It’s May, which means I have to tally up all the votes you made in April for the Molly-worthy commenters in March. We have two winners this month, the alliterative duo of Janine and Josh. Everyone say “OM!”
Now you face the onerous task of thinking back over the last month and nominating an exceptional commenter for the month of April. Leave a comment here with the name of your favorite.
And Ema gets very, very snarky. Missouri’s legislators have just passed a vague law that says pharmacists don’t have to fill prescriptions for things that they don’t like, especially nothing that might look sorta like an abortifacient. This is a bad law that removes standards of professional conduct from licensed pharmacies, and further removes all liability from pharmacists who disregard the doctor’s prescriptions for their patients. Well, some of their standards. Ema has a plan.
One last thing. I have a question for Rep. Ed Emery, Rep. Cynthia Davis, and all the other Missouri politicians who passed HB 226. Since you’ve removed the professional duty and standard requirements for the sale of drugs, can I haz street stand for the glorious, Capitalist selling of Plan B in your state?
Silly Ema. Only lawyers and politicians and priests are allowed to determine what is best for women’s bodies.
It could be a very interesting morning on Sunday at 9am on Atheists Talk radio. Eugenie Scott will be on, and she’s always interesting…and Greg Laden will be interviewing her, and he threatens to bring up the recent accusations of truckling to the theistic evolutionists. I will be looking forward to hearing Genie’s take on the subject. Call in! (I’m still going to be on the road, so I won’t be able to…but I will definitely catch the podcast later.)
I guess we have our own little anti-blasphemy principle operationally at work in the US. Look what can get you in trouble with the law now:
A Mission Viejo high school history teacher violated the First Amendment by disparaging Christians during a classroom lecture, a federal judge ruled today.
James Corbett, a 20-year teacher at Capistrano Valley High School, was found guilty of referring to Creationism as “religious, superstitious nonsense” during a 2007 classroom lecture, denigrating his former Advanced Placement European history student, Chad Farnan.Â
I am astounded that Corbett was found guilty of anything.
First of all, he told the truth: creationism is religious, it is a product of superstition, and it is nonsense — it doesn’t fit any of the evidence we have about the history fo the world or life on it. We have to have the right to tell students not only that something is wrong, but that it is stupidly wrong.
Secondly, we are being told over and over again that Christianity is not equivalent to creationism. This teacher has specifically said that creationism is nonsense, and this judge has equated a dismissal of a weird anti-scientific belief with making a rude remark about Christianity. So…where are all the Christians rising in outrage at the slander of their faith?
Thirdly, and this must be said, Chad Farnan is a self-righteously moronic creationist wanker who deserves to have his stupidity pointed out publicly, in the classroom and out of it, far and wide. Spread the word.
Ugh. Steve Austin, creationist geologist, is coming to Roseville to debate the age of the Grand Canyon on 13 May. He’s going to be engaging a local “evolutionist” who I don’t know — Steve Johnson — who I will trust to have the facts, but still — more geologists need to show up in the audience, because Austin is an ignorant clown who will put on a show to pander to a crowd that will mostly be even more ignorant than he is.
Debates are bad idea because they tend to put ludicrous claims on an equal footing with solid science. Sometimes we have to do them, because you’ve got to bring the argument home to the enemy, but when we do, we must get a supportive crowd in attendance, too. Otherwise, they’ll lose on the evidence but play games with the perception.
They are there, and they are trying to organize. If you’re a godless Nebraskan, look into Omaha Atheists — they’re looking for you, too.
When I teach genetics, I like to pull a little trick on my students. About the time I teach them about analyzing pedigrees and about sex linkage, I show them this pedigree and ask them to figure out what kind of trait it is.
It’s a bit of a stumper. There’s the problem of variability in its expression, whatever it is, which makes interpretation a little fuzzy — that’s a good lesson in itself, that genetics isn’t always a matter of rigid absolutes. They usually think, though, that it must be some Y-linked trait, since only males (the squares in the diagram) have it at all, and no females (the circles) are ever affected.
Then I show them the labeled version, and there’s a moment of “Hey, wait a minute…” that ripples through the class. Keep in mind that even the science classes at my university contain typically 60% or more women.
It’s a truly horrible pedigree. Not only is it trying to reduce a very complex trait like “scientific ability” to a discrete character, but its assessment is entirely subjective — a point that is really brought home by pointing out that the pedigree was drawn by Francis Galton, who judged himself brilliant, and that he was evaluating his own family.
The silent tragedy here, though, is all those women judged as lacking in the characters of brilliance and scientific ability. They are rendered as nullities by the prejudices of the time — even if they had shown the spark of genius, they probably would not have been recognized by Galton — and by a culture that wouldn’t have trained or encouraged girls to do more than master needlework and laundry and household management, and would have brought them up to value the fruitfulness of their ovaries over the product of their minds.
Look at all those empty circles. I’m sure some of them had the capacity to be an entrepreneur like Josiah Wedgwood, or an eclectic philosopher like Erasmus Darwin, or a deep and meticulous scientist like Charles Darwin, or even just a successful doctor like Robert Darwin (II-4; not someone I would have characterized as brilliant, and also an indicator of the variety of abilities Galton was lumping together in his arbitrary judgments). Half the scientific potential in that pedigree was thrown away by restrictive social conventions.
That’s the kind of blind bias we have to end, and I think this Letters to our Daughters project is a wonderful idea. Stop pretending the circles are empty, and ask them to speak; color in those circles with talent. If you are a female scientist, or you know a female scientist, write in and set an example, and show the next generation of our daughters that they have a history, too.
You can read the first letter in the project now. I think it needs a few thousand more.
Ray Comfort has made a post on the swine flu. You know already what kind of idiotic tripe he’s going to trot out.
The spread of the so-called ‘swine flu’ demonstrates yet again how useless and sometimes deadly a mutation can be. Furthermore, as the infection spreads around the world, the search for an antidote is desperately sought, but the very fact that the virus is seen as something to be opposed actually supports the Biblical view of this world. It is always good and right to oppose sickness, but in evolutionary terms, why don’t humans simply resign themselves to it and allow the strong to survive? The evolutionary point of view would say the virus has a ‘right’ to live, so ‘good luck’ to it!
How wrong can he be? It’s hard to imagine screwing it up more. In the evolutionary point of view, we are the children of ancestors who fought off disease and lived to procreate; those who surrender to a viruses imaginary right to live, if such imaginary beings ever existed, didn’t make much of a contribution to the current gene pool.
Well, you might wonder, what will the Ray Comforts of the world do to fight the virus?
The great hope for this fallen, diseased, weatherworn world, is the return of Christ, who has promised to bring restoration, everlasting health and peace to all people.
If waiting for Jesus is his only answer, he can join his fantasy evilutionists in the graveyard. But he’s lying here, because we know what will happen if Comfort feels the stirrings of the flu — he’ll scurry to his nearest doctor to take advantage of the work of scientists who don’t think the only hope is to cry out to Jebus.
Here’s the contrast: Nick Anthis describes the molecular mechanism of the flu’s resistance to some of the drugs in our arsenal. Unsurprisingly, he doesn’t cite the Bible even once, nor does he beg for mercy from a merciful deity. He does cite the scientific literature, though, and explains the natural, material processes — those mutations — that have contributed to the potency of this strain.
Who contributes more to the health and happiness of the people of this world, scientists or bible-thumpin’ idjits?
Can you bear yet another poll today? The initial results of this one, before all of you readers get to work and use your magic clicky fingers, is mildly interesting. The readership of Christianity Today consists primarily of scientific illiterates and wishful dreamers, split between people who seriously believe the earth is 6000 years old, those who think the Bible is a science text and are willing to stretch a metaphor, and fuzzy thinkers who want a god to have guided natural processes.
I imagine the readership here can rock their little world.
What best describes your view of the origins of creation?
Young-earth creationism
29%
Old-earth creationism
28%
Theistic evolution
26%
Naturalistic evolution
4%
I don’t know
7%
None of the above
6%
