Sometimes the NPR Series “This I Believe” peddles a short dose of codswallop, but today’s is pretty good.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Sometimes the NPR Series “This I Believe” peddles a short dose of codswallop, but today’s is pretty good.
Now that Atheist’s Talk radio is over for today, you can tune in to Non-Prophets Radio and listen to my interview from yesterday.
Climate change denialists have something in common with evolution denialists: they have a list of “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares,” just like the Discovery Institute’s list of hundreds of ‘scientists’ who “Dissent from Darwinism”. There is a difference, though: the DI got it’s list by asking crackpots and specialists in irrelevant disciplines to volunteer to sign on, so it is a real (but silly) list that exposes the existence of a tiny minority of loons within science.
The Heartland Institute, a think-tank for right-wing denialists, isn’t even that honest. They put their list together without consulting any of the authors they added to it — basically, anyone who published anything discussing the complexities or problems of climate analysis found their name added on to this list.
“I was surprised to find my name in the list of ‘Co-Authors’ in the Heartland Institute’s web page,” says Edward Cushing, professor emeritus in the U of M’s Department of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior. “I resent their implication that I agree with one of more of their statements.”
…
Herbert Wright Jr. is a former regents professor in the U of M’s Department of Geology, Ecology and Botany who was also named by Avery. “I requested that my name be removed from the list,” Wright said, “but the perpetrator refused to do so.”
Dozens of scientists have demanded that their names be removed from the list and that they be issued an apology, but the Heartland Institute opted instead to simply change the name of the study from “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” to “500 Scientists Whose Research Contradicts Man-Made Global Warming Scares.” In a release accompanying the name change, Heartland Institute’s Joseph Bast said the scientists “are embarrassed — as they should be — to see their names in a list of scientists whose peer-reviewed published work suggests the modern warming might be due to a natural 1,500-year climate cycle.”
“I suppose the list included anyone who had published on past climatic changes as inferred from the dated geologic record, even without reference to human factors,” said Wright, who did not seem the slightest bit embarrassed.
Wow. I never thought I’d find an anti-science outfit sleazier than the DI, but they’ve been topped.
Oops, spoke too soon — DI is pretty sleazy, too.
Paul Jones has died. I didn’t know him, or even know about him, until his obituary was sent to me, but it’s an utterly tragic life story. He was an ordained Baptist minister — there’s a waste of a life right there — and his death was ironic and futile.
He died of a heart attack, just as he was about to pray with a member of his Upper Room Fellowship. His last word was “Jesus”.
Someday I’m going to die, too, and I hope it is while doing something productive, and that I don’t go out with the name of an imaginary being on my lips. And in particular, it would be nice if my obituary would say something about the good things in my life, rather than babbling on about dedication to a superstition.
It’s a shame. Jones might have been a wonderful fellow, but all we strangers know about him is that he was “committed to expanding God’s kingdom” — that he had dedicated his life to a lie.
This morning at 9am, tune in to Atheists Talk radio for an hour of women and godlessness with Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. It’s Mother’s Day! Free a mom from the shackles of superstition today!
I’ve had about enough. The last of my kids is doing these obnoxious things like graduating from high school, and now, attending the final prom.
They have to stop trying to make me feel old.
Richard Dawkins takes only 3 minutes to slam both and Cardinal Murphy O’Connor and his interviewer, John Humphrys for the false privilege given to religion. Listen and enjoy.
Glenn Greenwald depresses me. His latest: Our military has been subverting the media with nicely tailored propaganda. I know, I know, so what else is new…but this is straight from Pentagon memos.
I recommend we develop a core group from within our media analyst list of those that we can count on to carry our water. They become part of a “hot list” of those that we immediately make calls to or put on an email distro list before we contact or respond to media on hot issues. We can also do more proactive engagement with this list and give them tips on what stories to focus on and give them heads up on issues as they are developing. By providing them with key and valuable information, they become the key go to guys for the networks and it begins to weed out the less reliably friendly analysts by the networks themselves . . . .
Read the whole thing. Keep it in mind, too, when you see those talking heads on Fox and CNN: those guys are saps who have been suckered by the military. Why do you get your news from the must gullible parrots on TV?
Would you believe a school in Minnesota suspended three eighth graders for refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? Outrageous. The pledge is ridiculous to begin with and replaces conscientious thought with blind obedience, and I think it ought to be rejected everywhere, but to punish students for refusing to kowtow to McCarthyite relics is absurd.
Greg Laden wants us to crash this poll. It’s a bit redundant, fortunately, since the forces of reason are already leading, but let’s tip it farther.
Here’s the silly poll:
Did school officials react properly to the students who did not stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?
- Yes, but the punishment should have been more severe.
- Yes, a one-day, in-school suspension is about right.
- No, they should have been given a warning first.
- No, they shouldn’t be required to stand.
Finals week is upon me, and I should be working on piles of paper work right now, but I need a break … and I have to vent some frustration with the popular press coverage of an important scientific event this week, the publication of a draft of the platypus genome. Over and over again, the newspaper lead is that the platypus is “weird” or “odd” or worse, they imply that the animal is a chimera — “the egg-laying critter is a genetic potpourri — part bird, part reptile and part lactating mammal”. No, no, no, a thousand times no; this is the wrong message. The platypus is not part bird, as birds are an independent and (directly) unrelated lineage; you can say it is part reptile, but that is because it is a member of a great reptilian clade that includes prototherians, marsupials, birds, lizards and snakes, dinosaurs, and us eutherian mammals. We can say with equal justification that we are part reptile, too. What’s interesting about the platypus is that it belongs to a lineage that separated from ours approximately 166 million years ago, deep in the Mesozoic, and it has independently lost different elements of our last common ancestor, and by comparing bits, we can get a clearer picture of what the Jurassic mammals were like, and what we contemporary mammals have gained and lost genetically over the course of evolution.
We can see that the journalistic convention of emphasizing the platypus as an odd duck of a composite creature is missing the whole point if we just look at the title of the paper: “Genome analysis of the platypus reveals unique signatures of evolution.” This is work that is describing the evidence for evolution in a comparative analysis of the genomes of multiple organisms, with emphasis on the newly revealed data from the platypus.
