Such temerity!

People are telling me that my blog entries are getting sprinkled with creationist ads in the RSS feeds, like this:

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Heh. I think it’s great. This is an old and familiar game that has been played for years, where creationists buy up lots and lots of ad placement on searches for topics in evolutionary biology, and I think they should continue to throw their money down that sinkhole. It seems like an entirely ineffective tactic, to try and dun people who are already willing to look at the evidence with appeals to their dogma.

Shall I start taking out ads in the local church bulletins, perhaps?

Organismal size over evolutionary time is a constrained stochastic property

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The intelligent design creationists are jubilant — a paper has been published that shows that organisms were front-loaded with genes for future function! It describes “‘latent’ or ‘preexistent’ evolutionary potential” in our history, they say.

One small problem. The paper says nothing of the kind. It does mention latent potential, but it means something entirely different from something that is ‘front-loaded’, which is a sneaky little elision on the part of the creationists. There isn’t even the faintest whiff of a teleological proposal in the paper at all, which makes me wonder if they even read it, or if, as seems more likely, they’re simply incapable of comprehending the scientific literature.

So let’s take a look at what the paper is actually about, and you’ll see that it in no way supports the self-serving cheering of the creationists.

[Read more…]

Pardon the hammering and sawing

Some of you have noticed some little instabilities around here since the software upgrade. Well, fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to get a little more rocky tonight. Our crack technical team is going to be ripping into the database and shaking some more bugs out of the system overnight, and while everything should still be usable, it may be slow, and there may be a few glitches now and then. It should all be fixed by the morning.

I think they chose to do it starting at midnight New York time because they hate all the Australian readers. Or maybe it’s because they trust you to be tough enough to cope with a few rough hours.

I can still be surprised

Aren’t letters to the editor fun? They publish some of the craziest stuff.

One of the many problems with Darwin’s theory of evolution pertaining to mankind is that neither Charles Darwin nor his worshippers take into account extra-terrestrial life.

It’s pretty hard for someone to draw conclusions on mankind when Darwin had never seen nor heard of UFOs. That’s kind of like teaching math but not understanding trigonometry.

Most of us in the Niagara Region live on a lake bed (Lake Iroquois). The Indians cannot be blamed for having an effect on this major geographical landscape change anymore than modern man can be blamed for the weather patterns we see today. There is such a thing as pole shifting, and according to people who have studied Mayan culture we are quite possibly in the midst of a pole change — which many people believe will be in 2012.

In his letter, Keith Wigzell ironically contradicts himself when he says that man as part of the animal kingdom is one of the last to appear.

Does this mean evolution stopped at man, or that God stopped creating his creatures?

I certainly believe that all life evolves consciously and spiritually; however, to suggest that man evolved from a monkey is simply silly.

John Kocsis

Beamsville

I have heard many arguments against evolution before, but to disqualify Darwin because he hadn’t seen a UFO is a new one to me. How about Bigfoot? Do you also have to score a Sasquatch sighting in order to be credible?

Texas has a problem

It’s not good news for Texas children in the public school system.

A new survey released by the nonprofit group Texans Care for Children shows that one out of every three Texas students may not make their way across the graduation stage to receive their diploma.

The survey reveals that Texas is ranked last in high school graduation rates and also found that more children in Texas had to retake kindergarten.

How are we going to fix this?

I know! Put a creationist dentist in charge of the educational system! Are you feeling reassured yet?

And seriously, this is a cruel trick to play on children. People sometimes throw out the idea that colleges ought to just smack down these states with poor science standards and a tradition of misrule by not allowing them admission — that would teach those states, but good — but let’s not lose sight of the victims. Those kids get one chance at a decent education, and they are not to be blamed for the short-sightedness and stupidity of their parents and their politicians.

When we are fighting against creationism, we aren’t just working for the future advantage of abstract scientific principle, we are fighting for children right now whose brains are being crippled and twisted and poisoned.

Open season on fresh meat

You may have noticed a recent influx of whining wackaloons, whose enchanting cries have consisted mostly of “You’re all so uncivil” and “This is not a science blog”. This is fallout from the Weblog Awards, where a couple of climate change denialist blogs have effectively turned out the disgruntled conspiracy theorist vote. One of those blogs will almost certainly win the ‘award’ — which tells you the value of these contests — so don’t worry about that. However, I do want to reply to the mindless, repetitive complaints of our new visitors, even though they will almost certainly evaporate when the award voting closes later today.

I want my commenters to be uncivil. There is no virtue in politeness when confronted with ignorance, dishonesty, and delusion. I want them to charge in to the heart of the issue and shred the frauds, without hesitation and without faltering over manners. These demands for a false front of civility are one of the strategies used by charlatans who want to mask their lack of substance — oh, yes, it would be so goddamned rude to point out that a huckster is lying to you. I am quite happy that we have a culture of being rude to frauds here.

The other claim is also a stupid distraction. This is a blog by an educator and scientist. We are not one-dimensional caricatures — I write about whatever interests me, whenever I feel like it. To claim that because I sometimes laugh and sometimes get angry and am a concerned citizen of a screwed-up country and have interests outside of journals and academia and am a father and husband and am willing to express myself on any topic that strikes my fancy means that there can’t possibly be any science here implies that you are a freaking idiot with a bizarrely narrow view of who scientists are, and a peculiarly close-minded vision of how this medium actually works.

Keep this in mind, O Regular Readers of the blog, and please do feel free to be uncivil to these fresh fools from the pseudoscientific fringe of the blogosphere.

It’s because reptoids are color-blind and can only see things in motion

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Jeffrey Rowland points out a great truth: there must be a conspiracy of bad web design behind all the wacky sites on the web. If he’d only more carefully read one of the victims of the conspiracy, David Icke, he’d have drawn the web design expert as a reptoid illuminatus.

Wait! Everyone knows this! Is Rowland hiding something? Is he part of the global cabal?