So…Do you believe God has intervened to revive patients that doctors ruled were hopeless cases? 63% of the respondents in Eastern Iowa say “yes”. Maybe we can disillusion them.
There was something familiar about this article on the colossal squid. It seems that when they’re young and small, they’re long, lean, and equipped with vicious hooks on their arms, but as they get older and larger, they get shorter, wider, and become slow-moving “giant gelatinous blobs”.
So…squid get tenure, too?
Even the lovely island of Malta is infested with creationists…who have somehow acquired positions of authority in private schools.
Far from becoming extinct 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs actually co-existed with early humans, and even helped in the construction of the pyramids.
This is the word of Vince Fenech, Evangelist pastor and director of a fully licensed, State-approved Creationist institution which admits children aged between four and 18.
I have to wonder what the point of licensing schools is when the process is so porous that flaming incompetents like Fenech can run them.
Claire O’Quin sent me this photo with a little story.
While taking a fish ecology and morphology class out at University of Washington’s Friday Harbor Labs, we came across this little Stubby squid, Rossia pacifica, while collecting one day. He soon became our mascot during the 5 week class. I know the picture isn’t that super, but he was a cool little guy and I thought you might like him too.
How can you resist a sweet little story like that?
This is another wonderful example of the sloppy scholarship of the creationists. The always pretentious Berlinski made the interesting claim that John Von Neumann, the deservedly famous mathematician, thought that Darwinian theory was ridiculous. Douglas Theobald crushes that claim. Von Neumann was clearly on the side of evolutionary theory … but of course, whether he was or wasn’t is actually irrelevant, since we don’t judge ideas in modern biology by the authority of mathematicians from 50 years ago.
Guest Blogger Danio, one last time:
The current standard of pediatric care mandating that all newborns undergo hearing screenings has been applied successfully throughout much of the industrialized world. Early identification of hearing impairments gives valuable lead-time to parents and health care providers during which they can plan medical and educational interventions to improve the child’s development, acquisition of language skills, and general quality of life.
Up to 12% of children born with hearing loss have Usher syndrome. However, diagnosing Usher syndrome as distinct from various forms of congenital hearing impairment is often impossible until the onset of retinal degeneration years later. The considerable number and size of the genes involved makes genetic screening impractical with the current methods, unless there is a family or community history that can shorten the list of targets by implicating a particular Usher gene or subtype.
The educational and medical interventions undertaken to improve a deaf or hearing-impaired child’s cognitive and social development can vary extensively, based in part on whether the child in question is expected to lose his or her vision later in life. Thus an earlier diagnosis of Usher syndrome is an immediate and critical research goal. The most imminent hope for such a diagnostic advance lies in gene chip screening. With this technology, the patient’s DNA can be screened against a microarray of human genes known to cause deafness (and/or Usher syndrome) when mutated, and variances in the DNA sequence of any screened gene would be detected and analyzed. One such chip is already available for commercial use, and another appears to be approaching clinical availability. The rapid and affordable analysis these microarrays offer will be of tremendous benefit in the early diagnosis and management of Usher syndrome.
[Read more…]
I’m still yucky icky sick and oozing slime and fluids like a mollusc, but I did go see the doctor, and she assured me that my death was not imminent but probably at some distant time years hence. I interpret that to mean that my agony will be long and interminably enduring.
We also scheduled a colonoscopy. This is probably not a good day to annoy me.
Here follows a brief account of my sojourn in the Galápagos Islands, just to give you all a rough idea of what I was up to all this time. I’ve tossed in just a few pictures to illustrate what we experienced; I’m planning to dole out the rest a little bit at a time, each week. I took a lot of pictures, and I was a real piker compared to a few other people on the trip — I’m thinking that if I use mine and some of the other photographs people took, if I post one a week, I’ll be able to keep the blog going for about 3800 years.
I can hardly see how anyone ought to wish
Christianity to be true; for if so, the plain language of the text seems to
show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father,
Brother, and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.
And this is a damnable doctrine.Charles Darwin
The counter to the side is ticking off the number of people who have died since you opened this webpage. The vast majority of those people are entering Hell. Christ commanded his followers to share the Gospel with those who are perishing… who have you shared with today?
The Surretts, an insufferable family of missionaries in Peru
They both seem to be saying the same thing. The difference: Darwin deplores the idea of damnation, the Surretts have made it the reason for their existence. I know which side I favor.
Guest Blogger Danio, sneaking a few more posts in:
Remember that execrable HHS policy document that proposes an extension of the current protections for health care workers who refuse to provide or assist in treatments that they personally find morally objectionable? I did a little back-tracking on this issue, and followed the trail of HHS Secretary Mike Leavitt, who requested this regulation after a “disappointing” interaction with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. He has since been unwavering in his support of the proposal–which he claims is not about abortion OR contraception, but about conscience rights–and has a recent blog post responding to the feedback he’s received from pro-choice activists as a result of the leaked document.
Here’s the money quote:
Is the fear here that so many doctors will refuse that it will somehow make it difficult for a woman to get an abortion? That hasn’t happened, but what if it did? Wouldn’t that be an important and legitimate social statement?
“Social statement?” I can scarcely get my mind around the fact that he is so openly, unapologetically endorsing a policy in which pious opinion would trump secular law. Once again, though, it shouldn’t be a surprise. After all, he himself states that “The Bush Administration has consistently supported the unborn”. Ah yes, even as they indiscriminately leech the quality of life (if not the life itself) from countless other self-aware, functioning humans on the planet, each and every blastocyst they encounter is ceremoniously wrapped in a mantle of sanctimonious protection.
Somehow even more disheartening are the numerous fawning, unctuous comments on Leavitt’s recent blog entry. One wrote:
Secretary Leavitt,
It is beyond my comprehension that anyone would be offended by a health care professional who valued human life. But the tragedy is our culture has regressed to a form of barbarism unseen in centuries where progress in technology and science has poisoned our minds, hearts and souls where the intentional destruction of innocent and vulnerable human life has become more important than saving it.
Those of us living and working in a society where human life is expendable by government dictate but fail to stand up to protect and cherish life at any and all costs will live to regret it.
You are doing the right thing Secretary by allowing those of us in the health care profession live our moral and ethical consciences rather than forcing us to choose another profession.
Choose another profession like….a PETA supporter working in a meat packing plant?An auto mechanic who doesn’t support the use of fossil fuels?
Keep your eyes on this one. It has ‘lame duck’s parting shot’ written all over it.
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UPDATE: Leavitt has a new blog entry up today announcing that the proposed rule is being filed in the Federal Register. Although the final draft no longer contains the specific language broadening the definition of “abortion” to include anything from “conception” onward, it still threatens to withhold Federal money if health care organizations don’t allow their employees to exercise their rights of conscience.
