If you haven’t seen the xkcd on climate change, you ought to — putting it on a 40,000 year time scale makes it clear how exceptional the changes in global temperature are right now. Oceanoxia has another of Munroe’s climate change illustrations which is very good.
Once upon a time, back in the days before I was totally locked into biology (and can never get out), I considered going for a history degree instead. All my electives were history classes, I was reading nothing but historical non-fiction for fun, and I might have gone for it except a) I liked biology better, and b) the damned language requirement. I never got far enough into a degree program to really commit to specific subfield, but one thing I was really into was Turkish history. The Turks were remarkable in how quickly they dominated their region, and further, I was very impressed with Ataturk’s secularization of the nation. You will sometimes hear atheists moaning about how Islam never progressed and needs to be more civilized, like Christianity — they’ve never looked at Turkey, apparently, or Iran. Or for that matter, appreciated the barbarism of Christianity.
But anyway, I’ve always wanted to visit Istanbul. I doubt it will ever happen, especially with the sectarian nastiness emerging among some Turks (I wouldn’t be able to shut my face about the nonexistence of any gods, which might get me into trouble), so I felt a twinge of envy at the fact that the creationist frauds at Reason to Believe got invited to a conference in Istanbul by Harun Yahya. That could have been me. All I’d have to do is abandon all pretence of scientific competence, declare my faith in an evil phantasm, and lie about the evidence for a few days.
No, unfortunately, I don’t think I can do that.
So, in addition to missing the historical power of visiting one of the great cities of the world, I also missed out on a conference that proved (their word) some amazing things.
The conference;
– Once again proved that genetics, biology, paleontology, physics, chemistry and astrophysics all answer the question ‘How did life begin?’ with ‘Creation’.
– Hosted leading academicians from the science world -all experts in their respective areas with many academic studies.Some of the topics discussed by the prominent scientists during the conference were as follows:
– The true origin of man
– Why I say ‘God exists’
– Detailed examination and criticism of evolutionary theory
– Origins and creation of the universe
– Fossils: The conclusive evidence of the history of life
The answer to that first point is not “creation”, which is a silly thing to say. Also, the crew at RtB are not leading academicians from the science world
. They are hack theologians.
I haven’t seen any record of the talks given, but some of the photos are revealing. Here’s that evidence against evolutionary theory:
There’s Harun Yahya’s whole schtick. Here’s a fossil; it kind of looks like a modern form to the naive eye, therefore it did not evolve, and all of evolution is false. Never mind that if a time machine dropped you off in the Cretaceous, almost everything would look radically different, because, hey, there were jellyfish in the Cretaceous, just like now. It’s an illogical argument, and it’s also factually false, because the species of jellyfish then were different than the species of jellyfish now.
It’s an indictment of Reasons to Believe, by the way, that they willing participated in this Turkish clown show.
But at least they got to watch the dancing.
Sciencedebate.org sent all the presidential candidates a list of 20 questions about science policy, and most of them have sent in their answers. Gary Johnson didn’t bother. Jill Stein did, but I admit, I didn’t bother reading her answers; I have no intention of voting for her, so I don’t really care, although she did seem to take the questions seriously and had some lengthy answers. I skimmed Trump’s answers (it was easy; they’re short) mainly as a point of comparison with Clinton’s.
Hillary Clinton gives substantial answers to every questions. Sometimes they aren’t very specific, but even there she hints at positive attitudes. For instance, the question on scientific integrity isn’t very good — of course every candidate supports scientific integrity, or at least says so! — and Clinton doesn’t hit on any specific points, but does say she supports “public access to research results and other scientific information”, which is a good thing. But on the question of immigration, she immediately proposes specific bills to assist qualified people in the tech sector. On climate change, she’s going to set ambitious goals.
Generally, my impression was that she (and her staff) made a serious stab at explaining her policy, with enough details that it’s clear she really has plans. This is what I want from a serious candidate.
Trump, on the other hand, had nothing. He’d too frequently wave his hands (his tiny, tiny hands) at “market solutions” providing the answer to everything. He dismissed serious issues: his reply to the question about climate change begins, There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of “climate change.”
Yes, he actually put it in scare quotes. Fuck him.
OK, I decided I wasn’t being fair to Stein, who put almost as much effort into her answers as Clinton did — I can definitely say she’d be a better candidate than Trump. So I looked at some of her longer answers. She lost me with her strategy for protecting biodiversity: Label GMOs, and put a moratorium on new GMOs and pesticides until they are proven safe.
. Nope. Sorry. Does she even realize that GMOs are a fantastic tool for reducing reliance on pesticides?
The alt-right is outraged at being called “deplorable”. They’re right. The term is utterly inadequate. How about “despicable”? How about abhorrent, abject, abominable, awful, contemptible, detestable, disreputable, hateful, heinous, ignoble, ignominious, loathsome, low, mean, odious, reprehensible, shabby, shameful, and vile?
A spokesman for the alt-right just had a press conference, led by Richard Spencer, head of the National Policy Institute, an openly racist, white supremacist organization. He also had a couple of speakers to help him out — speakers who are known entities in “scientific” racism.
Spencer invited two prominent members of the movement to join him. One was Peter Brimelow, the founder of the website VDARE.com, which the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as an “immigrant-bashing hate site that regularly publishes works by white supremacists, anti-Semites, and others on the radical right.” (Brimelow freely admitted during the event that he publishes white nationalists.) The other was Jared Taylor, a self-described “race realist” who explained why the white race is superior to all others (except for East Asians, he said, who are superior to whites). The audience was a mix of reporters and what appeared to be alt-right members and fans.
Good god. What did they have to talk about? Basically how wonderful Donald Trump is for their goals, and what a glorious leader he is.
Spencer continued, “It really is about him and it’s about, in a way, projecting onto him our hopes and dreams. There’s something called ‘me magic,’ and that is a self-fulfilling prophecy…We want to make Trump; we want to imagine him in our image. And that is maybe—you can see that in a meme of Trump as a Napoleon or Trump as some figure out of the Dune novels in an arcade of the future in a robotic suit of armor fighting enemies. All of that stuff is silly, all of that stuff is ridiculous, but it actually gets at something real and that is that we want something more, we want something heroic, we want something that is not defined by liberalism or individual rights or bourgeois norms. We want something that is truly European and truly heroic.”
Then they argued about whether Jews would be allowed to continue to live in the Aryan States of America. No, really.
What would this utopia look like? Spencer said it’s too far off to get into specifics. But he and Taylor, whose role at Friday’s event was to give academic assurances that the races of the world are not equal, disagreed on whether Jews would be welcomed into the white utopia homeland. Spencer took the position that they were not “European” and therefore would take their place in their own ethno-state. Taylor countered, “I don’t think that if a Jewish person identifies with the West and with Europe than that’s something that we should deny.” As Spencer acknowledged, the alt-right has yet to sort out these mere details.
“Mere details”. Poison gas, or bullets? Details.
It’s not all negative, in their minds.
But Spencer did offer up a vision of an alt-right society. “If the alt-right were in power, we would all have arrived here via magnetic levitation trains,” he said. “We would have passed by great forests and beautiful images of blond women in a wheat field with their hands, running them through the wheat.” The audience tittered. “It would be a wonderful sight.”
Jesus fuck. OK, what about the brunettes? Will they be deported to their own “ethno-state”? Will redheads be sequestered somewhere? I don’t even want to think about the fate of black women in Spencer’s utopia.
Like I said, “deplorable” is an unsatisfactory word to apply to Trump supporters. How about “Nazi scum”?
I think we’re well past the stage of needing to mince words anymore.
Also, the NY Times.
Jay is going to be stretched awfully thin trying to cover everything. Maybe they can also hire Roy Edroso and Heather Parton and Peter Daou and Charles Pierce and god just about anyone other than the mewling mob of sycophants and know-nothings and febrile desperate panderers they’ve all got in the media nowadays. Are they every one diving to join Breitbart in the flaming dumpster of irresponsibility or something?
I’m with Mano on this one. I am sick of this election, and I am particularly sick of our gutless, spineless, brainless media. They are jellyfish. Except jellyfish have a nerve net and maybe a tiny bit of self-respect.
This optical illusion is making the rounds. There are twelve black dots located at some of the vertices. Can you seem them all?< ?p>
You can’t see them all at once, at least: focus on one, and all the others disappear. This is not at all surprising — the central area of maximum resolution in your eye is very tiny, and your peripheral vision simply isn’t very good.
What did intrigue me, though, is that if I focus on a central intersection I can see two dots at once, one to either side of the intersection I’m looking at. However, I can’t simultaneously see two dots on the vertical plane.
I think this means I’d be particularly susceptible to drop bear attacks.
It’s called a Black-Waved Flannel, but none of us are fooled. We know where that came from.
It’s probably finished consuming its brain meal and is looking for a new host.
There are spit-takes galore in this video of Stephen Meyer, but don’t worry, he’s so slow and tedious and pompous that you’ll see them coming way ahead of time.
He confesses that the “intelligent design community” (you know, that dying horse that twitches occasionally) has avoided the issue because it has become strangely toxic
within Christianity, and then he meanders on about how you can come to either a young earth or an old earth conclusion just by how you look at the evidence, which is very much a Ken Ham/Answers in Genesis sort of perspective.
But don’t worry, he and Ken will still be in opposition. He later admits to being an Old Earth creationist, with the peculiar reservation that he thinks the paleontologists/anthropologists are all wrong, and that humans were spontaneously created by god much more recently than is believed.
But he thinks the age of the earth is a tertiary issue, and The first issue is the reality of god — is god real or imaginary?
. I think it’s clear that they have no evidence for a god of any kind, especially the twitchy nasty Christian patriarch he believes in, but it’s strange to argue that the age of the earth is unimportant. It’s a fundamental question: do you accept physical, scientific evidence, or don’t you? The age of the earth is really a relatively simple, straightforward question which has a largely indisputable answer that is supported by multiple lines of hard evidence. If you can’t agree on a basic physical parameter of our world, measured with multiple techniques to a high degree of confidence, you aren’t even speaking the same language.
I’d also say that if you think you can argue that Homo sapiens is only tens of thousands of years old, you’re talking gibberish.
But the real lesson of this video is that Stephen Meyer is a very silly man. I had a tough time listening to all 10 minutes of it because it’s just Meyer giving a stupid answer to a stupid question, and he is unbelievably long-winded, pedantic, and full of himself (a tone he can sustain for a painfully long time, as attested by those horrid doorstops that he has written). What really annoyed me beyond his drone, though, was that when he finally gives up the microphone, he immediately takes it back to praise, of all people, Lee Fucking Strobel, one of the worst, most dishonest, most unconvincing Christian apologists out there. I know atheists who left Christianity after reading that guy’s schlock nonsense. And here’s tedious superficial Meyer claiming he’s persuasive.
The oldest evidence for microbial life has been found in Greenland, with fossilized 3.7 billion year old stromatolites (layered bacterial colonies) found in the rocks. Here’s what they look like:
And here’s the abstract of the paper:
Biological activity is a major factor in Earth’s chemical cycles, including facilitating CO2 sequestration and providing climate feedbacks. Thus a key question in Earth’s evolution is when did life arise and impact hydrosphere–atmosphere–lithosphere chemical cycles? Until now, evidence for the oldest life on Earth focused on debated stable isotopic signatures of 3,800–3,700 million year (Myr)-old metamorphosed sedimentary rocks and minerals from the Isua supracrustal belt (ISB), southwest Greenland. Here we report evidence for ancient life from a newly exposed outcrop of 3,700-Myr-old metacarbonate rocks in the ISB that contain 1–4-cm-high stromatolites—macroscopically layered structures produced by microbial communities. The ISB stromatolites grew in a shallow marine environment, as indicated by seawater-like rare-earth element plus yttrium trace element signatures of the metacarbonates, and by interlayered detrital sedimentary rocks with cross-lamination and storm-wave generated breccias. The ISB stromatolites predate by 220 Myr the previous most convincing and generally accepted multidisciplinary evidence for oldest life remains in the 3,480-Myr-old Dresser Formation of the Pilbara Craton, Australia. The presence of the ISB stromatolites demonstrates the establishment of shallow marine carbonate production with biotic CO2 sequestration by 3,700 million years ago (Ma), near the start of Earth’s sedimentary record. A sophistication of life by 3,700 Ma is in accord with genetic molecular clock studies placing life’s origin in the Hadean eon (>4,000 Ma).
Nice illustration of Pacific coast wildlife.
I should go whale watching next summer. I wish.
