Uh-oh. The creationist expectation of an abrupt transformation from one species to another has been demonstrated: the picture below is of a chicken egg that was cracked open to make a meal, and inside … a dead gecko. A bird giving birth to a reptile?

Actually, no, sorry. A chicken giving birth to a lizard is the kind of thing creationists imagine that evolution predicts, but which would actually surprise and disturb scientists if it happened — we’d have to rethink a lot of genetics if a solid instance were documented.

In this case, there’s an alternative, if rather disgusting, explanation. The poor mother hen had a gecko crawl up her cloaca (probably in a pushy attempt to sell her insurance), die somewhere in the oviducts, and then got incorporated into the egg before the shell was laid down. The deposition of a calcium-containing shell is one of the last steps in egg production, so it’s possible…it would just take a very persistent suicidal gecko, or one that was profoundly lost.

Don’t tell Geoffrey Simmons — he’s been on a credulity junket lately, crowing about every functional adaptation, including the egg, as proof of purposeful design. I don’t know about you, but a system that muddles excretion with reproduction and that allows random lizards to crawl up your butt and squat in your oviduct doesn’t sound like great engineering to me.

Perhaps my fellow Americans feel a little dismayed at the news of all those young creationist school teachers…well, a recent poll in Britain showed that people have some awfully materialist opinions about god.

Only 1% of people think of God as female, with 62% considering God to be male, the online survey conducted earlier this month of 1,050 adults in Britain found.

Weird. So god has a penis, and a Y chromosome?

Some day, they’ve got to ask people some other details of god’s physical attributes. What shade is his skin color? What color eyes does he have? At his age, does he get regular prostate exams?

When you get bored of speculating on imponderable nonsensicals, you can take a second and crash their poll: do you believe in the supernatural? Yes is winning 60:40 right now.

Hank Fox is starting one of those memes: this one asks us to tell the story of a scar.

Tell the story of a (non-surgical) scar you have somewhere on your body. Answer and tag three other bloggers.

Alas, I am a pampered child of the middle class, and I don’t have much of a history of trauma and injury. I’ve got a couple of small slashes on my forehead from when I was a toddler, when I had a series of unfortunate accidents falling headfirst onto coffee tables. My knees were shredded in typical childhood accidents. I’ve got a massive appendectomy scar that gets admiring comments from doctors when I go in for checkups — most appendectomies nowadays involve teeny-tiny incisions and don’t demand a hemisection of the abdomen. That’s about it. Boring, I know.

There is one other hairline scar on my left hand, but I already described that. Does a self-inflicted incision with a scalpel count as non-surgical?

Now I’m supposed to tag three other people…wait, I’m supposed to ask some strangers to tell me about their scars? If you did that at a party it would be considered hopelessly rude. To reduce personal culpability, I just punched my magic blogroll randomizer and it spat up three urls: Neurodudes, Amygdala, and Unfogged. Surely somebody in that mob has a notable scar, but if you’d rather not talk about it, that’s fine. And please don’t feel obligated to show us any.

And in keeping with that fine circus tradition, the Duggar Family is about to have their 18th child.

You know, they have successfully turned their freakish excesses into a profitable enterprise, but it really isn’t at all sustainable — I think the superficial news market can only bear one amazing repeatedly distended vagina at a time, and if any of their children try a repeat performance it’s going to be ho-hum, and profligacy in child-rearing will be just another symptom & cause of poverty, neglect, and ignorance.

Here’s a bizarre miscellany.

• Well, it’s just Wisconsin.

  Two people have been arrested after a Juneau County Sheriff’s deputy found one of them and her two children living in a home with the body of a 90-year-old woman decomposing on the bathroom toilet.

  Tammy D. Lewis, 35, and Alan A. Bushey, 57, both of Necedah are each charged with two felony counts of causing mental harm to a child, according to a criminal complaint filed Friday. Lewis also faces one count of obstructing police.

  The body was decaying for two months in their bathroom. How could they do that? It takes religion to be that crazy!

  Lewis told the deputy that “God told her Alvina would come back to life if she prayed hard enough.” Bushey told the deputy that “Lewis was obedient and served the Lord just as she should.”

  The 12-year-old boy later told investigators that after Middlesworth died, Bushey told him her appearance “was the result of demons attempting to make it appear that Alvina would not come back to life. The boy also reportedly said that Bushey told him that if Middlesworth’s death was discovered, he and his sister would have to go to public school and get jobs because the woman, whom the boy referred to as his “grandmother,” was paying the bills.

• The ICR has put out an enemies list. There are three people on it: Richard Dawkins, Eugenie Scott, and … me! They noticed <sniff> — I’m so touched.

• Adnan Oktar, aka Harun Yahya, the notorious Turkish creationist, has been convicted of “creating an illegal organization for personal gain”, and has been sentenced to 3 years in a Turkish prison. Hooray! Justice at last!

If you thought Christian rock was horrible and unlistenable, you have not yet heard the Christian demo tapes — the stuff that is so awful it never even made it to the exalted ranks of famous artists like Creed.

Nah, you really don’t want to listen to those. It’s a version of audio torture. Maybe KKMS can use these songs, though.

Portland, Oregon is a beautiful city and a great place to live, but hoo boy, does it have its share of wackos. The latest: some credulous nut wants to practice acupuncture…on the city. He has semi-randomly associated regions on the map with organs (the Willamette River is a kidney?), and is sticking giant acupuncture needles in the ground to shift the flow of chi.

I hope this guy does not get funding for such stupidity.

Aaargh, grading. I’ve been ripping through student papers and exams all afternoon and evening, so I’m reduced to flinging out quick impressions of stuff people have sent me lately. I’m sure you can find something in this collection to discuss.

• This is a novel solution to the energy problem…oh, wait. Did I say “novel”? I meant stupid. It’s a group praying at the gas pump for lower prices.

  “Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.

  “Prayer is the answer to every problem in life… We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high,” Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.”Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.”We’ll have lower gas prices, we’ll have lower gas prices…” they sang.

• Here’s a video of an 18-month old kid “preaching”, with his dumb-as-dirt parents egging him on. Funny thing; the kid is howling gibberish, but he’s got the mannerisms of a pulpit-pounding preacher down cold, and he makes more sense than most Christians.

• A woman throws a tantrum because the new-found Christianity of her husband means…no sex. It’s all hilarious until someone throws a dog.

• This is a bit chilling: Active Duty Missionary. It’s a program to recruit soldiers to proselytize, in between shooting people.

• Jeff Dorchin doesn’t like Ben Stein.

  I mean, the historical ignorance he displays, his dismissal of centuries of European anti-Semitism, his blindness to the role of religion in genocides of peoples long before Darwin was even a twinkle in a lucky zygote’s chromosomes – these all betray the numbskullery of the notion of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin. But it’s the hypocrisy of Ben Stein, like that of his hero Nixon calling the murdered students at Kent State “thugs,” that makes the whole thing so breathtaking, heartbreaking and mind-blowing.

  I think I like Jeff Dorchin.

• Berlinski and Derbyshire duke it out. Two things really annoy me: 1) Fans of Expelled who berate critics who haven’t seen the movie. I’m sorry, but you lost the privilege to complain when I got thrown out of the theater (and I still haven’t seen the stupid thing). 2) Liars who defend the movie by claiming to read my mind, and getting it all wrong. Berlinski claims I regret my appearance; this is not true. I’m happy to state my opinions, even in a bad flop of a movie. He also claims I “sit before the camera in solemn stupefaction” — which is very peculiar. I have seen the clip where I’m talking, and no stupefaction is evident, nor was it felt at the time of the interview.

  I don’t think a guy whose interview was performed while lying on his back with his knees waving in the camera foreground gets to accuse others of looking stupid on film, I’m afraid.

Time for some sleep. Then I plunge back into the grading pile tomorrow.

What a bizarrely random incident: a fur seal tried to have sex with a penguin.

The 100kg seal first subdued the 15kg penguin by lying on it.
The penguin flapped its flippers and attempted to stand and escape – but to no avail.

The seal may have been frustrated in its attempts to find a partner
The seal then alternated between resting on the penguin, and thrusting its pelvis, trying to insert itself, unsuccessfully.

After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.

There are pictures. The seal was no doubt ignoring the penguin afterwards out of shame.