Just listen to Carl.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Just listen to Carl.
You know how New Scientist published that horrible magazine cover that said “DARWIN WAS WRONG” in big letters, which we now get to hear about all the time at school board meetings as every authority-happy creationist waves it around and announces that they were right all along? I want a copy of the July issue of the Portuguese edition of Playboy for the same reason.
Jesus is on the cover of the July Playboy, sitting on a bed, holding a scantily clad female. The title of Saramago’s book is engraved into the headboard of the bed.
The other explicit images in the magazine show Jesus watching a lesbian sex scene, standing next to a street prostitute, and looking over the shoulder of a half naked woman reminiscent of a Catholic school girl.
This is purely for pedagogical purposes, of course. For any other purposes I’d want the weird bearded guy airbrushed out of the picture.
We just got this note from Adam Bly:
We have removed Food Frontiers from SB.
We apologize for what some of you viewed as a violation of your immense trust in ScienceBlogs. Although we (and many of you) believe strongly in the need to engage industry in pursuit of science-driven social change, this was clearly not the right way.
How do we empower top scientists working in industry to lead science-minded positive change within their organizations? How can a large and diverse online community made up of scientists and the science-minded public help? How do companies who seek genuine dialogue with this community engage? We’ll open this challenge up to everyone on SB and beyond in the coming days so that we can all find the right solution.
That is such a relief.
I agree that scientists in industry must be part of the discussion. However, putting that discussion in the framework of an industry-sponsored infomercial compromises it — there are just too many constraints on what could be said. I also don’t believe that PepsiCo in this case was interested in a genuine dialog — what they wanted was a PR whitewash, and they were willing to pay to get it.
Some people are reasonably asking what next. Notice that Bly is asking questions up there! You can help by making suggestions.
You know that whole “climategate” nonsense was settled, right? It was a ginned-up controversy with no merit, and the evidence still supports the conclusion of anthropogenic global warming.
Unfortunately, that message hasn’t gotten to the public yet. It just goes to show how easy it is to persuade people with fabricated conspiracy theories.
33.6%
Yes, the panel was fair in reproaching their behavior while upholding key data.
66.4%
No, I still believe those scientists fabricated data to support their beliefs on man-made warming.
I did like this one comment:
Typical for scientists to lie… look at evolution and how they try to justify it.
Yeah, that guy is smart and well-informed.
Here we go again, another creationist who doesn’t understand the evolution side of the argument at all. He’s criticizing the argument from bad design in a kind of backwards way.
I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain that the mind they use is the result of lousy design, that their mind is the result of a mindless, purposeless process and thus fundamentally untrustworthy as a reality-processor. (Would you want to buy a “word-processor” made by a random, purposeless process? Would you trust it?)
I’ve never heard a Darwinist complain they’ve been given a crappy brain never designed for abstract thought, or, indeed for thought at all. And yet, according to the self-same Darwinist, the brain is not designed for anything, just like the heart is not designed, the knee is not designed, the eye is not designed, etc. They all just popped out of the ooze, on their own, for no purpose, and if you’ve got problems with that, you’re not very Bright™!
I’ll complain! I have a very bad brain for the purposes I want to use it for. It’s pretty good, but prone to awkward mistakes, for deciphering behavioral cues and inferring intent in my conspecifics, which is still a useful skill, but other functions, like the ability to search out fruit and tubers, or to coordinate a hunting party, or to detect predators lying in wait, I’ve let slide out of a lack of utility. I’d like a brain that could hold more than half a dozen numbers at once in my head, or that wasn’t prone to perceptual errors, or that could process written information a bit more efficiently than this linear, one-word-or-phrase-at-a-time parsing. I wish I had a memory that could accurately record events and scenes, rather than storing a few key hints and reconstructing the rest. I’d like a brain that was actually evolved for doing mathematics naturally, rather than requiring years of discipline and training to acquire the skill artificially.
We really do have very untrustworthy brains. The capacity for abstract, rational thought is a byproduct of general cognitive capacity, and doesn’t come easily to any of us. We have to work at it, and some of us, as is well demonstrated by creationists, never quite get the hang of it.
We even build crutches for brains. Math is a crutch. Science is a crutch. Philosophy is a crutch. Artists, too, use learned heuristics to get their minds to operate reliably in that unnatural mode. We rely utterly on these kinds of intellectual tools to focus our brains efficiently on problem solving, rather than doing what comes naturally, which usually involves snarfing down cheeseburgers and having wild monkey sex with other bipeds.
So yeah, we have crappy brains never designed for abstract thought. What we have are brains shaped by the exigencies of survival — we have big brains simply because of chance and the fact that having a smaller brain, in our peculiar niche, meant you either died or didn’t get laid. We make do. We haven’t been gifted with brains that would be better suited to our current urban/technological lifestyles.
Same with hearts, knees, and eyes. The current forms have been sculpted by time and chance to be good enough to keep us alive. All of them show signs of suboptimality, I can safely say as a fellow who needs glasses, has to watch his blood pressure and cholesterol, and has been plagued with a wobbly knee since he was a teenager. I’ll keep my back, prostate, and teeth in reserve, if we really need more examples of problematic ‘design’.
I’ll leave the strawman claim of derived structures popping whole and complete out of some mysterious ooze out of the argument, too. That’s just stuff you say when you’ve got a particularly stupid, malfunctioning brain. Although, actually, it does make my argument for me…
It’s easy. Bait your hook with stupid.
It’s true, we’re a sucker for that stuff, although it does have a downside. We’ll come up, swallow the bait, follow the line to its source, devour the poor fool holding the pole, and then waddle off, all fat and smug. It’s our nature, we can’t help it.
So, for instance, an Indiana politician who is considered a potential presidential candidate, Mitch Daniels, talks about atheism.
People who reject the idea of a God — who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm — have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications — which not all such folks have thought through — because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.
And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists — Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth — because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.
You should read the rest of that interview, especially the part where he talks about not being ostentatious with his faith. It’s so precious.
The projection is strong in this one. I don’t know if I’d want a president who thought the world was divided into people who thought the only two possible purposes in life were to glorify God or a brutal drive to power.
Daniels is an example of a Christian considered smart enough to be president. You should see what the brain-damaged masses believe. It’s always fun to be lectured about what I believe by a marginally literate kook. Did you know that atheists believe in these six things?
She even made a video about it!
But wait! You haven’t seen the scariest part! Who is this person?
Jellooo I’m Bev, I’m a health care provider, I work in a hospital and nursing home. I also earn my degree in Bachelor of Science major in Management, I teach academic program to toddlers, children and young adults, I also teach speech to foreign student.
If only she’d move to Indiana, she could run for president someday.
If only blogging were like pro basketball…
Never mind the chaos going on behind the scenes! We need a pretty distraction, stat!
Alex Pareene jumps on the anti-HuffPo bandwagon:
Giving a space to quacks to sell vitamin supplements to morons is insulting enough, but actually allowing a shameless asshole like Klinghoffer to use the Holocaust to promote his right-wing crusade to teach children lies is beyond the pale. Platform or no, there’s no reason for anyone rational or even anyone with a sense of shame to continue giving Huffington free content.
Orac is going to be peeved that his jeremiads against quackery at the HuffPo didn’t prompt this response, but what can I say? Jenny McCarthy killing kids with bad advice is small potatoes against stupidity, Nazism, and the Discovery Institute.
Well, not really. The anti-science is just the last straw that broke the back of a camel groaning under a load of Newage garbage.
