The bad news: the shameless astronomer is gaining on us, and has closed within a hundred votes.
The good news: Deep Sea News has joined the scienceblogs stable! This is either a portent of the squid-fans victory, or a consolation prize that will make up for any loss.
Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you are incapable of being dazzled by carnivorous sponges.
How can they have a respectable show trial if the defendant keeps defending himself so well? This is a classic and irrefutable response.
This sad jumble of bones is all that remains of Volaticotherium antiquus, a small rat-sized mammal that was recently dug up in China. There are two particularly outstanding things about this creature.
One is that browner layer in the rock: that isn’t an artifact, it’s a bit of soft tissue that was preserved, called a patagium. A patagium is a thin membrane stretched between the limbs, and is used for…flying! This animal probably lived much like a modern flying squirrel (although it is definitely not a squirrel), gliding from tree to tree.
The second surprise is the age. This is a Mesozoic mammal, from Chinese beds that are roughly dated to somewhere around the mid Jurassic to early Cretaceous—it was a contemporary of the dinosaurs. I’m tickled to imagine a diplodocid stretching up its long neck to strip the foliage from a tree branch, and this little guy squeaking angrily and leaping off to fly to the next tree.
Now one more thing we need, but are extremely unlikely to find, is a Mesozoic moose.
Mang J, Hu Y, Wang Y, Wang X, Li C (2006) A Mesozoic gliding mammal from northeastern China. Nature 444:889-893.
Here’s another article on that freaky Left Behind video game. The rationalizations for the ability to kill people violently in the game are fascinating.
Left Behind Games’ president, Jeffrey Frichner, says the game actually is
pacifist because players lose “spirit points” every time they gun down
nonbelievers rather than convert them. They can earn spirit points again by
having their character pray.
Isn’t the most wonderful version of pacifism ever? Go out, butcher a few people, engage in a warlike campaign…and as long as you beg an invisible man’s forgiveness afterwards, you can still call yourself a pacifist. With that kind of reasoning, Ted Haggard is a heterosexual, Bill Bennett is a cautious investor, and Ted Nugent is an environmentalist. No wonder Christianity is popular among hypocrites.
Since I was just mean to the British press, here’s a compensatory accolade: here’s a nice, sharp editorial from James Randerson.
ID was itself designed as a Trojan horse for creationism, with its origins in the Discovery Institute, a thinktank in Seattle whose stated aim is “to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God”.
Even a conservative judge in Dover, Pennsylvania, saw through the sham last year when he heard a case brought by parents who objected to ID being taught in their school. “Intelligent design is a religious view, a mere re-labelling of creationism, and not a scientific theory,” he wrote in his judgment.
Let’s be honest: despite its scientific-sounding frills and baubles, ID is pure religion. It is a reincarnation of an old idea that Darwin dispensed with and it has no place in a science class.
Although, actually, I was hoping to get Caligula, like The Countess.
(Honestly, I warned you. Keep voting.)
O how desperate he has become. Phil is stripping to get votes now. I’m not going to go down that road (I’d be doomed for sure if I did), so here’s the deal. Vote for me and I’m going to expose my brain rather than my bod: I’ve got this great post on evolution of the vascular system I’ll put up later today if you good, smart people can keep the drooling libidinous minions of the Bad One at bay a little longer, and keep me in the lead. Otherwise, it’s internet memes/quizzes and photos of my cat’s litter box.
Vote for Pharyngula (and remember, you can vote every day!). Unless you hate science.
P.S. Comrade Bérubé insists that my re-education will take great strides forward if I encourage all to vote for him as the Best Educational Blog.
Is anyone else getting a “look how stupid Americans are” vibe from all the British coverage of Ken Ham’s creation ‘science’ museum? It’s another story from the European press that politely echoes Ham’s overblown claims for his grandiose edifice to ignorance, and mostly recycles the same old stuff we’ve heard over and over again. It really does seem to simply parrot whatever the Answers in Genesis con men say with complete credulity…for instance, I’ve seen this strange comment repeated multiple times in these kinds of stories.
Two-thirds of the US population lives within six hours’ drive of Cincinnati, but Mr Ham has bigger ambitions for tackling agnostics further afield.
Hold it. Think. Check your facts. Look at a map, and you’ll see that that domain outside of a circle with a radius of 300 miles includes everything west of Chicago, the entire urban Northeast, and most of the major cities of the South, such as Atlanta. It includes Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, etc., a populous region to be sure, but how can one argue that a small area that excludes California, Texas, New York, and Florida contains the bulk of the nation’s people? That’s an area of about 280,000 square miles in a country of 3,700,000 square miles—shouldn’t that make a reporter stop and think, especially when it is an area that does not include our regions of highest population density?
I’m beginning to feel a “look how stupid the BBC can be” vibe right now, myself. Does anyone know where this mysterious number comes from? Is it Ken Ham lying, or is it the Cincinnati Chamber of Commerce lying?
I have been ordered by the Ministry of Justice of the We Are All Giant Nuclear Fireball Now Party to publicly confess my shame and apologize for my grave offenses against the WAAGNFNP. I do so apologize. I have been ordered to abjure all attempts to redirect trolls to the distraction of the Glorious Show Trial against the Enemy of the People, Chris Clarke. I do so.
Deepak Chopra is still blathering on. I’m afraid that while he can’t shut up, I can ignore him, and this will be my last response to his drivel; it’s also the last time I’ll be linking to the Huffington Post. Arianna Huffington’s exercise in indiscriminate narcissism is not the direction I want to see liberals taking, and while my voice isn’t a significant one, I can at least deny the kook wing of the Left my tiny bit of support.
This time the obsessive small-minded mystic is still whining against science and reason, still railing against his own idiotic imaginings.
But how can anyone seriously defend science as a panacea when it gave us the atomic bomb?
First of all, no one defends science as a panacea. It’s not leading us to utopia, it’s taking us towards a better understanding of the real world…which, contrary to the quacks who claim reality is what you imagine it to be, is often going to expose uncomfortable truths. There is no paradise. There is no perfection. There’s just a world where we have to struggle and compromise, and in the end we all die.
Secondly, the people who whimper about science bringing us bombs (and we’ve also got a few trolls wandering around scienceblogs damning scientists for that) have got it all wrong. Nuclear reactions are a property of the natural world—they go on in stars, they take place beneath our feet. Science did not invent fission and fusion, it only exposed the nature of the event, explained how it worked, and made this knowledge available to human beings. People chose what to do with it. We don’t have any choice in what science reveals. What would you have had 20th century scientists do, intentionally suppress all knowledge of a fundamental property of matter, and all of the unpredictable consequences of that knowledge? And just how would you propose to do that, short of destroying the scientific enterprise all together?
Reason isn’t the savior of the future. That role belongs to wisdom. With all the threats to human survival that we now face, I resort to a phrase coined by Jonas Salk: the survival of the wisest. Although a great researcher in medicine, Salk had the vision to look beyond materialism. He saw that evolution, as it applies to modern human beings, isn’t Darwinian. We no longer live in a state of nature.
Good grief, the inanity, it burns.
No, reason isn’t the savior of the future. It’s just the absolute bare minimum of what we ought to expect from the people to whom we entrust our futures—it’s the foundation of everything we ought to do. I don’t care what other wonderful virtues Chopra wants to tout, if they are built on irrationality and unreason, they are destructive.
I also don’t know what Chopra means by this fuzzy word “wisdom” he’s throwing out in his little essay, but he writes as if he thinks it is something completely orthogonal to reason, but of course it isn’t—unreasoning people can’t be wise, although they may pretend to it, and other irrational people may believe them. He’s using the word in an utterly meaningless way, the same way his kind of people use the words “spirituality” or “vibrations” or “quantum”, as subliminal tokens for indefinable emotions they might have; it’s shorthand for empty pseudo-profundity. It’s the hook the con artist uses to persuade his mark to fork over his respect, but it’s all a lie.
The rest I have no patience for. Chopra doesn’t know what “evolution” or “Darwinian” means, so trying to dissect the meaning he is reading into them as pointless: he’s just reciting buzz words, stringing them together like pretty beads on a string. It’s all noise from a fool.
Enough.
