The Wellcome Trust has published a short pamphlet to inform young students about evolution. I haven’t had a chance to look at it carefully yet, but it looks like an interesting combination of a fairly wordy presentation and lots of color and flash. You can download a pdf of Evolution: The Big Picture for yourself; would it be a useful tool to catch student’s eyes and get the basics across to them?

Out of 16 pages, 4 are dedicated to the conflict between science and religion. It doesn’t come right out and say that religion is bad, and it even makes the usual waffley about how some scientists accommodate religion in their lives, but their point-by-point comparisons of how religion and science generates ideas come down hard on religion, and they do pin the blame for the creationist antipathy to evolution on religion. It’s not exactly ferocious on the subject, but at the same time it would cause an uproar if it were distributed in US public schools, I’m afraid.

One of the readers here is also a student at Virginia Tech, and has written his own reflections on the tragedy.

Here’s what the various ScienceBloggers are saying about Virginia Tech.

I’m not personally enthused about turning the whole ugly episode into a rallying cry for whatever cause you favor right now, but I do side with Dunford: of course this is a time you should express your positions. This is a good time, when events have made the concerns more immediate and when people are looking for answers. It’s not a good time to act on those positions, because emotions overwhelm sense, but they are also good indicators of what is important to people.

For instance, if you see this as an excuse to cage all the foreigners, I’d like to know so I can stay upwind of you at all times. If you’re concerned about what we can rationally do to prevent these tragedies in the future, even while distraught about the evil that has been done, then OK, I’ll try to remember that you are a fellow signee of our mutual social contract. So please, keep it civil, and remember that we are a community of civilized beings, not a mob of barbarians.

I knew this one would come slithering out quickly: Ken Ham.

Anyone heard from Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell lately? I wonder if their handlers heard the news and rushed to slap a gag on them.

We all have a request from Kurt Vonnegut.

I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, “Isaac is up in heaven now.” It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, “Kurt is up in heaven now.” That’s my favorite joke.

Kurt is up in heaven now.

I think it is also only fair to give him Kilgore Trout’s epitaph: “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”

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Skatje beat me to it. Vonnegut is one of her favorite authors, after all.

My uncle Ed, my fun uncle who took a long, long time to grow up, had two favorite comics on the funny pages: The Wizard of Id and B.C. I liked them, too, and we followed them regularly. Of course, that was in the 1960s and early 70s, and I’m afraid they were afflicted with that syndrome common to long running strips: fading relevancy, recycled humor, the growing impression that the caroonist was phoning it in and didn’t really care anymore, as long as he got his syndication check. Johnny Hart, the creator of those strips, was a particularly sad case, because compounding the problem of staleness was an especially annoying and intrusive simple-minded religious stupidity. And now he’s gone. It’s unfortunate, in part because I regret any death, but also because he wasted so many of his last years cranking out crap and soiling his reputation.

I’ll forget about his religion, and remember instead my uncle chuckling over the Sunday funny pages.

Go on over to his place and leave a birthday greeting, and be sure to check out the multimedia collection of good wishes.

We wondered what we could do to express our appreciation, and had a hard time figuring out what would be appropriate … until a student asked to borrow one of my copies of The God Delusion because he couldn’t find one anywhere in town. Instead of giving Dawkins a present directly, the Myers family is donating a copy of his book to the local library, where we hope some receptive minds will discover it.

Because I’m really sick of sharing one with these pigs.

• Texas male Dan Patrick is proposing to buy unwanted babies for $500 a head, but only if you promise you were going to abort it if you didn’t.

• Sleazeball male tries to dope date, gets caught be sharp-eyed female bartender.

• Male in pickup truck can’t get a woman’s attention by harrassing her, so he runs her over instead

Really, they aren’t my kind.

Geoffrey Simmons, a senior fellow of the Discovery Institute, is going to be on the prestigious Coast to Coast AM show to talk about evolution and the impossibility thereof on Tuesday night. Simmons is an MD (lately, we’re seeing a trend in DI’s taste in proponents, aren’t we?) in Eugene, Oregon … one of my favorite places, so it’s a little sad to see craziness that isn’t of the granola-and-herb type coming out of there.

But Coast to Coast AM … I remember listening to that years ago, when it was just Art Bell broadcasting out of his double-wide in Pahrump. It’s a show for loons — conspiracy theorists, bigfoot specialists, people dreading apocalyptic doom from aliens in flying saucers. It’s perfect for the Discovery Institute!

Little things can expose serious injustice. For example, this story about two women being thrown out of a restaurant for a kiss…we need reminders like this that discrimination is real, and it hurts people.

There is no federal law prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation. Neither Kansas nor Missouri are among the few states that protect gay people from being discriminated against in areas of employment, housing and public accommodations.

Kansas City does have an ordinance protecting gays, as do St. Louis, Columbia and University City. But if you’re anywhere else in Missouri and you’re gay, you can legally be denied service in restaurant. Landlords can refuse to rent you a place to live.

You can even be canned from your job on the suspicion that you’re romantically inclined toward members of your own sex.

(via Daily Irreverence)