Why comparative religion classes will never work in American public schools

Sometimes I think that what public education in this country really needs is a good general requirement for a course in comparative religion. I’ve thought that one obstacle, though, would be finding teachers who wouldn’t warp it to proselytize for their favorite cult. It turns out that there’s another major problem: parents will sue teachers who make their kids think about that which must be believed dogmatically.

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Classic octopus

Adam Cuerden sent me a scan of this interesting article from the 1871 Illustrated London News, and I decided I was being terribly selfish keeping it to myself, so here you go — don’t say I never share. The image that accompanies it is a wonderful example of old-time illustration; click on it for a larger version.

As the media usually does, it plays up the horrible danger of this alien creature.

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Report from Planet Righty

Tim Lambert summarizes an informal survey of 59 right-wing bloggers: 100% of them deny the idea that humans are the primary cause of global warming, contradicting the scientific evidence. They were also asked about other issues—the majority approve of the “surge” in Iraq, think Bush is doing an acceptable job in foreign policy, and believe Democrats like the idea of losing the war in Iraq, but only on global warming is their unanimity.

It’s too bad the survey didn’t ask about other science issues. I’d like to know if they are similarly wrong about evolution, HIV as the cause of AIDS, and whether the earth goes around the sun rather than vice versa.

A reminder to any Ann Coulter fans

A while back, I wrote a response to Coulter’s piss-poor excuse for a book, Godless. It’s actually fairly long and substantial; since there was absolutely no accurate statement of either fact or theory on the subject of evolution in the entire book, and since there was nothing specific to address, I took the time to make a link-rich collection of sources where anyone could look up the evidence for evolution, with suggestions of places where one could look up the basics of the theory. Writing a line-by-line rebuttal would have been a massive task, and one that Coulter fans would have ignored anyway.

At the end of that post, I made a challenge. I said that I would make a comprehensive, detailed reply to any one paragraph in the chapters on evolution if anyone who’d read the book would come right out and state that it was an accurate and honest and supportable claim about the subject. I’m still waiting for anyone to stand up for Ann’s words. No one has, and it’s been about 9 months now.

I guess even her fans can’t defend anything in that book. Either that, or they just got it for the pictures.

Carnivalia, and an open thread

We have a fine, meaty collection of carnivals today, and a couple of requests for submissions.

This weekend is your last chance to send in submissions for the Circus of the Spineless.

I’m also hosting Encephalon on 12 March. If you’ve got brains on the brain, send me links.

We may also have a special event planned for 12 March here on Pharyngula…stay tuned.

Orthozanclus

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(click for larger image)
Reconstruction of O. reburrus by M. Collins. The precise arrangement of the anteriormost region remains somewhat conjectural.

Halkieriids are Cambrian animals that looked like slugs in scale mail; often when they died their scales, called sclerites, dissociated and scattered, and their sclerites represent a significant component of the small shelly fauna of the early Cambrian. They typically had their front and back ends capped with shells that resembled those we see in bivalve brachiopods. Wiwaxiids were also sluglike, but sported very prominent, long sclerites, and lacked the anterior and posterior shells; their exact position in the evolutionary tree has bounced about quite a bit, but some argument has made that they belong in the annelid ancestry, and that their sclerites are homologous to the bristly setae of worms. One simplistic picture of their relationship to modern forms was that the halkieriids expanded their shells and shed their scales to become molluscs, while the wiwaxiids minimized their armor to emphasize flexibility and became more wormlike. (Note that that is a very crude summary; relationships of these Cambrian groups to modern clades are extremely contentious. There’s a more accurate description of the relationships below.)

Now a new fossil has been found, Orthozanclus reburrus that unites the two into a larger clade, the halwaxiids. Like the halkieriids, it has an anterior shell (but not a posterior one), and like the wiwaxiids, it has long spiky sclerites. In some ways, this simplifies the relationships; it unites some problematic organisms into a single branch on the tree. The question now becomes where that branch is located—whether the halwaxiids belong in a separate phylum that split off from the lophophorate family tree after the molluscs, or whether the halwaxiids are a sister group to the molluscs.

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Get meaner, angrier, louder, fiercer

The IDists love to quote me, because I am rather militant in my opposition to their lies. They are particularly fond of one particular quote* that they’ve even used in their fund-raising literature. They think it’s damning; some of my fellow anti-creationists swoon and protest when they hear the words, but they tend to be faint-hearted anyway. But here’s what’s really amusing.

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