Euprymna tasmanica
Figure from Cephalopods: A World Guide (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mark Norman.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I’m trying figure out how this insane bill could even get a hearing. State Representative Leo Berman (R, of course) was peeved that the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ruled that the Institute for Creation Research would not be allowed to grant degrees. So, he came up with an amazingly stupid idea: pass a law that would allow private, non-profit education institutions to grant degrees without the board’s permission. Which, if you think about it, is actually kind of brilliant in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a worse solution.
If it were to pass, though, I’d like to move to Texas for a few months, open a free daycare, and issue doctoral degrees to every toddler who can go a day without pooping his pants. I’d have the diplomas printed on diapers, too.
That’s about what a degree from a Texas university would be worth if Berman had his way.
I hope all you Texans with real degrees from real universities are frantically writing off to your representatives explaining why this would be a very bad idea.
There’s a fellow who has been posting as an atheist on various sites, and making unusual claims — unusual because I have never heard an atheist say anything like this.
If a man wants to make a women his b****, so be it? So what if you don’t like it, what if I do?
If I want to do something, and my conscience is cool with it, then I can do it. If it’s feed a homeless person, so be it. If it’s kill my neighbor, so be it. I am not bound to any morals.
Wha…? That’s not what an atheist would say; it sounds more like an ignorant Christian caricature of an atheist. And what do you know, it was. Even better, the fellow who is doing this is Pastor Chris Fox of Kendalls Baptist Church in New London, NC. He has been confronted with his dishonesty, and he sees nothing wrong with it, even. Way to represent Christian morality, pastor!
Since this is acceptable Christian behavior, I guess that means I can visit various Christian sites, pretend to be born-again, and chatter about how that means I have acquired a taste for human flesh and want to gun down random people so they can go to heaven faster. Oh, wait, darn…I’m an atheist! I’m bound by human, social patterns of acceptable behavior, and don’t have an imaginary friend in the sky to give me a pardon for lying. Oops. I guess I’ll have to change my plans for the afternoon.
I think you want to read Carl Zimmer’s post on bat flight — it has lots of lovely slo-mo videos that show just how amazingly agile bats are.
I’m not going to say much about this since Ed Yong has an excellent write-up, but a new feathered dinosaur has been discovered, called Tianyulong. As you can see in this image of the fossil, it was bristling with a fuzz of thin fibers — proto-feathers.
There are a couple of noteworthy features in this creature. One is apparent: feathers just didn’t bloom suddenly in evolution, but appeared in steps. This animal has ‘feathers’ that don’t branch like those of modern birds, but instead form more of a furry coat than a set of flat blades.
The other cool thing is that this is an ornithischian dinosaur; most of the other dinosaurs that have been discovered to have feathers were saurischian. What that means might be made more clear by this diagram:
It implies that just maybe the last common ancestor of the saurischia and ornithischia were also covered with proto-feathers, which means that feathers may be a primitive state in this lineage.
Zheng X-T, You H-L, Xu X, Dong Z-M (2009) An Early Cretaceous heterodontosaurid dinosaur with filamentous integumentary structures. Nature 458:333-336.
There is an undersea volcano erupting right now — and a fantastic photo set is showing the event.
Today we have to judge whether any of our contestants have met their immunity challenge. The challenge was this:
The challenge for the seven surviving candidates is to write a short comment, 200 words or less, that reveals that they actually understand why their attitudes and pattern of expression have so exasperated readers here, and explains what they will do to change their behavior in the future. This will be a tough one for this crowd, I’m sure. Let’s see if they can wake up enough to do some honest self-assessment.
The purpose of this challenge isn’t to force people to change or defend their ideas, of course, but to see whether they can honestly recognize why other people might find them so irritating that they are asking me to ban them. So your job in the comments here is to tell me who you think did the best job of actually being briefly self-aware.
Here are the attempts:
Africangenesis, who explains that far left progressives don’t like being shown to be shallow, destructive, and vindictive by someone who is more comfortable with himself.
John Kwok apologizes for name-dropping and talking about his high school…and then tells us that he should be talking about it. And then he tells us about his high school again and
again and
again and
again and
Pete Rooke talks at length about beliefs. You tell me if he makes it, because I couldn’t read it all without nodding off.
Facilis has one that I missed first time through.
Vote for who you think meets the immunity challenge. Considering the quality of the entries, “None” is also a legitimate vote.
Do you feel like you don’t pray enough? Are you too busy working, or playing golf, or fornicating to actually take the time out to get down on your knees and praise the invisible man in the sky? Well, there is a service for you: Information Age Prayer. For the low, low price of $3.95 a month, they will run your prayer of choice through a voice synthesizer every day, and allow the computer to speak to god for you. Is a loved one sick? For only $9.95 per month, the computer will beg god to help them 5 times a day! Throw enough money at this service, and you can just skip church altogether, not waste any time with the holy muttering, and get all the benefits of piety, every single one. Sign up today!
(Lest you think this must be a humor site, the buttons to bill your credit card actually work, and go through paypal. If it’s a joke, it’s an evil one that might actually suck some money out of the pockets of the desperately stupid.)
Who knows? Maybe they’re right. They’re planning a program for “Nightline” (which, I seem to recall, at least used to be a pretty good news program) which will probably get them some decent ratings.
They’re going to have a debate on the existence of Satan.
Yeah, you heard that right…on a so-called news program. But it gets worse! They have 4 people coming on to yell at each other.
On the “Satan exists!” side, they have Pastor Mark Driscoll, head of a megachurch in Seattle, and Annie Lobert, former prostitute and founder of a group called Hookers for Jesus. Sensationalism is already rearing its gaudy head, you can tell.
Even worse, the “Satan does not exist!” side is a joke. It consists of Bishop Carlton Pearson, who doesn’t accept the doctrine of hell but is a Christian, and…unbelievably…Deepak Chopra. Not an atheist or skeptic among them, just hardcore believers in woo vs. fluffy believers in woo.
Don’t tune in. It will be a complete waste of time.
The media are all agog at the fact that the Creation “Museum” has an exhibit on natural selection. Whoop-te-doo, I say — anybody who has been following creationism at all knows that they happily trot out this claim all the time. We’ve got all kinds of concrete examples of observed evolutionary change in lizards and insects and birds and fish, so their argument has always been that they accept a small amount of change, but there are magical limits.
A new exhibit at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum argues that natural selection — Darwin’s explanation for how species develop new traits over time — can coexist with the creationist assertion that all living things were created by God just a few thousand years ago.
“We wanted to show people that creationists believe in natural selection,” said Ken Ham, founder of the Christian ministry Answers in Genesis and frequent Darwin critic.
The exhibit might seem peculiar to many who have watched the decades-long battle between evolution scientists and creationists, who take the Bible’s Genesis account as literal truth.
No, it isn’t. This is old stuff and an elementary distortion of evolutionary theory that the creationists have been using for years. It’s the same as their old distinction between microevolution, which they say they accept while not understanding what it is, and macroevolution, which they say they reject while in a similar state of blind ignorance.
The newspapers are getting played for a chump. They even asked Eugenie Scott’s opinion of this “development”, and she flat out told them it was old news.
But the idea that creationists can accept natural selection “isn’t really new in creationism, though it’s interesting that Answers in Genesis would have an exhibit on it,” said Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, Calif.
It’s interesting that they have an exhibit in that we would like to see how they’ve mangled good science this time.
