John Freshwater is going to trial

Remember the case of John Freshwater, the Ohio science teacher who burned a cross into a student’s arm and decorates his desk with Christian kitsch? He’s a raving mad loon, but he’s also fun and popular with the Christian kids at school (who are, naturally, a majority).

Now John Freshwater and the school district are going to court.

Freshwater’s action and the administration’s inaction, the lawsuit states, “have the purpose and effect of endorsing religion over non-religion and Christianity over other religious beliefs, thus violating the neutrality portion of the Establishment Clause.”

In addition to asking the court to issue an injunction against the teaching of religion in the school, the plaintiffs seek compensatory damages, punitive damages, reasonable attorney fees, prejudgment interest and post judgment costs, and other relief the court deems appropriate.

Read the whole thing. It sounds open-and-shut to me, since not only is Freshwater plainly promoting sectarian religion in the public school classroom, he’s proud of it and brags about his advocacy. One wild card, though: the plaintiffs want a jury trial. That isn’t always a plus in a case that’s trying to protect a minority view.

They’re also just asking that Freshwater stop peddling his sectarian nonsense in the classroom (plus damages and costs), so I don’t think he’ll get to achieve his desired martyrdom.

Also at FCA [Fellowship of Christian Athletes] meetings, the suit alleges that Freshwater distributed Bibles for the students present to give to other students at the school who were not present, and that an invited speaker told students “they should disobey the law to further their own religion, even if it means going to jail.”

Jail isn’t at stake here, nor are they asking that he be fired. Just please stop using the classroom as a pulpit.

Freaky scents for cents

On the one hand, there is this incredibly tacky exploitation of the devout in the marketing of The Pope’s Cologne. It’s claimed to be produced according to some 19th century formula, straight from Pope Pius IX, who apparently went around dazzling the ladies with his bling and his expensive scent. On the other, there is this testimonial to the willingness of the devout to be taken. This poor woman’s husband has just died, and she’s handed a bottle labeled “The Pope’s Cologne”, so what happens?

What I experienced later will be a sight I will never forget!!! The widow used the cologne to “anoint” her husband EVERY 20 minutes. She would sprinkle it on his hands, his head, his forehead, and his neck. You could see in her eyes she had found a way of redemption through the cologne. Everyone was asking about the cologne and its origin. Everyone that came in to give her their condolences could not stop asking about the pleasant aroma they were experiencing. Everyone was quiet and in awe for hours. She also kept on rubbing the bottle as if it was some sort of amulet or charm.

I am a little bit creeped out. These poor grieving women, trying to find solace in a marketing scam.

At $26/bottle for a label, though, it’s quite the scam.

So I’m thinking…every day I put in some time working on the elliptical trainer, and I dribble out a good load of sweat. How much would you pay for a real, genuine, authentic vial of actual atheist sweat? $25.95? $25.75? $25.50? No. I’m practically giving it away for the low, low price of $25, even. And this isn’t just some smelly water cobbled up out of an old recipe, it’s actually right from my body, pungent and complex and thoroughly biological.

It’s incredibly useful. Not only will it drive away evangelical door-knockers, but you can anoint your beloved dead (anointing of the living not recommended) with it. You will get such great comments from the guests at the funeral: “Whooo-wee. He was a ripe old one, wasn’t he?” and “When’s the cremation? Soon, I hope.” And think of the money you’ll save on the reception afterwards: no one will have an appetite!

If enough of you order, it’ll also help motivate me to keep up the exercise program. “Ka-ching, ka-ching, ka-ching” with every step is an awfully good incentive.

I think I’ll call it…”Whiff of Mortality”.

Miller on Colbert

Here you go:

It was a good performance, but I think he tried a little too hard to cram a whole lecture into a few minutes — but then maybe that’s what you need to do on Colbert, ride hard over his attempts to derail you. I also disagree with his premise that creationism has its roots in anti-authoritarianism and rebelliousness, which he touched on briefly here but goes on at length in his book…but yeah, he’s dead on target when he points out that ID has no evidence, and is basically trying to cheat its way into the curriculum.

I get email

I just got an email listing 50 “proofs” for the existence of a god. It was also sent to a large number of skeptics, and included a plug for the dumb-as-bricks author’s book — she’s a flea who writes an imaginary scenario in which Richard Dawkins gets psychiatric counseling…from Jesus! If Debra Rufini’s imaginary dialog is as bad as this list of “proofs” — more like a collection of cliches, bad quotes, and lies — I can’t imagine wanting to slog through it.

Any one of these I’d happily rip to shreds, but 50 at once? The distilled dementia herein is overwhelming, and I’m sure she counts on that.

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Good idea, utterly horrible execution

Somebody has floated the idea of building an Evolution Museum in the same neighborhood as Ken Ham’s Creation “Museum”. Superficially, it’s a fine idea, but no, I can’t support it, for a number of reasons.

  • Every natural history museum is an evolution museum.

  • There is already a natural history museum in Cincinnati—The Cincinnati Museum Center.

  • The web page for this proposed museum is thin and unprofessional. It looks like someone had the bright idea to build a competing museum, and his first and only strategy was to scribble up some html, in the hopes that millions will come pouring in through Pay Pal.

  • You want to build a real museum? Get the support of the scientific community first. Try to integrate with existing institutions. Line up real money from investors. Then ask private individuals to put a few dollars on their Visa card. This proposal is entirely backwards.

  • Charging forward as a private citizen and making naive plans to just “build a museum” might, if they’re very lucky, produce four walls and some space, but it will be just as superficial and empty as Ken Ham’s kitschy pile of crap.

  • Their financial page just makes me cringe. They’ve got 0 donations, but they’re dreaming of donations on the order of $10 million per month. Unbelievable.

So, like, ugh. There is a right way to go about putting together the complex resources needed to build a museum, and I’m pretty darned sure this isn’t it.

Now, if somebody were working with regional universities and museums and had a real plan that tapped into investments from the state government and/or local industry, then we’d have something I could get behind. This is, however, a much bigger project than the instigator has imagined.

The trends, IF they continue, are in our favor

I just got around to reading this very nice article by Gregory Paul and Phil Zuckerman, which we godless heathen ought to find reassuring and optimistic. They describe how religion is fading, even here in the United States, and that it is a natural consequence of economic trends. In particular, the main reason atheism is growing isn’t that we’ve got lots of wild-eyed proselytizers, it’s simply that security and an absence of fear make religion irrelevant and even unattractive.

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How Life Began

As I said I would, I’m watching this History Channel documentary about the origin of life. How about a little live-blogging?

8:00. Ugh. It begins with a bunch of tripe from Coyne and Polkinghorne, claiming we need religion to understand the meaning of life. This is a bad, bad start, but I’m hoping it’s nothing but a weasely preliminary that they will then abandon to get to some real science.

There are lots of gimmicky special efects, but OK, let’s get the general audience interested. I’m not too keen on the parade of talking heads, though: they keep trotting out different investigators, letting them say a sentence or two, and then zipping off elsewhere. I know you don’t want some guy sitting and droning at you, but this seems like a poor compromise.


8:15. It’s a quick tour of the complexity of the cell. They’re using this special effects analogy of a “factory of life” where chemistry is going on.

First important element of life: metabolism. Second: life is cellular, with compartments. Third: life can replicate.

Now we get a parts catalog of polymers: lipids, proteins, and nucleic acids.

Very weird: in their factory analogy, they point to something hidden behind a big red curtain and say that that’s where all these bits and pieces come together to make something that’s alive; it seems a bit of a cop-out, a way to pretend there’s something hidden where the viewer can imagine anything they want. Come on, bite the bullet and admit it: life is chemistry, and there is nothing more.

Now we get a fairly lengthy discussion of the idea of emergence. At least they clearly state that emergence is nothing magical, but is just a consequence of the execution of the laws of nature. This is a rather pointless digression, I think.

OK, now we get a timeline of the origin of life: it appeared about 3.8 billion years ago, on a very hostile planet with no oxygen in the air, and just cooling after the last of the great meteor bombardments. This leads naturally into a discussion of extremophiles, with a tour of Mono Lake.

Segue to commercial by mentioning that life will change the environment of the earth.


8:30. Conditions on early life are hostile to us, but chemical energy is abundant. Life would have existed as single-celled forms only, which may have been unrecognizable to us (why are they showing video micrographs of nematodes while they tell us this?)

Stromatolites are introduced, as organisms that grew on chemical energy sources. What are those energy sources?

The camera crew goes spelunking. They’re collecting rock-eating microbes, which the scientists argue is a kind of primitive chemistry that evolved before photosynthesis.

Nice reminder that single-celled life was the only form of life here for 80% of the history of earth, but then they make the mistake of using the past tense in saying they were the dominant form of life on the planet.

Wait…now they’re saying that the ability to reproduce is a property of DNA? That’s kind of cutting off the possibility of an interesting discussion of alternative paths.

Suddenly, boom, they’re talking about Leeuwenhoek. Hang on, this is a bit jumpy. Can we talk more about extremophile chemistry before we start on 17th-18th century microscopy?

Now it’s all about photosynthesis. We’ve moved way, way beyond the period of early abiogenesis already, and they’ve scarcely touched on any of the major theories.

Before the commercial, we get talk about multicellularity and oxygen chemistry. Either they’re going to be jumping about an awful lot and scrambling the story, or we’re not going to get anything about abiogenic chemistry…


8:45. Oops, I had to miss part of this section to run some real-world errands. I come back to see the Burgess Shale and a discussion of the Cambrian explosion. This is long, long after the origin of life!

It’s an excuse to show some computer animations of Anomalocaris, anyway.

George Coyne does a good job now saying that life doesn’t need a designer; Polkinghorne pops up to make excuses for the metaphorical nature of the book of Genesis. Bugger off, Polkinghorne, you bother me, ya twit.

Now we get a summary of the importance of selection and sex. I don’t think we’re going to get a good review of biogenesis anymore — sex is not an important issue in that field.

I am completely baffled. Before the commercial, they say the big question was how human life arose…then they ask, “What was the specific mechanism that caused non-living chemistry into living biology?” Weird. These are very different questions. They seem to be muddling up the origins of life with the origins of the only important form of life, humans.


9:00. We’re back to animals. Come on, animals are peculiar latecomers.

Maybe it’s an excuse to return to a historical survey of ideas about the origin of life. I hope.

Aristotle proposes the idea of spontaneous generation, an idea that hangs on for centuries but is relatively easy to disprove…as Redi and Spallanzani do. This stuff isn’t bad, but it feels like introductory material they should have brought up at the beginning.

Actually, I’m enjoying this part best of all so far. They’re actually talking about the experiments done to disprove spontaneous generation, so it’s a useful summary of how scientists actually do science.

Our closing question: so how did life arise from chemistry? The second half is off to a good start, I think.


9:15. I’ve got to say…the actor playing Charles Darwin looks nothing like him, and that beard looks cheesy and fake.

We get the early concepts: “warm little pond”, “primorial soup”. There the questions are about what kind of chemicals and conditions existed at the beginning of life. They mention Oparin’s ideas about the chemical monomers available, and the idea that these chemicals would accumulate in the oceans. It seems like a very low probability sort of exercise.

The Miller/Urey experiment at last. This is well done, with a very nice illustration of the apparatus and techniques. They get it right, too — it was nice work that showed that the natural chemistry that would produce organic substrates for life was relatively trivial. It also set up unrealistic expectations for how easy it would be to create life.

Closing premise: now there is a race to figure out prebiotic chemistry.


9:30. Let’s consider other sources of organic matter!

Space-borne debris. Complex organic molecules are found in metorites and in space. We get to see scientists extracting organic molecules from ground-up meteorites. Panspermia is mentioned, but they aren’t doing a good job of distinguishing chemicals from life. At least Bob Hazen is razor sharp in pointing out that panspermia is a cop out.

Hazen also clearly explains bottom-up (exploring basic principles about biochemistry to replicate the events at the origin) vs. top-down (working in reverse from extant life backwards to the origin). He also explains that we need a multiplicity of approaches, and the origin may also have been generated from diverse sources.

Hmm. Commercials seem to be coming more frequently as we get close to the end.


9:40. It’s deep-sea vent time, with nice shots of black smokers and squid. Then Bob Hazen shows us how his experiments on the chemistry at high pressure and temperature are done. Cooking a little pyruvate for a while generates substances that form micelles.

Clays! Clays are shown as potential catalytic surfaces that would concentrate organic compounds and promote reactions that form, for instance, RNA. RNA monomers will polymerize in the presence of clays.

Transition: are scientists on the verge of creating artificial life in the lab?


9:50. It’s “3000 years after Aristotle”? What?

Never mind. Now we get pretty crystals growing and changing. This bit is a little fluffy.

All right: Jack Szostak. They describe his efforts to try and create a protocell. Cool video of creating cell membranes — beautiful little droplets bubbling out of an electrode. Some good cautionary statements: if they succeed, this will still only be a model, not a demonstration of how it actually happened 3.8 billion years ago.

They don’t really say much about the mechanisms in the closing minutes, but they do have a nice statement by Neil de Grasse Tyson about how the search is the important thing, even if we don’t get an answer.


Summary: the first hour was a muddle, and not worth watching. If you’re going to catch it later, just watch the second half.

The last half wasn’t bad. It at least talked very briefly about the actual science and how it is done. It was all painfully abbreviated and only touched lightly on the subject, but I think that is simply a limitation of the medium. I imagine it’s a seriously difficult balancing act to try and meet the needs of real nerds (like us!) and the more casual viewer, so I’ll accept the compromise.

Something at the end to lead the interested viewer to more in-depth sources would have been a good idea — they could have at least mentioned Hazen’s Genesis as a plug.

I guess I’m going to have to dust off the telly tonight

In addition to the abiogenesis program on the History Channel, it looks like Ken Miller is going to be on the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. I hope you’ve got cable!

By the way, if you don’t have cable, and you still want to see Ken Miller, the HHMI offers a DVD of Miller lecturing on evolution and ID for free to North Americans. I’m reviewing it right now for consideration in our introductory biology class.

(I actually don’t use a television, I’ve got one of these tuner gadgets for my laptop, so I’ll probably record both programs tonight.)