck stopped to make a left turn way ahead — like 4 or 5 blocks ahead. So I touched the brakes to slow down a little more. So I tried to slow down a little more. So I tried very hard to slow down some more. Why isn’t this car slowing down at all? I still had plenty of room, so I started easing over to the right to miss the truck on the shoulder. I tried to ease over. Why isn’t the car turning? I was pumping the brakes and trying to shift over just a little bit, right up until the moment I crunched into the right rear corner of the truck.
I’d managed to slow it down enough that the truck was hardly damaged — a shattered tail light, and some dinged up body work. Unfortunately, my car smacked right into the wedge of the back corner directly at my left front wheel, and then slide forward to take out the driver’s side door. The wheels looked rather pigeon-toed afterwards, and I got a broken glass shower.
You will be pleased to know that I did not pray at any moment, but kept busy trying to get the vehicle under control. I did have plenty of time to curse at length and polysyllabically, saying cruel and hurtful things about the car’s ancestry and the sexual and excretory habits of Minnesota weather systems.
I have bounced back! My wife made an emergency run from work to pick me up and deliver me at the airport (I owe her big time now). I’m now waiting to catch a slightly later flight than I had planned, but I’ll still make it to Michigan in time for my talk tonight. Have no fear, I will also look composed and fabulous when I make my entrance.
There was an appalling and tragic plane crash in Montana: 14 people were killed, 7 of them children.
Tom Hagler, a mechanic at the Oroville airport, told The Sacramento Bee that he allowed several children ages 6 to 10 to use the airport bathroom before they boarded the doomed plane.
“There were a lot of kids in the group,” he said, “a lot of really cute kids.”
Nine of them were members of one family. This was a horrifying and genuinely horrible accident; I can’t begin to imagine the grief felt by the survivors, who lost children and grandchildren.
At least, that was my first thought on viewing this rampant graffito.
More than five years ago, I was griping about the pretense of compatibility between science and religion, prompted by an otherwise good site at the University of California Berkeley that offered the usual pablum:
Science and religion deal with different things. Science tries to figure out how things work and religion teaches about morality and spirituality. There doesn’t need to be a conflict.
Complete bullshit. I’d rather get my morality from reason and real world experience, from science, and religion teaches nothing about morality. Religion is about obedience to arbitrary rules. As for spirituality — I don’t need a cult to teach me about the nonexistent and irrelevant. Then last year, the NAS came out with the same nonsense:
Science and Religion Offer Different Ways of Understanding the World
Science and religion address separate aspects of human experience. Many scientists have written eloquently about how their scientific studies of biological evolution have enhanced rather than lessened their religious faith. And many religious people and denominations accept the scientific evidence for evolution.
There is this kind of conciliatory and entirely false cliched position that major proponents of better science education tend to take — because it’s popular, they pretend that religion is the gentle, benign bit of fluff that has some vague utility in making people better. It’s a lie told to calm the ignorant…the ignorant who will then turn about and obligingly stick a knife in our efforts to improve science, all in the name of their Lord.
I’ve never understood it. It simply grants religion an unquestioned privileged place as an equal to science, when it deserves no such prestige. Why aren’t these pro-science organizations going out of their way to say, “Science and literature deal with different things” or “Science and Art Offer Different Ways of Understanding the World”? At least then they’d be saying something true. At least then they wouldn’t be promoting a damaging delusion.
I’m not a lonely voice crying out my frustration to an unheeding world, I’m pleased to say. I’ve heard from many fellow scientists who feel the same way. Larry Moran has always been vocal about the same problem. And of course we’ve got those cranky New Atheists busily publishing their demolitions of the validity of faith.
Add another big name: Jerry Coyne is making a similar argument.
It seems to me that we can defend evolution without having to cater to the faithful at the same time. Why not just show that evolution is TRUE and its alternatives are not? Why kowtow to those whose beliefs many of us find unpalatable, just to sell our discipline? There are, in fact, two disadvantages to the “cater-to-religion” stance.
By trotting out those “religious scientists”, like Ken Miller, or those “scientific theologians,” like John Haught, we are tacitly putting our imprimatur on their beliefs, including beliefs that God acts in the world today (theism), suspending natural laws. For example, I don’t subscribe to Miller’s belief that God acts immanently in the world, perhaps by influencing events on the quantum level, or that God created the laws of physics so that human-containing planets could evolve. I do not agree with John Haught’s theology. I do not consider any faith that touts God’s intervention in the world (even in the past) as compatible with science. Do my colleagues at the NAS or the NCSE disagree?
The statement that learning evolution does not influence one’s religious belief is palpably false. There are plenty of statistics that show otherwise, including the negative correlation of scientific achievement with religious belief and the negative correlation among nations in degree of belief in God with degree of acceptance of evolution. All of us know this, but we pretend otherwise. (In my book I note that “enlightened” religion can be compatible with science, but by “englightened” I meant a complete, hands-off deism.) I think it is hypocrisy to pretend that learning evolution will not affect either the nature or degree of one’s faith. It doesn’t always, but it does more often than we admit, and there are obvious reasons why (I won’t belabor these). I hate to see my colleagues pretending that faith and science live in nonoverlapping magisteria. They know better.
If you want to talk compatibility with science, atheism is a far better fit to the evidence. It is ridiculous that we still try to link evolution and science education to an airily nebulous version of inoffensive religion that virtually no one accepts, and isn’t even a reasonable model of the way the universe actually works.
Everyone keeps sending me this photo from FAIL blog. I think it’s mislabeled.
This is not a failure. This is something working for once. Every church ought to have “Danger!” signs slapped on it. It’s a success when churches are clearly marked, exceeded only by those wonderful moments when they are demolished or repurposed for some useful community function.
The Texas Board of Education is led by Don McLeroy, a creationist dentist and plagiarist who believes that the earth is only 6000 years old.
Just stop there and savor it. The man who wants to dictate what all of the children in one of the largest educational systems in the country should learn about science believes his pathetic and patently false superstition supersedes the evidence and the informed evaluation of virtually all the scientists in the world. There is no other way to put it than to point out that McLeroy is a blithering idiot who willingly puts his incompetence on display. His job is not at risk, and he’s even advancing his freakish agenda with some success.
It’s a marvel, isn’t it? A fellow just wants to laugh and shoo him back to his church and his dental practice, but instead, he’s been given all this power over the education of American children, and it’s hard to laugh, because it is so damned terrifying.
But wait! The unbelievable insanity is not yet complete! The Texas school board is debating and will vote on a revised curriculum this week, a curriculum in which the uninformed, uneducated doubts of this arrogantly ignorant man will be enshrined in the lesson plans of every child in Texas. And the board is about evenly split!
There’s a deeper problem here than the simple superficial fact that we’ve got influential people trying to push nonsense into science classrooms. It’s that somehow, we have a system that gives flaming incompetents this kind of power — that we willingly hand over important decisions about the education of our children to people who aren’t qualified, who have no understanding of science, and who want prioritize a page and a half of vague, poetic metaphor from a ragged old hodge-podge of a book of mythology over the concrete, well-tested, and well-documented body of modern scientific information.
It’s ludicrous and painful to watch. Steve Schafersman will be live-blogging the proceedings. I think we’re obligated to follow along, in order to suffer for our national shortcomings. Think of it as penance, and as an object lesson. We need to correct the structural problems in the governance of our educational systems, no matter which way the decision goes. If you are in Texas, and you care about good science, then you should plan on showing up and testifying.
Even that is sad and pitiful. We rely now on getting enough presentable people to show up and speak forcefully in order to persuade a state board of education to support science?
I’m sure you all remember that plane crash in the Hudson a while back, in which all the passengers survived thanks to the commendable competence of the pilot, Chesley Sullenberger, and the crew. What impressed the atheist community, too, was that this was not a case where the crew credited some fickle deity for keeping them alive — it was good old skill, training, and keeping a cool head in times of danger.
What if, instead, the pilot had trusted in a god? We’ve got an example of that, too.
A plane made a similar emergency water landing off the coast of Sicily in 2005. In this case, the Tunisian pilot panicked, and instead of taking emergency measures or even trying to reach a nearby airport, he instead chose to pray loudly. I’m sure that was reassuring to the passengers.
Sixteen people died.
Reason gets some revenge, though. The pilot has been sentenced to 10 years in jail for his neglect of his responsibilities. I like that; resorting to prayer represents an abdication of responsibility.
Last week, I wrote about the spectacular Cretaceous octopus fossils, and I made a blatant prediction.
Accustomed as I am to the workings of the minds of creationists, though, I’m sad to say that I also immediately saw how this find will be abused. I guarantee you that Harun Yahya is grabbing these images and planning to stuff them into his next bloated and repetitive tome, with a caption that announces that there has been no change in octopuses over 95 million years, therefore evolution is false.
After explaining the differences between these fossils and modern forms, and showing a chart that illustrated the transitional nature of their morphology, I further stated:
Don’t be fooled by the superficial resemblance — there are more subtleties to being an octopus than simply having eight arms. What these fossils reveal is more detail about the evolution of the octopods.
Well, my only error was on pinning this kind of stupidity explicitly on Harun Yahya. I should have known there were plenty of local idiots who would, in their sublime ignorance about cephalopods, leap to the false conclusion that this is an example of stasis (it isn’t: these are different than modern forms), and claim that the octopus “did not evolve at all”. Please note: having eight arms is a very general property of the octopods. You can’t just throw away all the evolutionary change that is described because you are so unaware that you see everything with eight arms as being the same creature. There are over 200 species named in the family Octopodidae, with over 100 waiting further description and classification, and no doubt many more awaiting discovery. They are incredibly diverse.
What these blind kooks are doing is the equivalent of pointing out that paleontologists have discovered 365 million year old tetrapods, that all mammals today still have four limbs, and claiming, therefore, that evolution did not occur.
(Hat tip to Canadian Cynic; personally, I can’t stomach reading the odious Denyse O’Leary, and rely on others to point out her more flamboyant inanities.)
