God arrested!

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Omnipotent, omnipresent supernatural being (left) deigns to be arrested for raping children.

It’s a rough era for deities. This one seems to be subject to ordinary mortal ills, like wrinkles and graying hair, ordinary mortal temptations, like having sex with young girls, and also, surprisingly, is powerless before minor material obstacles, like handcuffs. Odd, isn’t it? He should stamp his foot, and the earth cracks wide and his foes tumble into the depths. He ought to wave his hands raise a whirlwind that sweeps away his enemies, scatters their guns, and hurls their squad cars into the sky. But no, they always turn out to be fragile meat with no special abilities, and the most tawdry, revolting tastes.

Wayne Bent, AKA Michael Travesser, AKA minister of the Lord Our Righteousness Church, AKA the Messiah as revealed by God, has been arrested. How do you arrest a supernatural being, I wonder?

I hope they’ve built a special prison cell for him out of an adamantium/eternium alloy, with a special guard detail of angels and demons. Nothing else could possibly hold messiah.

A little psychiatric help might also be in order.

Portland, how could you?

Portland, Oregon is a beautiful city and a great place to live, but hoo boy, does it have its share of wackos. The latest: some credulous nut wants to practice acupuncture…on the city. He has semi-randomly associated regions on the map with organs (the Willamette River is a kidney?), and is sticking giant acupuncture needles in the ground to shift the flow of chi.

I hope this guy does not get funding for such stupidity.

The History Channel might do something right

I just got this announcement for a new series to appear on the History Channel in June. This has the potential to be really good — at least it sounds like the focus is on the biology — and we’ll have to tune in.

SERIES PREMIERE!
EVOLVE:
EYES

Eyes are one of evolution’s most useful and prevalent inventions, equipping approximately 95 percent of living species. They exist in many different forms across nature, having evolved convergently across different species. Learn how the ancestors of jellyfish may have been the first to evolve light-sensitive cells. In the pre-Cambrian era, insects, in particular the dragonfly, would take the compound eye to new heights. Find out how dinosaurs adapted their eyes to become such successful hunters of prey. And while dinosaurs remained at the top of the food chain for 150 million years, tiny early mammals developed night vision to populate the night as a survival technique. Finally, learn how primates underwent several adaptations to their eyes to better exploit their new habitat, and how the ability to see colors helped them find food.

Throughout eons of evolution, the natural world has played host to a never-ending competition. Since the dawn of time roughly 99% of all species have become extinct. In order to survive, all creatures, including man, must treat life as a battlefield and master the natural weapons and defenses that have evolved: Tyrannosaurus Rex’s 13-inch canines; the gecko’s Velcro-like toe pads; the bald eagle’s telescopic vision that is capable of spotting a hare a mile away. What is the history of these evolutions and how did they come about? They didn’t just appear arbitrarily, they evolved for a common reason – to give these animals a critical edge in interspecies warfare. To evolve is to conquer!

The new series EVOLVE traces the history of the key innovations that have driven nature’s evolutionary arms race from the dawn of life to today, from the anatomical (eyes, jaws, and body armor) to the behavioral (movement, communication, and sex). This 13-part series will deftly blend spectacular live-action natural history sequences, CGI, epic docudrama, and experimental science to illustrate our and our fellow species’ eternal struggle for survival on earth.

PREMIERE: Tuesday, June 17 at 10pm/2am ET/PT
LENGTH: 2 hours
REPEATS: Sunday, June 22 at 11pm/3am ET/PT
PRODUCED BY: Optomen Productions, Inc.

Mildred Loving has died

Loving was the woman who, with her husband, was tried in the 1960s for the crime of interracial marriage; their victory before the Supreme Court led to the striking down of laws banning racially mixed marriages across the country. Here’s part of her account:

Not long after our wedding, we were awakened in the middle of the night in our own bedroom by deputy sheriffs and actually arrested for the “crime” of marrying the wrong kind of person. Our marriage certificate was hanging on the wall above the bed. The state prosecuted Richard and me, and after we were found guilty, the judge declared: “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.” He sentenced us to a year in prison, but offered to suspend the sentence if we left our home in Virginia for 25 years exile.

The judge’s comment is particularly interesting. He’s using an unholy mix of rank creationism and Blumenbach’s 19th century taxonomy of human races to justify his decision! For all the finger-pointing at science for promoting racism, though, it’s clear that most of the rationalizations have come from god-fearin’ church folk. Browse the racist web boards (here’s an example; it’s the evil Stormfront, so be warned), and you’ll find an amazing infatuation with biblical authority.

It’s worth noting that the same flavor of argument, thumping the bible to claim god is agin’ it and making up ‘facts’ about the natural world, is also the same strategy used to argue against homosexual marriage. I remember 1967 — that was the year I was grooving to Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles — and it’s dismaying to think our country held onto the bigotry that denied people the right to love one another for so long, but it’s even more distressing to see that the same attitudes still prevail in 2008.

Late night weird story dump

Aaargh, grading. I’ve been ripping through student papers and exams all afternoon and evening, so I’m reduced to flinging out quick impressions of stuff people have sent me lately. I’m sure you can find something in this collection to discuss.

  • This is a novel solution to the energy problem…oh, wait. Did I say “novel”? I meant stupid. It’s a group praying at the gas pump for lower prices.

    “Lord, come down in a mighty way and strengthen us so that we can bring down these high gas prices,” Twyman said to a chorus of “amens”.

    “Prayer is the answer to every problem in life… We call on God to intervene in the lives of the selfish, greedy people who are keeping these prices high,” Twyman said on the gas station forecourt in a neighborhood of Washington that, like many of its residents, has seen better days.”Lord, the prices at this pump have gone up since last week. We know that you are able, that you have all the power in the world,” he prayed, before former beauty queen Rashida Jolley led the group in a modified version of the spiritual, “We Shall Overcome”.”We’ll have lower gas prices, we’ll have lower gas prices…” they sang.

  • Here’s a video of an 18-month old kid “preaching”, with his dumb-as-dirt parents egging him on. Funny thing; the kid is howling gibberish, but he’s got the mannerisms of a pulpit-pounding preacher down cold, and he makes more sense than most Christians.

  • A woman throws a tantrum because the new-found Christianity of her husband means…no sex. It’s all hilarious until someone throws a dog.

  • This is a bit chilling: Active Duty Missionary. It’s a program to recruit soldiers to proselytize, in between shooting people.

  • Jeff Dorchin doesn’t like Ben Stein.

    I mean, the historical ignorance he displays, his dismissal of centuries of European anti-Semitism, his blindness to the role of religion in genocides of peoples long before Darwin was even a twinkle in a lucky zygote’s chromosomes – these all betray the numbskullery of the notion of blaming the Holocaust on Darwin. But it’s the hypocrisy of Ben Stein, like that of his hero Nixon calling the murdered students at Kent State “thugs,” that makes the whole thing so breathtaking, heartbreaking and mind-blowing.

    I think I like Jeff Dorchin.

  • Berlinski and Derbyshire duke it out. Two things really annoy me: 1) Fans of Expelled who berate critics who haven’t seen the movie. I’m sorry, but you lost the privilege to complain when I got thrown out of the theater (and I still haven’t seen the stupid thing). 2) Liars who defend the movie by claiming to read my mind, and getting it all wrong. Berlinski claims I regret my appearance; this is not true. I’m happy to state my opinions, even in a bad flop of a movie. He also claims I “sit before the camera in solemn stupefaction” — which is very peculiar. I have seen the clip where I’m talking, and no stupefaction is evident, nor was it felt at the time of the interview.

    I don’t think a guy whose interview was performed while lying on his back with his knees waving in the camera foreground gets to accuse others of looking stupid on film, I’m afraid.

Time for some sleep. Then I plunge back into the grading pile tomorrow.

Squish

That’s the sound you should hear when Joe Felsenstein takes on an idiotic claim by Sal Cordova. Would you believe that Cordova claims that Kimura and Ohta’s classic 1971 paper “shatters the modern synthesis”? That’s what he claims, on the basis of his poor understanding of the mathematics of population genetics, which is ridiculous on the face of it. So it’s very satisfying to see one of the big guns of population genetics take him down with one brief explanation: contrary to Cordova, the principle he’s describing confirms the effectiveness of natural selection.

Just to help everyone follow along, here’s the simple explanation. As Kimura and Ohta explained, most mutations, even advantageous ones, do not go to fixation in a population, and are lost. Slimy Sal just reports only that much, and declares the end of evolution, to huzzahs from his equally ignorant cronies. What he ignores, and what Felsenstein explains, is that 1) the frequency of fixation of advantageous alleles will be much, much greater than for neutral or deleterious alleles, and 2) that there are many mutations being generated — so natural selection is an effective filter.

It’s a kind of mathematical quote mine, where Cordova only tells a tiny part of the story and leaves out the important bit that destroys his thesis.

I can’t believe in Florida anymore

OK, Florida, this has gone far enough. You’ve been dallying with creationism, and I’ve read enough Hiaasen novels (who knew those were non-fiction?) to see that there are many screws loose down there, but this is getting ridiculous. Look at this reason for firing a teacher.

Substitute teacher Jim Piculas does a 30-second magic trick where a toothpick disappears then reappears.

But after performing it in front of a classroom at Rushe Middle School in Land ‘O Lakes, Piculas said his job did a disappearing act of its own.

“I get a call the middle of the day from head of supervisor of substitute teachers. He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,'” he said.

When Piculas went in,he learned his little magic trick cast a spell and went much farther than he’d hoped.

“I said, ‘Well Pat, can you explain this to me?’ ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’ [he said]. Wizardry?” he asked.

I’m calling Poe’s Law on the whole state of Florida. That place is entirely made up, isn’t it? I’ve been to Miami several times, but now I’m beginning to suspect that it’s actually a giant theme park set up on one of the Caribbean islands. It’s not really there.

I should have been clued in by the amusingly penile shape of the state drooping off our southern shores. That’s made-up, isn’t it? Right from the geography, it’s got to be one big joke a bunch of 16th century Spaniards were pulling on the whole rest of the world.

Well, the joke is over. It’s finally gone too far. No one could possibly be as loony as these fictitious (I’m sure) school administrators. Can we get around to correcting the maps and pulling those phony senators and representatives out of the federal government now?