Someone asked if I went to church yesterday. Yes. This one:
I was only there for the gargoyles, which are all of Ecuadorian wildlife.
(Now I have to go catch a plane to the islands…)
Sunday at 9am Central, tune in to Atheists Talk radio for a chat with Lori Lipman Brown of the Secular Coalition and Louis Appignani, Humanist Philanthropist.
Quito is not a shiny city. It’s a bit shabby, with peeling paint, narrow twisty streets, buses belching fumes, and cheap gray tenements erupting all over the hillsides, and it is also far too churchy for my tastes. But man, it has character. It’s a wonderfully lively place, and what it lacks in chrome it replaces with color and quirkiness and charm. We had a good time today touring the Old City.
I was charmed by this little restaurant with guinea pigs turning on a spit. We didn’t have a chance to stop and sample them, though, since we had to scurry up the road to visit the equator.
There’s the famous Trophy Wife, straddling two whole hemispheres at once.
Tomorrow, we have to rise up early for our flight to the Galapagos — communication may get even more limited for a while. Trust me, though, we’ll be having fun.
Another bit of distortion from Ray Comfort: he claims now that I was asked to present the very best evidence for evolution, and that all I could come up with was some “little infolding of the gut”. If you’ve come here from Comfort’s ignorance zone, here are the details of the evolution of lizards of the genus Podarcis.
What Comfort cannot comprehend is that there is no one absolute make-or-break piece of evidence for evolution — evolution is a conclusion from the totality of the evidence. There are thousands of cases that demonstrate that the principles of evolution work and are useful for understanding the natural world; there are no cases where creationism has improved our understanding.
Hey, I’ve safely arrived here in Quito, Ecuador…and of course, I beat Phil Plait here, getting through customs and to the hotel long before he did. He’s got to be getting used to second place by now.
I see the guestbloggers have come through and are doing a bang-up job, so I don’t need to say much at all. We’ll be touring the city tomorrow and won’t have much time to write then, either — so don’t expect too much from me in the near future. Not even in reply to Matt Nisbet.
Speaking of slanderous, self-serving frauds, Ray Comfort has been claiming that I “chickened out” of our debate on WDAY radio. This is not true, and it’s unfair to the radio station. They actually changed the format on their own initiative because they felt that 20-30 minutes would not let us do justice to our positions if we had to split the time. I have a formal statement from the producer that they’ve asked me to post:
For why we decided to change formats, we came to the conclusion that being we are a caller driven show, while having both Mr. Comfort and Dr. Myers on at the same time would be entertaining, neither would have been able to fully develop their respective positions, or take many questions from callers. We decided this Monday afternoon. We attempted contacting Mr. Comfort, with no success, and when I spoke to Dr. Myers he was gracious enough to move his interview to Wednesday morning. We sent several emails to Mr. Comfort (actually his assistant) with the changes to the format, and the emails were eventually responded to.
It is possible, however, that the information in the emails to Mr. Comfort’s assistant was not passed in full to Mr. Comfort. It is also possible that one of the emails we sent to Mr. Comfort’s assistant was lost due to the problems we’ve experienced with our email server this week (which has been an absolute nightmare). This could account for the misinformation that Mr. Comfort is stating on his blog. I will email his assistant this afternoon and try to straighten this out.
Feel free to reproduce this email on any blogs where this discussion is taking place (I’m guessing on Pharyngula and Comfort Food). If there are any further questions, feel free to email me at benandjim@wday.com
Thanks again,
Erik Matson
Producer, Ben and Jim in the Morning
WDAY Radio
Once again, we open the floor to the lyrical expression of a few readers who have been inspired by the recent effusion of musical and poetical outbursts here. Fortunately for all, there is no gong hanging on the wall behind you, the judges…although some of these have been pretty good.
First up is a little poem written during the Dover trial by a very famous evolutionary biologist who has asked me to keep it anonymous. No confidence in the meter, huh? Or perhaps fear that declaring such talent will lead to the literary set distracting from the real work of biology?
I think that I shall never see
A theory dumber than ID:
It says that God can make a tree,
A beaver or a honeybee-
That God can simply get a whim
To make the small E. coli swim.
He waves His hand through Heaven’s air
And lo! Flagella everywhere!
But sometimes even God falls down
And makes a poor, pathetic clown:
Yes, poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make Behe.
The second submission is by a well-known atheist who does out herself.
Super Geek
by Greta Christina
(to the tune of “Super Freak” by Rick James)She’s a very geeky girl
The kind you cheat off of in math class
And she will never let her teachers down
Once she takes her SAT’sShe likes the boys in the chess club
She says that Spassky is her favorite
When she makes a move, it’s rook takes bishop, check-mate
She’s very hard to beatThe girl is pretty bright now
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
I’d really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright with me, yeah
She’s a Super Geek, Super Geek, she’s super-geekyShe’s a very special girl
From her glasses to her Oxfords
And she will help me study AP math and physics
And AP bio, too“Live long and prosper”‘s what she says
“Back in the chem lab I’ll be waiting”
When I get there, she’s got Number Two pencils
It’s such a geeky sceneThe girl is pretty bright now
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
The kind of girl you read about
(In Omni Magazine)
The girl is pretty brainy
(The girl’s a Super Geek)
I’d really like to test her
(Every time we meet)
She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright with me, yeah
She’s a Super Geek, Super Geek, she’s super-geeky
Judges?
As for me, it’s time for me to flee the country. Ta-ta, until I next find a wireless connection somewhere in South America!
This is how to do it: the Big Think project wants you to look over their inspirational science profiles and vote for one — and as a reward, they’ll donate $1 to DonorsChoose, to fund educational projects. This is a win:win situation. For a couple of clicks, you get to be entertained for a few minutes, and you get to gouge a dollar out of Pfizer, and you get to help out school teachers. How can you not do it?
Apparently, they need 8000 more clicks to meet their quota and limit for the month. I bet we can do that in a day.
(By the way, I voted for Pardis Sabeti.)
Have you been wondering who won the Molly for July? It goes to … Owlmirror, OM. Let’s hear some applause for the worthy champion.
In other news, you may recall that I’m going to the Galapagos Islands, and I’m leaving tonight! I shall be spending the next week and a half bobbing about in a boat in the Pacific, 600 miles off the coast of mainland South America, and while I’ll still be able to access the internet in a limited way, I’m going to be somewhat distracted. “Oh, no,” you’re thinking, “Pharyngula will go all silent and boring, and there will be no biological ejaculations from a godless liberal to add flavor to my morning coffee.” Have no fear! I could just schedule a blank post to appear every morning, and knowing you people, it would fill up fast — you don’t really need me to provoke you. But no, I have gone another route, and have recruited a few guest bloggers who will post a few things now and then while I’m off. We’re squaring things away with Seed right now, and I’ll let them introduce themselves at their own pace.
If you decide you like them better than me, I shall be heartbroken, but I will be kicking them off on the 18th of August anyway. Maybe they’ll be inspired to go on to new blogs of their very own…?
I’ll also be handing the whip and keys to the dungeon to Skatje. She won’t be quite as diligent in monitoring things as I am (17 — almost 18 — year old girls have a life, you know), but she will be available to skewer any trolls. Don’t cross her, she might be cranky about not getting to go to the Galapagos.
And today is going to be spent packing and tidying up the Myers mansion for the housesitters, a job that requires carefully inventorying the beer. It might be a while, especially if I decide that leaving all that good beer behind that Don Kane and Rachel Warga left here last week would be a waste.
I’m afraid the odious Oklahoma legislator, Sally Kern, has opened her mouth again. She has declared herself a “cultural warrior for Judeo-Christian values. I despise the term “Judeo-Christian” — it’s so fake, and such a transparent attempt to tie morality to religion. So what are these “Judeo-Christian” values?
“I am not saying everyone has to be Christian; this is not a homogenous nation,” Kern said. “What you have to be is someone who believes in a Judeo-Christian ethic, in other words, in knowing there’s a right and wrong.
That’s it? Knowing that some things are bad to do and others are good is all there is? Pagans, heathens, wiccans, atheists, Muslims, and animists all know that; dogs seem to feel guilt, and we could even argue that jellyfish are able to see the world in these kinds of binary terms. So why pretend Jews and Christians invented it?
Oh…because she has to have an absolutist rational for parochial fundagelical American bigotry.
“Not all lifestyles are equal; not all religions are equal,” she said. “Was I saying all people are not equal? Heavens no; we were all created equal.”
Kern repeated her opposition to gay marriage and homosexuality, though the lawmaker said she supports people’s individual rights.
Pssst, Oklahomans: Vote for Ron Marlett this fall. Anyone but Bughouse Sally, please.
