Octopus abaculus
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
Tonight, in about an hour, I’m going to be on Second Life in a talk show called Virtually Speaking. You can show up there in your avatar, or if you aren’t quite that nerdy, you can just listen in on the audio simulcast.
Strangely, I just realized that I have absolutely no idea what the topic of the interview will be. I guess you can just surprise me with questions!
(via that wild and crazy guy)
Yesterday, two great pious leaders of the world met in Washington DC. President Bush has immense temporal power, leading one of the richest countries on the planet with the most potent military force. Pope Benedict is a spiritual leader to a billion people, with immense influence and the responsibility of a long religious legacy. What could they have talked about? Mostly, they seem to have patted each other on the back and congratulated each other on their commitment to superstition.
In remarks greeting the pope at the White House, Bush called the United States “a nation of prayer.”
Bush was interrupted by applause as he said, “In a world where some treat life as something to be debased and discarded, we need your message that all human life is sacred and that each of us is willed.”
Benedict responded by praising the role of religion in the United States.
“From the dawn of the republic, America’s quest for freedom has been guided by the conviction that the principles governing political and social life are intimately linked to a moral order based on the dominion of God the creator,” he said.
I am often told that religion is a source of morality. I’ve read the Bible myself; I can see that there were moral philosophers at work behind that book, that we have a tradition of law in the Old Testament, with a fellow named Jesus adding social justice and concern for the poor and weak in the New that are actually rather commendable. I also see a lot of myth and error and misplaced obsession with the supernatural that rational people are willing to set aside to focus on the core humanitarian message … or at least they do so in the best of circumstances.
Yet what I also see in modern religion is a re-prioritizing: the secular concerns that should matter, the egalitarian word of a religious tradition that valued the cohesion of the social fabric and demanded equal treatment for even the least of society is ignored, given a little lip service perhaps, but made subservient to the intangible theological nonsense of prayer, of an invisible god, of submission to dogma and hope in an unevidenced afterlife. It’s a religion that has shifted its eyes from a task to be done here on earth to an unearthly vision of a magical unseen world run by an ethereal tyrant who must be placated.
Bush calls us a nation of prayer — a depressing label that makes us a country of delusions. Worse, he claims that we respect life as sacred, a lie straight from his lips. How can George Bush claim our country does not debase and discard human lives?
As you well informed blog readers all know by now, last week ABC broke an interesting little story. It was about how Condi Rice, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, Colin Powell, George Tenent, John Ashcroft and other Bush “Principals” all gathered in regular meetings in the White House to discuss and approve of the various torture methods being used against prisoners held by the United States in the War On Terror. ABC interviewed the president a couple of days later and asked him if he was aware of these meetings and he said he was not only aware of them, but that he’d approved of them. Moreover, he specifically said he had no regrets about what was done to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, who we know was tortured with simulated drowning — also known as “waterboarding” — which is considered by the entire civilized world to be torture.
The great pious Catholic Pope stands before this man, and what does he say? Does he mention that Jesus asked that we do to others as we would have them do to us? Does he remind him that they call their religious figurehead the “Prince of Peace”, and that he asked us to turn the other cheek when we were struck, or that he asked that we protect the poor and weak? Does he point out that the central event in their shared faith was the torture and execution of their prophet and god, and that the New Testament isn’t about emulating the heroic Romans?
No, of course not. An obscenely wealthy old man heading an organization that protects child abusers and advocates horrendous and ignorant social practices that harm the poor all around the world would look utterly hypocritical even trying to rebuke a war-monger and apologist for torture. So instead he stands there and tells him that they share common principles founded in fear of a nebulous god. Those are ‘principles’ I reject — they seem to be nothing but labile excuses for doing as you will to anyone who falls under your thumb.
There’s an evil tableau for you: the callous torturer stands up with blood on his hands and a lie in his teeth, while the priest draped in gilt reassures him of his righteousness. How often has that scene played out in history, I wonder?
Our press seems to be more interested in promoting the pomp of a papal visit than actually addressing the vileness that this administration prosecutes; we’ll see more of the pointless, self-promoting ceremonial nonsense of the mass in New York this weekend than we’ll see addressing the unconscionable evil these great pious leaders condone. I won’t be watching any of it. The sight of these two sanctimonious monsters makes me ill. How about you, Christians? These are your leaders, your paragons, your representatives of the power of your faith. Do you feel some slight tremor of shame that your values are on parade in an empty ritual in the foreground, and a brutal indifference to human life in the back?
The email below the fold is a fairly typical rant from a creationist who has a teeny tiny bit of information, and therefore thinks he has uncovered an irrefutable disproof of evolution. In this case, he has noted that different species have differing numbers of chromosomes, and therefore, because he believes variation in chromosome number is an absolute barrier to fertilization, evolution could not have occurred.
He’s missing a few key pieces of information. One is that, contrary to his belief, variation in chromosome number is not a barrier to reproduction, although it can reduce fertility. Chromosomes are fairly arbitrary collections of genes; they’re like a small collection of filing cabinets in the cell, in which genes have been tossed haphazardly by chance and time. Chromosomal rearrangements are like grabbing one stack of stuff from one cabinet and shoving it in another — it doesn’t change what stuff is present, it just changes the filing system. And since the filing system is remarkably disorderly in the first place, it really doesn’t make that much of a difference.
The other problem with his screed is that barriers to reproduction aren’t really a problem for evolution, either. If you look at the speciation literature, what you find are lots of people talking about how reproductive barriers between populations are constructed, either geographically or genetically.
Most of the papers in that literature, though, do not depend on the argument from extreme capitalization, on strange color changes in the text, or a peculiar dislike of the space bar on their keyboard. At least this guy didn’t use Comic Sans throughout.
Find out for yourself. Darwin Online has acquired a huge digital collection of Darwin’s papers, everything from book drafts to personal letters, and has them scanned and available on the web. There they are in all their scribbled, crossed out, penciled over, rewritten glory — historians and antiquarians will drool over these, but me, I prefer the neatly typed versions.
The collection of family photos is pretty darned cool, though.
Lewis Black defends the Old Testament? He’s still angry about it, at least.
This is just getting weirder and weirder. What kind of dummies are behind Expelled, anyway? First they lied about the premise of their movie to get interviews; then they copied Harvard/XVIVO’s cell animations; then they
Anyway, no matter how the lawyers dance, one thing is clear: the makers of Expelled have been paragons of ethical dubiety, doing their best to skirt the edges of the law and sneak as much doubtful, dishonestly obtained content into their little propaganda movie as they can. I guess they had to skimp on the budget for the actual content of the movie to scrape together a very large advertising budget — it’s as if their movie is a metaphor for all of Intelligent Design creationism.
A family of Minnesotans were involved in a horrific plane crash in the Congo.
Barry and Marybeth Mosier were on their way to visit their son Keith, 24, in Kinsangani, Congo, with two younger children when their plane crashed on takeoff Tuesday in Goma. At least 36 people died as the plane plowed through a market and burned. Most of the people who died were on the ground, according to the U.N. mission in DR Congo.
…Mosier said, he and his wife were carrying their son Andrew, 3, in the shoving “mass of humanity” trying to escape the burning plane. They got out through the opening in the fuselage.
…“Outside the plane, she was wandering around. … It was total chaos,” he said. “People were screaming and yelling because the plane had landed on this market. All of a sudden, out of the blue, all of these people who were just standing there are now dead.
“So there’s parts of bodies and people burning and people screaming and yelling, and she was out there by herself.”
It sounds like a nightmarish event, and I’m glad they survived. I wish a few more people hadn’t died horrible, painful deaths in such a catastrophe, but this was a family of despicable missionaries, so you know what’s coming next.
“We couldn’t believe that our family of four could all escape a plane that was crashed and on fire, but by God’s mercy, we did,” he said.
Mosier said he believes the family made it for a reason.
“I think the Lord has a plan for us, otherwise we wouldn’t have survived,” he said. “He still has work for us to do.”
Their god has no mercy to spare for the innocent people in the market, of course, and their lives must have been totally useless for their god to be able to dispense with them in such a brutal fashion. Or perhaps they were wicked and deserved a flaming extinction with lots of fear and screaming?
In a just theistic world, I think their god would despise such smug, self-satisfied Christians.
