The cuteness assault continues. Today: OTTERS. Yeah, try throwing a cat in the ocean and see how adorable they are then.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
The cuteness assault continues. Today: OTTERS. Yeah, try throwing a cat in the ocean and see how adorable they are then.
I’ll be starting our second Pharyngula podcast on Google+ in one hour, at 10am Central time. You can look for it on my google+ stream, or wait patiently and I’ll post a link to the Google+ hangout and the youtube live stream somewhere early in the process. So get your webcam and your headset ready if you’d like to join in the conversation about those silly creationist claims.
I’ll also embed the video right here when the recording is all done.
We’ve started. I think these links will work:
The Google+ hangout, if you have a Google+ account.
The YouTube stream, for everyone else.
I think you can leave comments in real time at either place, I’ll try to monitor them and bring up any interesting points people might want to make.
Anybody want to try those and let me know if they’re working? Leave a comment if I need to fix something.
Hey, we sort of got it working. I think the problem was that I have to send invites to a discrete set of individuals, and a lot of people weren’t getting that and couldn’t log in. Next time, we’ll arrange it better ahead of time, and I’ll have a group of 8 or 10 people lined up to participate.
Here’s the video anyway. Ignore the first half hour or so (make that the first 15 minutes — it didn’t take as long as I thought), it’s just me and Russell Glasser floundering as we try to figure out why we’re not making contact.
We do not have a rational drug policy. There are potent and dangerous drugs that are socially accepted because hey, we’ve always drunk alcohol and smoked cigarettes, while there are milder, far less dangerous drugs that are damned because they’re new and unfamiliar. And so we throw people in prison for long jail terms if they are caught with some marijuana, while people can go out every weekend and drink themselves into an abusive, obnoxious state, and we just tell them they’re cool.
It is possible to take an objective look at the effects of various drugs on individuals and society, and ask “where’s the harm?” Here’s an example, the dangers of an array of drugs characterized and ranked.
There’s lots of small print there, so you may have to click to embiggen, but I can tell you what the extremes are: alcohol is the worst, and psychoactive mushrooms are the least. Heroin and meth are bad, LSD and Ecstasy are among the least dangerous.
And there are good biological reasons for this ranking.
The particular type of neurotransmitters that a drug affects in the brain has a huge impact on the harms the drug can contribute to. A major similarity between the drugs that tops the list above is that these drugs, in addition to other areas in the brain (click here for a discussion), directly affect the dopaminergic “reward system” in the midbrain. This area has been shaped and “designed” by millions of years of natural selection in mammals to reward for adaptive behavior such as sex and the intake of nutritious food. When they are artificially stimulated by drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine they have adverse consequences for addiction and health (that is the reason why drugs such as nicotine and heroin have the characteristic addictive effects). Drugs at the bottom of the list, such as MDMA (ecstasy), mushrooms and LSD stimulate mainly serotonergic neurons (several places in the brain), and does not directly stimulate the mesolimbic reward systems (which is why they are not addictive).
Wouldn’t it be interesting if we had laws and penalties that were actually informed by science, rather than fear and naivete?
I will add, though, that there’s more to this than just biology: there are the sciences of sociology and pyschology that have to be taken into account. We’ve done the experiment of trying to criminalize alcohol in the same way we do heroin; it didn’t work.
I am an atheist because of Alcoholics Anonymous. My mom is an alcoholic, and had been in the group and sober for as long as I can remember. AA was my religion growing up, even more than Christianity. While I would go years without setting foot in a church, I sat outside of AA meetings and listened to everyone share and repeat the twelve steps and the Lord’s Prayer several times a week. I learned all of the twelve steps and all of the slogans. I was taught my mom had a disease, and that her disease would kill her if she didn’t attend these meetings. I was taught that while I was important, god and AA had to come first in her life. I was also taught that alcoholism was a family disease, that it was genetic, and that I was doomed to either become alcoholic myself or marry an alcoholic.
I have just completed an informal survey of the community by scanning through the New York Times, the Washington Times, the LA Times, High Times, Fortean Times, and World Net Daily, and have come to the realization that this blog does not conform to the wider interests of the world around us. Most people in the world do not care much at all about science, as long as their TVs work, are completely ignorant of evolution, and find atheism completely repellent. Therefore, my interests are out of sync and not worth doing.
From now on, I’ll be changing what I write about to something more reflective of the status quo. My time will be better spent writing about stuff white people find awesome, cars, cosmetics, Charlie Sheen, Justin Bieber, cats and kittens, the attractiveness of slender women in bikinis, martinis, football, and jokes about women making sandwiches.
I understand that these are the topics of prime importance. I’ll also be yelling at everyone else on FtB that they’re wasting our time and being non-representative of people’s concerns by being all disagreeable and failing to conform and stuff.
Also, at last, all those women scribbling away here can find something more productive to do: making my sammiches.
Yeah, this book has to be awful. He wants the one page summary of what magic button to push.
Oh, wait. The title says it’s for the “thinking man” — he’s clearly not in the target audience.
Also, 240 pages is nowhere near enough.
And you can read it online, as well as at all of their conferences.
I guess we’re winning, aren’t we? Progress is being made on every front.
Say, look: it’s a new organization promoting godless values, called Secular Woman. You should join. I just did, and they didn’t even balk at my Y chromosome!
The Blaze is hot on this story! They say it’s “yet another point of evidence that non-believers are working feverishly to harness and secure power”. They’re wrong. It’s another point of evidence that we’re working steadily and confidently to take over the world.
Remember! Tomorrow (Saturday) at 10am Central I’ll be opening up Google+ and setting up a public chat about those silly creationists. The resulting youtube video will be posted here, if you want to sleep in, or you can watch it streaming live, and even join in.
If you want to talk, come prepared with your favorite creationist foolishness…and also, your refutation of it.
(If you’re reading this shortly after I’ve posted it, you’re awake for it: it will be about this same time tomorrow. Or you can convert US Central time to your time zone.)
It’s really a shame: the United States does have some very good things, like an excellent higher education system (which is declining with drooping support, but that’s a different subject), a fine Constitution, and good pizza, but what is making headway in the rest of the world? McDonalds and creationism. Turkey has the creationism bug even worse than we do, and guess who infected them?
In the 1980s, Turkey was still reeling from a military coup d’etat. The socially conservative government that took control after the junta relinquished power changed the science curriculum in schools, Kence says. After the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court case “Edwards v. Aguillard,” which prohibited the teaching of creationism in American public school science courses, he says creationists’ gaze moved abroad. Turkey came calling.
“In collaboration with American creationists, the Minister of Education in Turkey called the Institute for Creation Research and asked for their help,” he says. New textbooks were printed and distributed, and over time teachers began to teach creationism and evolution side by side.
A spokesperson at the Ministry of Education confirmed that government-sanctioned biology textbooks label evolution as a theory, as do scientists everywhere, but also teach creationism alongside it, as a rival theory.
It’s pathetic and sad, too, when I look at the Turkish creationist literature, like Harun Yahya’s junk: it isn’t original or interesting or exotic, it really is exactly the same crap the ICR and similar evangelical creationist missionary outfits have been peddling since the 1960s. You can look at that ghastly Atlas of Creation that Yahya was mailing out to scientists everywhere and trace everything in it back to Duane Gish and Ron Wyatt and all the wacky Ark hunters who go off to Turkey to hike around Mt Ararat and spread gospel tracts.
The people who gravitate to creationism really are the bottom of the barrel, without a single original idea in their heads. And that seems to be true world-wide.
