There’s more to a book than a title

Talk about clueless gomers—here’s a Canadian blog praising the Expelled movie, and bringing up a very tired argument against evolution.

For the trolls (and you know who you are!), I simply offer the original title Darwin gave to his book,

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life

,and ask you to explain how such a social (and Holocaust-endorsing) statement can be classified as the title of a purely scientific work — until I get a direct answer to that, I will not respond to any of your inquiries as I haven’t seemed to get much of a response on mine and think I’m overdue!

First of all, the logic is deeply flawed: if evolutionary theory did have undesirable social consequences, that wouldn’t be a valid argument against the truth of evolution.

Secondly, and more conclusively, the question reveals quite a bit about the questioner. He hasn’t read the book he’s criticizing, beyond copying down the title! The Origin is using “race” in an antiquated way that refers to what we’d now call varieties — he doesn’t discuss human races at all, but does talk a great deal about domesticated breeds of pigeons and horses and vegetables. It certainly doesn’t endorse any kind of holocaust. Darwin doesn’t advocate any action, but is offering a descriptive explanation for what is.

The Origin is a purely scientific work, rich in detail and experiment and offering a useful framework for subsequent research. A man who can barely read past the title is in no position to make demands for explanations or deplore the unread contents of the book.

(via Canadian Cynic)

Sunday is a big day for Minnesota Atheists

Minnesota Atheists will be having the first of many weekly radio programs on Air America, starting on Sunday, 13 January, at 9 AM. They’re getting off to a very strong start with an interview with Richard Dawkins, among many other features.

Minnesota Atheists will launch a weekly, one-hour program on Air America Minnesota (AM 950) beginning Sunday, January 13, 2008 from 9:00 to 10:00 a.m. It will be broadcast live, streamed live on the internet, and made available later as a free podcast. The name of the program is Atheists Talk (the same as our cable television show). The show will feature news, interviews, live call-ins, and more. We are proud to announce that our special guest on the inaugural program will be Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion, The Selfish Gene, and many other important and influential books.

If you are out of the listening area and want to hear the program live, go to www.airamericaminnesota.com/listen and enter a Minnesota zip code. If you would like to become involved with the program by volunteering your services, making a donation, or purchasing advertising, please call August Berkshire at (612) 338-4548 or e-mail him at augustberkshire@gmail.com.

Tune in! Call in!

Hey, St Petersburg, Florida!

You’ve got a real winner running for mayor down there. Bill Foster is another ignorant creationist running for political office.

“Evolution gives our kids an excuse to believe in natural selection and survival of the fittest, which leads to a belief that they are superior over the weak,” Bill Foster wrote board members in a letter received this week. “This is a slippery slope.”

He continued: “One of the Columbine shooters wrote on his Web site, ‘You know what I love? Natural selection! It’s the best thing that ever happened to the Earth. Getting rid of all the stupid and weak organisms.'”

Rather than reducing our kids’ exposure to evolution, let’s increase it. The problem with what Bill Foster believes, a belief he shares with the Columbine punks, is that it has nothing to do with evolutionary biology — in their ignorance, they’ve swallowed a whole pop-culture, religious line of bullshit about the theory. Biology does not advocate killing the stupid and weak; it does not preach some kind of objective superiority of one class of people over another; it merely describes what happens in the natural world.

Maybe if the Columbine killers had gotten a more accurate version of evolution from a science teacher rather than the idiot’s version they got from people like their conservative preachers and the Bill Foster’s of the world, they wouldn’t have held those ridiculous distortions of the idea.

I hope all you St Petersburg residents are planning to vote for some other person. You don’t really want an ignoramus in charge of your city government, do you?

Goodbye, Vampira

i-eb15165ba5f2632578ba208bb902e509-vampira.jpg

Sad news…Vampira has died. She was very young for a vampire, only 86, and there’s no word on whether it was a stake or sunlight that ended her long career as one of the rare Finnish vampires (real name: Maila Syrjäniemi). You may recall her from her important role in Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It’s the last sad whimper to the lingering death of an old tradition. When I was a young’un, there were horror hosts everywhere—you knew that if you turned on the TV anywhere at about 11 on a Friday or Saturday night, there’d be somebody in a Halloween costume introducing some old black-and-white horror movie. It was campy, it was predictable, the movies tended to be awful (although when one of the old Universal classics with Karloff or Chaney, or anything with Vincent Price, was scheduled, I made a special effort to watch it), and it was always fun. Rmember those cheap Japanese monster movies? Roger Corman’s low-budget rip-offs of Edgar Allen Poe titles, with content completely divorced from anything Poe ever wrote? That phenomenal wave of British horror coming out of Hammer Studios? Them, The Incredible Shrinking Man, The Amazing Colossal Man, The Blob—all that 50s paranoia about nuclear bombs?

Many of us godless people still identify as cultural Christians because that was the background of our upbringing, but I think my late night inoculations with classic horror and sci-fi movies had a deeper, more long-lasting influence on my life than those boring, unentertaining, unengaging Sunday mornings spent in church pews. I am a cultural Frankenstein, Jekyll, Moreau, Morbius, Pretorius, Phibes, and even Vampira — and they were all the more important as shapers of my perspective because there was no pretense that they were real, and because their portrayals were open to criticism and mockery.

The Atlas of Creation has found a destination

OK, you can all stop trying to win a copy of the Atlas of Creation now — the owner has decided who is to be afflicted with punished with tormented with given the copy. Scott Hatfield, I’ve passed your email address along. Look for a message. Get ready, it might take a month’s worth of a public school teacher’s salary to cover the shipping.

By the way, if anyone else wants to dispose of their copy, browse that thread — I can connect you up with recipients.

You know you’re a biology nerd when…

…you think the PCR song is kind of catchy.

The PCR Song

There was a time when to amplify DNA,
You had to grow tons and tons of tiny cells.

Then along came a guy named Dr. Kary Mullis,
Said you can amplify in vitro just as well.

Just mix your template with a buffer and some primers,
Nucleotides and polymerases, too.

Denaturing, annealing, and extending.
Well it’s amazing what heating and cooling and heating will do.

PCR, when you need to detect mutations.
PCR, when you need to recombine.
PCR, when you need to find out who the daddy is.
PCR, when you need to solve a crime.

(repeat chorus)

A clever compromise

Texas has been considering this application from the Institute for Creation Science for approval to offer a degree in “science” “education” (a double misnomer!). Now there’s an excellent idea afloat by the Texas commissioner of higher education — go ahead, give ’em a degree, only call it “creation studies”. Perfect! It removes the problem of false labeling, and allowing people who aren’t actually qualified to teach science get jobs in the public school system. And it actually gives the graduates of programs in creation studies an edge in acquiring high paying jobs in the Baptist Sunday School sector. Everyone wins!