That’s a line in this video describing the scene when the South African police tow a beached whale carcass offshore—you can guess what it all looks like, if you’d rather not watch.
It just gets better, though. After the great white sharks have gorged themselves and are lolling about, the announcer declares that they have spotted the “tell-tale aspect of a large sexually aroused male”…
(via Byzantium’s Shores)
Today is Evolution Sunday. It’s that day when participating ministers will say a few supportive words about evolution from their pulpits, or as I prefer to think of it, when a few people whose training and day-to-day practice are antithetical to science will attempt to legitimize their invalid beliefs and expand their pretense to intellectual authority by co-opting a few slogans.
As you might guess, I’m not exactly against the event, but I definitely do not support it. I’m sure a few readers are going to complain that I should be praising these efforts to get people to take baby steps in the right direction, but I just can’t do it.
I’m sorry, but when I see people in chains shuffle a few steps at the behest of their jailer, my heart isn’t in to shouting, “Hooray! You’re free!” You have a choice. You can go to church today, and among the hymns and prayers and magic rituals and chants to nonexistent beings, you can hear a few words in support of science; or you can refuse to support the whole rotten edifice of religion and stay home and read a good book. Which alternative do you think I would support?
Instead, I’m going to encourage you all to participate in my Enlightenment Sunday project. Skip church every week. Ignore the pleas of your priests. Donate money and time to charities of your choice directly, rather than through the intermediary of the church bureaucracy. Improve your brain with books and videos and conversations about science. Think skeptically. I’m sure the participants in Evolution Sunday mean well and are sincere in their wish to reconcile faith with science, but we’ll do far more to promote reason in this country if we withdraw from all participation in the church and let religion wither away from disuse, than we will by encouraging these modern day witch-doctors to spread their delusions.
In the comments, Art Hunt passes along a short analysis from Patrick Frank of the instances of Haeckel’s work in a number of biology texts from 1923 to 1997. Even the oldest was critical of Haeckelian recapitulation, and only a minority used Haeckel’s figure at all.
A few recent carnivals to keep you busy:
The next Tangled Bank will be at Lab Cat on Wednesday. Send links to me or host@tangledbank.net.
I’m still collecting submissions for the Circus of the Spineless at the end of February— send me links to your invertebrate-centric articles.
The DI certainly is obsessed. They recorded Olson at a screening of Flock of Dodos, and are now claiming that he backtracked on Haeckel’s use in textbooks. It’s only backtracking if you accept the DI’s false premise that he claimed in the movie that there was absolutely no sign of Haeckel’s diagram in biology text—a claim I’ve already shot down.
If they want to claim he backtracked, they should just quote the movie—you know, the part where he says the diagrams aren’t found in the textbooks “other than a mention that once upon a time Haeckel came up with this idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny”. Does qualifying a comment in the same sentence count as “backtracking”? To the DI, perhaps.
The Discovery Institute is stepping up their smear campaign against Randy Olson and Flock of Dodos, and the biggest issue they can find is their continued revivification of Haeckel’s biogenetic law. They’ve put up a bogus complaint that Olson was lying in the movie, a complaint that does not hold up, as I’ll show you.
First, though, let’s simplify the debate. The Discovery Institute position is that any text that shows Ernst Haeckel’s ancient diagram of various embryos is guilty of fraudulently distorting the evidence for evolution. They have accused scientists of a conspiracy of lies, of using this known false diagram to buttress evolutionary theory.
If this were the case, then the worst case of mass market fraud around would have to be Wells’ own Icons of Evolution: it contains 4 versions of the Haeckelian diagram, including the original, and talks about it for 28 pages. Obviously, this is a criminal conspiracy to promote phony evidence for evolution.
Wait, wait, you protest: Wells’ book was explaining that Haeckelian recapitulation was wrong, and that there were both errors and intentional misrepresentations of embryos in that old work. That should be acceptable.
I would agree, except that the textbooks Wells is damning in Icons often do exactly the same thing! Those that do mention Haeckel and his biogenetic law do so as an example of a historically significant error. Some go on to explain what was correct and what was wrong in his ideas, but basically all are merely pointing out that here was an interesting but failed explanation from the late 19th century, that nonetheless exposes an interesting phenomenon that needs to be understood.
I would add that progress in evolutionary biology has led to better explanations of the phenomenon that vertebrate embryos go through a period of similarity: it lies in conserved genetic circuitry that lays down the body plan. Intelligent Design creationism has contributed absolutely nothing to either refuting Haeckelian ideas, which was the product of working biologists at the end of the 19th century, nor has it generated any better, testable explanations for the conservation of embryonic body plans.
Now what about the Discovery Institute’s claim that Olson was lying about Haeckel’s representation in modern texts?
Since so many call me a bad guy, let’s see where I fall on the Super Villain scale.
Your results:
You are Mr. Freeze
|
You are cold and you think everyone else should be also, literally. |
Click here to take the Supervillain Personality Quiz
(via ZayZayEm the Joker)
Via GrrlScientist, here’s a fun little demo of what drugs do to your brain. Drag the stoned mice to the special chair, and you get to peek in at what marijuana and ecstasy and cocaine and etc. do to the synapses.
Uh-oh. Those evil scientists are up to no good again, blindly making discoveries and creating inventions without any thought to the long-term consequences. Dynamite, nerve gas, the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb…what’s next? What new horror will they unleash on humanity?
Scientists are close to coming up with a vaccine against Chlamydia. The bastards.
Notice the trend? Develop better hygiene to end childbed fever, anesthetics to dull the pain of childbirth, cures for venereal diseases, the recent vaccine against human papilloma virus, and now this. It’s like they don’t think women deserve to suffer. You know this will only lead to licentiousness, rampant freedom, and orgies. Come on, fellow scientists, think. Do you really believe this kind of behavior will make the world a better place?
Just you wait. Someone will try to stop them.
I presume everyone has already had their lunch here in the Americas, so it’s safe to mention this: a delectable collection of 10 tasty snacks. Go ahead — you know you want to click on that link.
