So you filled up another bucket in the endless thread…I really should get that leak fixed someday. Meanwhile, here’s a little something from the Institute on the Environment at the UM.
(Current totals: 11,487 entries with 1,207,883 comments.)
I can’t understand a word that’s written in this article, but I like the cartoon.
Somebody should make a similar one for moderate Christians…they can tut-tut over murdered abortion doctors, they can make excuses for pedophile priests, they can go in a voting booth and pull the lever against gay rights, but an atheist puts up a billboard that says you can be good without gods, and zowee! Screaming fits on Fox News!
I used to always give my spare change to the Salvation Army at this time of year — there they were, ringing their bell outside the grocery store, so sure, I’d give a little. That changed when I learned about their anti-gay policies, though…and now there’s another reason to spurn the Salvation Army.
The Salvation Army says it refuses to distribute Harry Potter and Twilight toys collected for needy children because they’re incompatible with the charity’s Christian beliefs.
The policy has alarmed a Calgarian who volunteered to sift through a southeast warehouse full of unused, donated items and was alarmed when he was told by Salvation Army officials that the two kinds of toys are “disposed of” and not given to other charities.
“I asked if these toys went to another charitable organizations but was told no, that by passing these toys on to another agency for distribution would be supporting these toys,” said the man, who wouldn’t give his name due to his occupation.
So donors may have handed over popular toys for distribution, not knowing that the destination was going to be the landfill. And it’s not because the Salvation Army is concerned about the quality or educational value of the toys…
“I was told to withhold a six-inch Harry Potter figure, but when I picked up a plastic M-16, I was told, ‘That’s for the 10-year-olds,'” he said.
I feel so dumb for having ever given that organization anything. I should have been clued in by the frickin’ name that it was run by a gang of puffed-up sanctimonious looneys.
You want an atheist Christmas carol? Here it is.
I still remember the shock when I heard the news on 8 December 1980.
There’s nothing I detest more than intellectual dishonesty, and the Discovery Institute is a world leader in that. They have a ghastly little article up on their website, “Is origin of life in hot water?”, which cites a recent paper in PNAS to argue that life couldn’t have evolved without the enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions. Here’s what they say about it:
So it seems according to a new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The authors address the conundrum of origin of life chemists between the rate of (un-catalyzed) organic reactions and the lack of time available for these reactions to occur. From the article (note: an enzyme is a biological catalyst):
Whereas enzyme reactions ordinarily occur in a matter of milliseconds, the same reactions proceed with half-lives of hundreds, thousands, or millions of years in the absence of a catalyst. Yet life is believed to have taken hold within the first 25% of Earth’s history. How could cellular chemistry and the enzymes that make life possible, have arisen so quickly?” [Internal citations omitted]
Indeed this is one of the problems with origin of life scenarios, particularly those scenarios that presume a metabolism-first world (as opposed to an RNA-first world). The half-life of certain reactions without a catalyst can be millions of years, but studies show that the emergence of early bacteria could be dated as far back as 3.5 billion years (see ENV post on a cold origin of life and Schopf, J. William, “The First Billion Years: When Did Life Emerge?” Elements vol 2:229 (2006) for more on this). This means there was a limited amount of time for fundamental biological reactions to occur. Reaction kinetics can be prohibitive. However, the authors of this paper have a theory to solve the reaction kinetics problem.
No, the authors provide data to support a dramatic (and unsurprising) effect of temperature on the rate of chemical reactions, and the Discovery Institute uses a paper demonstrating the feasibility of life’s early chemistry to argue the exact opposite.
It’s stunningly arrogant — I guess they’re used to their readers simply accepting whatever they say. They quote the first three sentences of the paper, and leave off the rest of the paragraph. Would you like to know what it says?
Do you think the DI might have accurately represented the sense of the paper?
Place your bets now. Here’s the remainder of the paragraph:
Here, we show that because of an extraordinarily sensitive rela- tionship between temperature and the rates of very slow reactions, the time required for early evolution on a warm earth was very much shorter than it might appear. That sensitivity also suggests some likely properties of an evolvable catalyst, and a testable mechanism by which its ability to enhance rates might have been expected to increase as the environment cooled.
It reminds me of the infamous quote mine of the that section of Darwin’s Origin on the evolution of the eye, in which he rhetorically sets up the problem and then goes on to explain exactly how it occurred…and the creationists only ever quote the part where the problem is laid out, and pretend the answer was missing. That’s exactly what the creationists have done to this paper by Stockbridge et al. — they’ve pulled out just the few sentences at the beginning where the authors explain why this is an important problem, and then gloss over the whole point of the paper, which is to solve the problem.
Just in case you’re curious, here’s the abstract — there’s absolutely nothing in here to provide any consolation to a creationist.
All reactions are accelerated by an increase in temperature, but the magnitude of that effect on very slow reactions does not seem to have been fully appreciated. The hydrolysis of polysaccharides, for example, is accelerated 190,000-fold when the temperature is raised from 25 to 100 °C, while the rate of hydrolysis of phosphate monoester dianions increases 10,300,000-fold. Moreover, the slow- est reactions tend to be the most heat-sensitive. These tendencies collapse, by as many as five orders of magnitude, the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution in a warm environment. We propose, further, that if the catalytic effect of a “proto-enzyme”—like that of modern enzymes—were mainly enthalpic, then the resulting rate enhancement would have increased automatically as the environment became cooler. Several powerful nonenzymatic catalysts of very slow biological reactions, notably pyridoxal phosphate and the ceric ion, are shown to meet that criterion. Taken together, these findings greatly reduce the time that would have been required for early chemical evolution, countering the view that not enough time has passed for life to have evolved to its present level of complexity.
Stockbridge RB, Lewis CA, Yuan Y, Wolfenden R (2010) Impact of temperature on the time required for
the establishment of primordial biochemistry,
and for the evolution of enzymes. Proc Nat Acad Sci USA. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1013647107.
Down in Texas, they had a holiday parade, and the atheists showed up — not to be mean, not to beat up Christians, not to stink up the event with doom and gloom and cynicism, but to celebrate the Christmas season.
18 people made up the Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band which paraded down Texas Avenue while playing “Jingle Bells” on vuvuzela horns.
News 3 spoke with the leader of the group who said they weren’t protesting Christmas or the parade but were there to announce their presence in the community.
…
“We just wanted to say hey, were here, its’ ok, you know. We didn’t intend to be specifically offensive to anyone you know we just wanted to say we’re here too,” said Keri Bean of the Brazos Valley Atheist Vuvuzela Marching Band.
Bean organized the Brazos Valley Vuvuzela Marching Band and said they chose to perform “Jingle Bells” to stay with the Christmas spirit of the parade.
“When we were walking around we would say, ‘Merry Christmas’ or ‘Happy Hanukkah’, ‘Merry Kwanzaa’, there’s a whole bunch of different holidays that happen now, so we wanted to make sure that everyone was represented,” Bean said.
Good for them. That’s exactly what we should do: have a good time, adopt good traditions like midwinter festivals as our own, and join in with the community. No one can complain about that, can they? Well, maybe the vuvuzelas were in poor taste, but otherwise they were just being enthusiastic and participatory.
It is no surprise at all that some people were upset. Not at the vuvuzelas, either. Here are some of the responses they got.
“Wasn’t exactly happy about the Christmas Parade this year, I spent many years teaching my children to love and respect other people and to love the fact that they were children of God and I don’t feel that they should be influenced in any other way especially not at a Christmas parade,” said Tina Corgey, who is a lifelong Bryan resident.
Corgey brings her three kids to the B/CS Christmas Parade every year.
She said she was disgusted by what she saw on Sunday.
“If you have younger children they weren’t going to understand but I have older children, a teenager, 8-year-old and they were curious and they asked questions and it was hard for them to believe and understand that there are actually people out there that don’t believe in God,” Corgey said.
Who’s the nasty, cynical bigot stinking up the event? A Christian, of course.
The media isn’t helping, either. They’ve got a poll with an awesomely stupid question, something I wouldn’t have thought would even be considered…but of course it will be.
Should Non-Christian Groups Be Allowed to Participate In the B-CS Christmas Parade?
Yes 57.5%
No 43.0%
I think what would make the parade better is if they excluded the cranky Christians. And vuvuzelas, too.
According to their sacred literature, anyway. Would you believe this collection of angry ignorant kooks whining about their taxes in local American politics is actually written up in the Bible? Yeah, this is the fourth Tea Party movement: the first was after the death of Solomon, the second was led by Jesus Christ himself, the third was the Boston event, and the fourth was begun by a ranting overprivileged ass on the Chicago stock exchange, which makes Rick Santelli some kind of prophet, apparently.
Man, these guys are lunatics. American politics is more than a little embarrassing for Americans.
We’ve all been sitting around wondering what big questions would ever completely stymie science — we’ve been just knocking ’em down right and left, and scientists have been completely baffled about what good question they could possibly ask next. We’ve all had serious concerns that maybe we were all done, and we’d have to go work for a living or something terrible like that.
But we’ve been saved by Oprah. She, or rather the scientifically deep team of scientific and philosophical experts on her staff, have come up with a challenging list of Humongous Questions that we’ll have to address in our next grant proposals. Here they are, Six Questions Science Can’t Answer.
Padre Pio’s Stigmata! Old dead Italian priest would poke himself to make himself bleed every day, and people worshipped him like Jesus!
Hindu statues drink milk! When offered sips of milk, statues of Ganesha are claimed to have drunk it, and people believed it!
Mosque didn’t fall down! Old mosque in city damaged by tsunami failed to collapse; populace dumbfounded and consternated!
Well golly gee. I am sorta puzzled…not by the questions, which are trivial and stupid, but by the fact that the authors, Jennifer Margulis and Meredith Bryan, managed to find gainful employment as writers and that CNN thought this crap was worth publishing. More Mysteries! That Science Can’t Answer!
But wait! I’m sure at this point, Jennifer and Meredith — hang on, I need a cutesy name for this couple…Jennidith! — Jennidith looked at their list of big questions and pondered. They’d hit up a couple of the Big Religions, and they were probably thinking that they could have gone on in this vein for a while. After all, they haven’t said anything about Judaism or Buddhism yet (maybe, “Why is a Catholic girl like Madonna suddenly so Jewish?” or “How will you explain what the Dalai Lama will be reincarnated as in his next life?”), but they were unsatisfied. These questions didn’t sound very sciencey. They weren’t even sciencish.
So they puzzled and they pondered and they contemplated, and they thought of some big science-like questions that had nothing at all to do with the first three questions, but kind of looked like questions a really smart person might ask, and since they didn’t know the answers, they must be the big questions we should shoo the scientists off to find out.
How did the universe begin? Like, planetariums are really awesome. Especially during Laser Floyd.
Do aliens exist? We’re not crazy to believe in space aliens, and we found a scientist who says there are other planets out there for them!
How many species live on earth? So many of those species are really, really small, so they must be hard to count!
I’d say more, but right now I’m just looking at Jennidith, shaking my head sadly, and wondering if maybe there isn’t somewhere else I’d rather be. Somewhere else with beer, maybe. And maybe with grown-ups who can talk intelligently. Because Jennidith, poor Jennidith, is an airhead.
They shouldn’t feel too bad, though. You can’t even imagine what I think of Oprah!
This is fabulous news: the Louisiana school system has been wrestling with a proposal from the Louisiana Family Forum (you know the rule: the word “family” in their title means they’re anything but) which would have had the schools using science textbooks with absurd warning labels and watered down content. The Board of Elementary and Secondary Education has seen the light, however, and voted 6 to 1 in favor of using quality textbooks for the kids of Louisiana. It’s an all-around win for everyone.
The Louisiana Patriarchy Forum is not happy. They are venting their frustration a bit with a ridiculous poll — go make them cry some more.
YES
29%
NO
71%
Just remember, to a creationist “false and inaccurate” refers to any piece of evidence that shows how bogus their superstitions are, and vote accordingly.
