Seed Media has created a special offer: you can donate a subscription to Seed magazine to the school of your choice for only $14.95. It’s a good strategy in general: help out your local schools by giving their libraries good science resources.
It’s remarkable. Comfort gets something right.
The contention between Darwin’s theory of evolution and the Bible’s account of creation is extremely significant. This is because if evolution is true, the Bible is a fallacy.
I know, it’s unbelievable. Comfort’s remarks usually set the bar for stupidity, so it’s astounding to find two sentences in his usual babble that actually make sense — yes, it is a significant conflict, and yes, the Bible is fallacious.
It would be nice if we could just stop there, allow the poor man a moment of glory, and leave him to bask self-contentendly in the belief that he is educable, but we can’t. That’s because his next paragraph departs from that brief high-water mark to plunge into the abyss of obtuse inanity.
If you have webcams, turn them on now. I’d like to record the multitudes sitting before my blog, jaws gaping like fish, followed by peals of laughter. This one is for the creationist record books.
Darwin theorized that mankind (both male and female) evolved alongside each other over millions of years, both reproducing after their own kind before the ability to physically have sex evolved. They did this through “asexuality” (“without sexual desire or activity or lacking any apparent sex or sex organs”). Each of them split in half (“Asexual organisms reproduce by fission (splitting in half).” Ask A Scientist, Biology Archive, http://www.newton.dep.anl.gov/askasci/bio99/bio99927.htm.)
Wait, what? Darwin “theorized” no such thing. Humans reproduce sexually, as do all primates, as do all mammals, as do most vertebrates, as do a great many animals. There was no period where males and females evolved separately. The nice quote from Ask a Scientist refers to single-celled organisms — no human being has ever reproduced by splitting in half. We evolved from precursor populations containing both males and females.
This is often the most difficult thing about trying to argue with creationists. You get discombobulated by their most profound misconceptions, and you really do have to be prepared to start the discussion with the simplest, dumbest basics — it’s like trying to have a serious conversation about biology with a preschooler, although usually the preschoolers are far more open-minded and willing to learn. And these are the people who feel qualified to set the high school science curriculum.
How else could a naked clergyman get a potato in there?
Just a suggestion: if he’d been wearing two wetsuits while hanging his curtains, it would never have happened.
You all may recall the Holy Joe mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, who had a great plan to deal with urban crime: he bought 2,000 burlap bags so community leaders could dress in sackcloth and ashes and pray. Unfortunately, the federal authorities stuck to the old fashioned scheme of dressing sensibly and pursuing the evidence, and have now arrested Larry Langford on multiple counts of corruption. Curses! If only the Feds had gone with biblical policing scheme!
(via Techskeptic)
I just received a sampling of
Order of St. Nick’s Alternative Holiday Greeting Cards, so I have to give them a plug. If you’ve been looking for atheist Christmas cards, they’ve got ’em.
I was thinking of sending them to my family back in the Pacific Northwest, but I may have to get some more so I can send some to Bill Donohue and Bill O’Reilly, too.
Oh, my — they also have evil Christmas cards. Maybe those would be more appropriate for the Bills.
Last week’s Friday Cephalopod actually has an interesting story behind it. It was taken from a paper that describes the evolutionary radiation of deep-sea cephalopods.
First, a little background in geological history. Antarctica is a special case, in which a major shift in its climate occurred in the last 50 million years. If you look at a map, you’ll notice that Antarctica comes very close to the southern tip of South America; 50 million years ago, they were fully connected, and they only separated relatively recently due to continental drift.
We have a couple of comments from people who phoned the Cincinnati Zoo that suggest that the shameful pairing of the zoo with the Creation Museum is going to be revoked. I suspect that this was a case of an overzealous person in the marketing department grabbing an opportunity that sounded like good financial sense, without considering its implications to the educational and research mission of the zoo, and that the higher-ups with a bigger picture of their goals are a bit horrified, and are rapidly correcting the problem.
It has been verified: zap, the combo tickets on the zoo’s ticketing site have been eradicated. The Creation Museum is still promoting them, though…let’s hope they shamefacedly erase that page soon.
Any of you who wrote to the zoo — it might be nice if you send a follow-up commending them for their swift action.
Hah! The Creation Museum link has now gone dead. Our triumph is complete.
The story made the Cincinnati Enquirer:
A promotional deal between the Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum was scuttled Monday after the zoo received dozens of angry calls and emails about the partnership.
The promotion was billed as “Two Great Attractions, One Great Deal” and offered a package deal on tickets for the zoo’s annual Festival of Lights and a museum event called Bethlehem’s Blessings.
The deal appeared on web sites for both institutions Friday, but it was pulled by the zoo Monday morning after complaints about the partnership started pouring in.
Most of the protests echoed the same theme: the Creation Museum promotes a religious point of view that conflicts with the zoo’s scientific mission. The museum promotes a strict interpretation of the biblical version of how life began, and it suggests that dinosaurs and man once lived side by side.
The New Humanist blog is running an advent calendar podcast, in which various people are asked what scientist they’d like to have a Christmas-style celebration around, and what invention from scientific history they’d most like to receive for Christmas.
First up is Stephen Fry, who made the interesting choice of Robert Hooke — I approve, he’s an interesting character — and all he wants for Christmas is an orrery.
You’ll have to listen every day. I’m going to be in there somewhere, and Richard Dawkins gets to be the Christmas eve fairy.
The Atlantic has republished Asa Gray’s review of Darwin’s Origin from 1860. It’s a fascinating read: Asa Gray was a general supporter of Darwin, and the two of them corresponded regularly, and the review is generally positive, pointing out the power of the evidence and the idea. However, Gray is also quite plain about the way the implications of the theory make him very uncomfortable, and you can see him casting about, looking for loopholes.
The prospect of the future, accordingly, is on the whole pleasant and encouraging. It is only the backward glance, the gaze up the long vista of the past, that reveals anything alarming. Here the lines converge as they recede into the geological ages, and point to conclusions which, upon the theory, are inevitable, but by no means welcome. The very first step backwards makes the Negro and the Hottentot our blood-relations; — not that reason or Scripture objects to that, though pride may. The next suggests a closer association of our ancestors of the olden time with “our poor relations” of the quadrumanous family than we like to acknowledge. Fortunately, however,— even if we must account for him scientifically,-man with his two feet stands upon a foundation of his own. Intermediate links between the Bimana and the Quadrumana are lacking altogether; so that, put the genealogy of the brutes upon what footing you will, the four-handed races will not serve for our forerunners;— at least, not until some monkey, live or fossil, is producible with great-toes, instead of thumbs, upon his nether extremities; or until some lucky ‘geologist turns up the bones of his ancestor and prototype in France or England, who was so busy “napping the chuckie-stanes” and chipping out flint knives and arrow-beads in the time of the drift, very many ages ago,-before the British Channel existed, says Lyell,— and until these men of the olden time are shown to have worn their great-toes in a divergent and thumblike fashion. That would be evidence indeed: but until some testimony of the sort is produced, we must needs believe in the separate and special creation of man, however it may have been with the lower animals and with plants.
No doubt, the full development and symmetry of Darwin’s hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal,— that all are equally “lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited.”
Alas for Gray, his loopholes have been steadily closed.
I do like his conclusion, though — “uncanny” and “mischievous” are great virtues in a theory, I should think.
So the Darwinian theory, once getting a foothold, marches boldly on, follows the supposed near ancestors of our present species farther and yet farther back into the dim past, and ends with an analogical inference which “makes the whole world kin.” As we said at the beginning, this upshot discomposes us. Several features of the theory have an uncanny look. They may prove to be innocent: but their first aspect is suspicious, and high authorities pronounce the whole thing to be positively mischievous.
The Cincinnati Zoo & Botanical Garden and the Creation Museum have made a joint marketing agreement and are selling “combo tickets” to get into both attractions for one price.
The Cincinnati Zoo is promoting an anti-science, anti-education con job run by ignorant creationists.
Unbelievable.
Here’s a little bit about the Cincinnati Zoo. I’ve highlighted a few key words and phrases.
Part of the public school system in Cincinnati since 1975, the Zoo hosts a four-year college prepatory program – Zoo Academy. The Cincinnati Zoo is proud to serve as the leading non-formal science educator in Southwest Ohio. Over 300,000 students participate in the Zoo’s educational programs annually.
The Zoo has long been successful at captive breeding, starting with trumpeter swans and sea lions back in the 1880s. The Lindner Center for Conservation and Research of Endangered Wildlife (CREW) was founded in 1986 to strengthen the tradition. The research conducted here has made the Cincinnati Zoo an international leader in the protection and propagation of endangered animals and plants around the world.
Rated by peer zoological parks as one of the best zoos in the nation, the Cincinnati Zoo continues to set the standard for conservation, education and preservation of wild animals and wild spaces. Over 1.2 million people visit the Zoo annually. The Zoo features more than 500 animal and 3,000 plant species, making it one of the largest Zoo collections in the country.
I believe the Cincinnati Zoo has betrayed its mission and its trust in a disgraceful way, by aligning themselves with a creationist institution that is a laughing stock to the rest of the world, and a mark of shame to the United States. I urge everyone to contact the zoo; write to their education and marketing and public relations departments in particular and point out the conflict between what they are doing and what their goal as an educational and research institution ought to be.
While you’re at it, it might be even more effective to contact the newsroom at the Cincinnati Enquirer and the Cincinnati weekly, City Beat. Let’s raise a stink and give these guys the bad PR they deserve.
