Unless you’re one of those god-crazed fundagelical thugs, you ought to be willing to support your first amendment rights and agree that religion does not belong in government. Sign the petition! It’s the very least you can do.
Now if only they hadn’t used the phrase “Sound Science” to describe scientific policy free of religious bias…
I’m falling behind on the carnival circuit! Here are some I should have noted the other day.
No, no…it’s cephalopodmas madness. Only 38 days to go!
Cody visited the creation science “museum” near Glenrose, Texas, and came back with a photo of the mural portraying Adam and Eve. Adam looks…familiar.
I knew he was old, but that old?
I’m not sure who Eve resembles. Anita Bryant? Skeletor?
This fairly typical scrap of creationist email made me smirk. Please, if you’re going to be sarcastic and tell me how stupid I am, don’t make the first word of your diatribe grammatically incorrect.
your soo smart… I wish I was as smart as you
Oh you are soo much smarter than everyone else. That’s odd being that your ancestors were monkeys. Too bad you are going to drown soon when mankind melts the polar ice caps. I guess you would have done just as well if we would have used your embryo for research and the rest of us would be much better off too. What a stupid arrogant know-it-all loser you are.
I do think it’s absolutely brilliant that in one short paragraph he managed to express his dull, uncomprehending irritation with four hot-button issues: evolution, global warming, abortion, and fetal research. If only six sentences hadn’t exceeded his attention span, maybe he could have worked in something about gay sex and the Iraq war, too.
Oh happy day, the Sea Urchin Genome Project has reached fruition with the publication of the full sequence in last week’s issue of Science. This news has been all over the web, I know, so I’m late in getting my two cents in, but hey, I had a busy weekend, and and I had to spend a fair amount of time actually reading the papers. They didn’t just publish one mega-paper, but they had a whole section on Strongylocentrotus purpuratus, with a genomics mega-paper and articles on ecology and paleogenomics and the immune system and the transcriptome, and even a big poster of highlights of sea urchin research (but strangely, very little on echinoderm development). It was a good soaking in echinodermiana.
It’s a sign of the lowly state to which the DI is descending that their assaults on evolutionary ideas have lately been led by the pathetic Casey Luskin. Luskin is a guy who doesn’t understand biology, and whose usual line of attack is to whine about credentials—it isn’t a good combination. After all, isn’t it a bit sad to have a particularly ignorant lawyer and ideologue complaining about scientists’ (or science journalists’) understanding of science?
Anyway, while taking a break from the futilely but furiously spinning exercise wheel at the Discovery Institute, Casey Luskin is now squeaking frantically at Carl Zimmer. Carl, of course, calmly and perhaps even bemusedly flicks him away. It’s great fun.
Mark your calendars—Cephalopodmas is on the 22nd day of December, and you need to start rehearsing those Cephalopodmas carols.
I have to say, though, that the continuing neglect of this important holiday by the media is another sign of the War on Cephalopodmas. Don’t believe me? Walk into your local Wal-Mart, and I promise you that the greeter won’t say “Merry Cephalopodmas!” to you. You won’t see any civic displays draped with tentacles. The school pageants won’t be full of songs about squid. The smell of kelp won’t be in the air, nor will you be hearing the mournful, melodious tones of the foghorn. Outrageous, isn’t it?
I want everyone this year to give their best Bill O’Reilly glare to anyone you meet who doesn’t affirm your personal beliefs with a verbal recognition of the validity of Cephalopodmas. Temper tantrums are good, too. Of course, it should go without saying that you shouldn’t have to explain why you’re walking around always looking so pissed-off; truth be told, when you have to explain that you’re upset because people aren’t reciting some ritualized formal greeting at you, you sound a bit like a pinhead. So don’t.
Here’s a useful tip: if ever you are attacked by giant monsters, you want to call a Minnesotan for help. I think it’s the summertime practice in fighting off insectoid swarms that helps.
Stephen Bates of the Guardian gets an advance tour of Ken Ham’s new creation science museum. It’s amusing and creepy at the same time.
When it is finished and open to the public next summer, it may, quite possibly, be one of the weirdest museums in the world.
The Creation Museum — motto: “Prepare to Believe!” — will be the first institution in the world whose contents, with the exception of a few turtles swimming in an artificial pond, are entirely fake. It is dedicated to the proposition that the account of the creation of the world in the Book of Genesis is completely correct, and its mission is to convince visitors through a mixture of animatronic models, tableaux and a strangely Disneyfied version of the Bible story.
“Entirely fake” is right—the title is a misnomer, it’s not a museum, it’s a carnie show. A very serious, very expensive, very elaborate freak show exhibit.
[The workers], too, know they are doing the Lord’s Work, and each has signed a contract saying they believe in the Seven Days of Creation theory. Mornings on this construction site start with prayer meetings. Don’t think for a minute that this is some sort of crazy little hole-in-the-corner project. The museum is costing $25m (£13m) and all but $3m has already been raised from private donations. It is strategically placed, too — not in the middle of nowhere, but within six hours’ drive of two-thirds of the entire population of the US. And, as we know, up to 50 million of them do believe that the Bible’s account of Creation is literally true.
That 50 million is a very conservative estimate, I fear.
You know, I hate to give these guys any money, but I would like to propose that sometime after that “museum” opens, we should organize a mob of sciencebloggers (and others) to descend upon it, take the tour, and coordinate a massive storm of ridicule. I am, unfortunately, more than a six hour drive away, so I’d have to fly in to Cincinnati to do it, but I’d be willing. Is there anyone else who’d be up for a vivisection without anesthesia of Ken Ham’s Temple of Idiocy? Depending on when they actually finish the foolishness, maybe late summer 2007 or early summer 2008?
