Truth is something unearthed gradually, and we have to be prepared to revise our interpretation of it based on the evidence. Several readers have informed me of recent developments that will require us to radically re-evaluate our perspective on the universe.

• Geocentrism can make a comeback! Since astronomers are arguing about the definition of something as fundamental as a “planet,” that obviously means that all of physics is in disarray, and completely wrong.
• As long as we’re resurrecting old fables, we might as well get them right this time: clearly, God is a giant squid. There’s even physical evidence.
• There’s also a mythological tradition in place! I’ve always wanted a solid gold octopus god headdress. With a hat like that, I could probably persuade lots of people to give me money.

I think that settles it: Peru is the center of the universe around which all things revolve, and the creator of that universe is a cephalopod somewhere offshore.

Somebody has way too much time on their hands: they’ve modeled a Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster…in Legos.

I’m afraid, though, that I’m such an atheist that if such a building existed in reality, I’d still spurn it as superstitious nonsense.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale is raising money for their Darwin Day celebration by selling something a little bit cheesy, but I may have to get one for my office anyway: a Darwin bobblehead. Cute, eh? Don’t you need one, too?

Creationists often bring up Piltdown Man^* as an example of an evolutionary fraud, and claim that it was the foundation of huge volumes of research. It was a fraud, and it did linger unpleasantly in the scientific literature for far too long, but you’d be hard pressed to find a serious work of science that used it any more. Until now. That genius of the modern era, L. Ron Hubbard, cited Piltdown in Scientology: A History of Man.

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^*By the way, if you haven’t been reading Richard Harter’s World, you should. It’s a sort of antediluvian blog, with none of the conventions we’ve grown accustomed to, but it’s an amazing pile of entertaining and random oddities…including the Piltdown information, monthly joke collections, bits of math and poetry. It’ll keep you busy for days, at least—the archives go back to 1996.

Martin Rundkvist has discovered a peculiar little paper. It’s titled “Deconstructing the evidence-based discourse in health sciences: truth, power and fascism”, and here’s part of the abstract:

Background Drawing on the work of the late French philosophers Deleuze and
Guattari, the objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the evidence-based movement
in the health sciences is outrageously exclusionary and dangerously normative with regards
to scientific knowledge. As such, we assert that the evidence-based movement in health
sciences constitutes a good example of microfascism at play in the contemporary scientific
arena.

Objective The philosophical work of Deleuze and Guattari proves to be useful in showing
how health sciences are colonised (territorialised) by an all-encompassing scientific research
paradigm — that of post-positivism — but also and foremost in showing the process by
which a dominant ideology comes to exclude alternative forms of knowledge, therefore
acting as a fascist structure.

It’s a paper that objects to the hegemony of EBM. That’s “Evidence Based Medicine” to you and me. The authors also resent the reliance on RCT—Randomized Clinical Trials. This is so strange that I had to read the whole thing.

Yes, I actually did.

And, you know, there actually is a teeny-tiny germ of a worthwhile idea imbedded in it. It’s sloshing about in the midst of a lot of impenetrable jargon, misplaced complaints about reliance on that horrid bug-a-boo, “evidence,” and worst of all, utterly outrageous accusations of fascism and references to Hitler and Mussolini, and talk about terror and totalitarian violence. It’s a bit overblown, but here’s one interesting point:

Of course, we do not wish to deny the material and objective existence of the world [that’s a relief, since he had just finished complaining about the people who are wedded to ‘evidence’], but would suggest, rather, that our relation to the world and to others is always mediated, never direct or wholly transparent. Indeed, the sociocultural forms of this mediation would play a large part in the way the world appears as full of significance. Empirical facts alone are quantities that eclipse our qualitative and vital being-in-the-world. For example, how should a woman assign meaning to the diagnosis she just received that, genetically, she has a 40% probability of developing breast cancer in her lifetime? What will this number mean in real terms, when she is asked to evaluate the meaning of such personal risk in the context of her entire life, a life whose value and duration are themselves impossible factors in the equation?

That’s actually useful to think about. Unfortunately, the ultimate grand failing of this paper is that it doesn’t present much thought about the questions, and proposes absolutely nothing to complement or replace that ol’ Evidence Based Medicine…the only message I got out of it was that the authors felt like complaining about those mean doctors and granting agencies that demand evidence for treatments.

I must be one of those evidence-demanding fascists, because my first thoughts on reading his question were that 1) evaluating the meaning of one’s entire life is something that can be done without demanding the suspension of evidence-based prospective treatments, and 2) isn’t this exactly the kind of situation that other ol’ fascist, Stephen J. Gould, found himself in when he was diagnosed with mesothelioma? He describes the process he went through in The Median Isn’t the Message, and it seems to me that he found the honest answers to his problem in the evidence, the data, and the assistance of modern medical care.

That’s a more productive and useful attitude than complaints about modern medicine as tools of 20th century totalitarianism, which is all this paper has to offer. There certainly isn’t any discussion of any alternatives.

Forget those visions of holy virgins or Mother Teresa in a bun or Jesus in a chalupa—guess who appeared in a smoky cloud over the Atlantic?

This could be a new feature here, rather like RaptureReady’s Rapture Index. I’m collecting omens and portents of the coming of our imminent doom at the hands suckers of the Tentacled Great Old Ones. It’s a race: will the cephalopods beat Jesus? A distinct edge goes to the squiddies—at least they’re real.

As mentioned earlier, cephalopods are turning up in our nation’s rivers and highways.

Martin Rundkvist reports that the Swedish Research Council’s new outreach magazine is called…Tentakel.

Majikthise reveals that the cephalopods have conquered the Moon. (Oh, and here’s a much prettier carving).

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Our current Cephalopocalypse Alert Level: 6.7, Glass. Marine molluscs are taking advantage of modern science, beware of strange people in lab coats that have too many arms.

Uh-oh. This is something I never want to meet in a dark alley.

Penguins on the freeway—that must have been an interesting sight. A truck overturned in Texas, releasing the animals, and several were taken out by passing cars.

The good news is that there was also an octopus in the truck, and it came through the accident unharmed. I’d kind of like to know the details of that one.

CNN is also reporting some roadkill in Connecticut. I never cared for the sanctimonious git so I’m less concerned about that one.