Dan Phelps presents an overview of all of Answers in Genesis’s shenanigans, right up to the recent news of a known pedophile in Ken Ham’s employ.
Isn’t it remarkable how much creepy/borderline criminal/dishonest stuff Ken Ham gets away with?
At the beginning of the semester, I was pleased to see that I had no classes on Friday, and I looked forward to several months of 3 day weekends.
Hah.
Work expands to fill the time allotted for it. I spent my day a) cleaning up the basement mealworm colony b) cooking, preparing meals to last a few days, c) opening up the fly lab and feeding the residents of the spider lab, d) taking care of probate stuff (I’m still bogged down in legal stuff), e) and then spent all afternoon composing genetics problems. I made the mistake of asking the students what they wanted and they told me they all wanted more practice problems, so now I spend a day each week putting together practice problems, which entails making an answer key with explanations. Oh boy.
This weekend I have to work on a couple of lectures. But I’m also planning to go out with my wife to the movies on Monday. I hope Paddington in Peru is good, because that’s our only choice.
I’m never trusting the promise of a day off ever again.
Of course it did. Baleen whales don’t have teeth to chew him up, and their throats are too narrow to swallow him whole, so this kayaker just had a brief, fun little trip to tell his friends about.
When I want to hide from the news, I’ve always got bugs to tend. I’ve been neglecting my mealworm colony, so this morning I cleaned it out — it was mostly full of frass, which explains why my harvest was a bit low. Here’s today’s collection.
The frass is in the compost, I scooped up a handful of the larvae to feed the spiders today, and the rest got dumped into a couple pounds of fresh cornmeal with an overripe banana as a treat.
I’ve got to expand this colony, just in case the situation in America becomes even more dire, and I need a source of healthy protein for myself, not just the spiders.
The Trump administration and his unelected stooge, Elon Musk, had charged in and imposed a blanket reduction of all indirect costs to 15% — indirect costs are the mechanism used to support the infrastructure of science all across the country. This was a devastating, crippling strike against research.
A federal judge in Boston ordered a nationwide temporary pause on plans by the National Institutes of Health to substantially slash research overhead payments to universities, medical centers, and other grant recipients.
Judge Angel Kelley of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts issued the temporary restraining order late Monday night in response to a lawsuit filed that afternoon by associations representing the nation’s medical, pharmacy, and public health schools, as well as Boston and New York-area hospitals. The suit names the NIH, Department of Health and Human Services, and the acting heads of both agencies as defendants.
In the order, Kelley wrote that the defendants cannot take “any steps to implement, apply, or enforce the [policy] … in any form with respect to institutions nationwide until further order is issued by this Court.”
That’s good. Unfortunately, I don’t like the idea of judges deciding the fate of universities, because if one thing is clear, there is no objective standard in how laws are applied, especially since different judges are expressing different opinions, and the judiciary is already packed with ideologues. Thanks, Federalist Society!
Perhaps more encouraging is that some Republicans are waking up to the fact that they’re getting boned by Trump policies.
Red-state universities are hitting back at the Trump administration’s expansive cuts to science and research funding, warning they would be forced to shutter laboratories and lay off staff should they face the sudden elimination of millions of dollars in funding.
The blowback, echoed by at least two Republican senators, marks the most widespread political resistance the Trump administration has faced in its rapid sprint to reshape the federal government and its spending policies.
There are very good universities imbedded in all those red states — they provide resources and training that are essential to the economic well-being of those regions. Even Republicans know this, and they have begun stirring to defend against the Trump/Musk idiocy.
Universities in conservative strongholds have spent the last few days warning of the drastic economic and scientific toll of the new funding limit, putting fresh pressure on Republican officials to stand up for their states. The episode could also amplify scrutiny of Trump’s pick to run the Education Department, Linda McMahon, ahead of her confirmation hearing on Thursday.
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) slammed the policy as “devastating” and illegal.
Oh fuck no…Susan Collins is saying she opposes it? You know what that means: as soon as an opportunity to act rises up, she’s going to vote for anything Trump says. That’s the problem: you can convince Republicans that something is against their self-interest, but when push comes to shove, they’ll align themselves with the biggest bully in the room.
It’s Darwin Day!
And it is sort of about him, sorta. It’s not like a Catholic saint’s feast day, or like a day idolizing a Communist revolutionary, or even like gushing over a pop star. It’s a day to recognize the good work one respected scientist did, and to recognize the centrality of an influential hypothesis that he pioneered, while still recognizing his flaws.
It’s not like we can get excited about one grand unifying principle on one particular day. After all, every day is evolution day, so Charles Darwin is just a nice focus point to justify a party.
The Discovery Institute is thrilled by Rogan and Weinstein, entirely because these conspiracy theorists criticize “Darwinism”. It’s laughable. Rogan is an ignorant meathead, and Weinstein is a weird outsider who profits from babbling nonsense about science. It’s no surprise that the garbage out crowd is in alignment with religious propagandists.
Here’s the bit the DI adores:
Weinstein says he is “sympathetic” to ID but rejects it, which we knew. He says the current version of Darwinism, however, is “broken” and the evolutionary mainstream “lies” to itself, and to us. He alludes to another Darwinian mechanism operating on top of the standard one of random mutation and natural selection:
I believe there’s a kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form, that is much more of a type that would be familiar to a designer, either of machines or a programmer. [I believe] that what we did was, we took the random mutation model and we recognized that it was Darwinian, which it is, and we therefore assumed that it would explain anything that we could see that was clearly the product of Darwinian forces, on the basis of those random mutations. And we skipped the layer in between, in which selection has a different kind of information stored in the genome that is not triplet-codon in nature. [Emphasis added.]
In another words, I think he’s saying, the other information is in a “meta” relationship to the familiar material genome, the genetic information instantiated in DNA and other known physical epigenetic features in the cell.
Dr. Weinstein is a deep thinker, and I hope I’m not misrepresenting him. But this other information, in his view, is also material in nature, not spiritual — which might be the difference between Weinstein’s thinking and, say, that of Platonist ID scientists like Richard Sternberg and Günter Bechly who posit an “immaterial genome,” occupying that meta role.
Weinstein is not a deep thinker. He’s a disgraced ex-biologist and intellectual charlatan who now pals around with Douglas Murray and Andy Ngo and various other far right wing creeps, promoting ridiculous ideas about vaccines, race, and is an AIDS denialist, while promoting ivermectin during the COVID epidemic. He’s a fringe kook, but the DI is so stupid they can’t tell.
I have no idea what this “kind of information stored in genomes that is not in triplet codon form” that he is referring to is, and I don’t think he knows either. He’s making up strings of words. The DI is right about one thing: it is on a par with “immaterial genome”. It’s all nonspecific nonsense that dumb ol’ Joe Rogan will nod along to.
Weinstein has another tell that exposes his irrelevance.
[In my opinion,] the mainstream Darwinists are telling a kind of lie about how much we know and what remains to be understood. So by reporting that yes, Darwinism is true, and we know how it works, and people who aren’t compelled by the story are illiterate or ignorant or whatever, they are pretending to know more than they do. So all that being said, let me say, I think modern Darwinism is broken. Yes, I do think I know more or less how to fix it.
…
There are several different things that are wrong with [Darwinism]. The key one that I think is causing folks in intelligent design circles to begin to catch up is that the story we tell, about how it is that mutation results in morphological change, is incorrect.
…
I am sympathetic to the intelligent design folks, though I do not believe they’re on the right track. I’m open to a universe with intelligence behind it, but I’ve seen no evidence of that universe myself. I’m open to it. If it happens, I will look at it.
Darwinism. Darwinism, Darwinism, Darwinism. Yes, there are things wrong with Darwinism: it’s a 19th century hypothesis composed by a guy who knew nothing about DNA, genes, molecules, or mutation. Show me anyone who proudly announces that he has discovered problems with Darwinism, and I’ll show you a popinjay whose understanding of science ended in 1900.
What is the story we tell about how mutation results in morphological change? I would love to hear it.
And then…
You’ve had Stephen Meyer on. He’s a scientist who’s quite good, and he’s spotted that the mechanism in question [the standard Darwinian one] isn’t powerful enough to explain the phenomena that we swear it explains. And so he’s catching up, but that’s really on the Darwinists for not admitting what they can’t yet explain and pursuing it, which is what they should be doing.
Holy crap. Stephen Meyer is not a scientist. He got an undergrad degree in physics and earth science, decided he knew everything there is to know about biology, and went on to get a master’s and Ph.D. in philosophy. He held jobs in a couple of private Christian colleges before becoming a professional propagandist at the Discovery Institute. And now Weinstein thinks he’s a “quite good” scientist? That tells you all you need to know about Weinstein.
Well, that and vague, handwavey glop about mysterious sources of genetic information, vaccine quackery, racist apologetics, and ill-informed complaints about “Darwinism”. This is a guy whose whole career now is bent on getting on the Joe Rogan show to foment non-controversies.
A bill has been introduced in Washington DC by a congressman from Georgia.
H.R.1161 – To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as “Red, White, and Blueland”.
It’s real. Buddy Carter has got to be one of the dumbest suck-ups in congress. I am embarrassed to be from this country.
It’s all her fault. Iliana is bringing on Winter Storm Iliana. I hope she doesn’t have to pay for all the damages.
She must like her grandparents though, because it looks like it’s going to miss my part of Minnesota.
Yeah, that’s my granddaughter.
This drunken sot and serial sexual harasser, Pete Hegseth, was appointed Secretary of Defense by a president who doesn’t give a damn about competence. Hegseth recently banned transgender people from serving in the military, and is starting to make noises against any non-heterosexual people, and is now going on a triumphal tour of military bases around the world.
Military families protesting the Defense Department’s anti-DEI push heckled Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth on his arrival at United States European Command headquarters in Germany on Tuesday.
On a visit to the U.S. military’s key European military hub in Stuttgart, Hegseth was booed by around two dozen people who live at the base in an apparent demonstration against the policies currently being implemented by the Trump administration.
The demonstrators at the short protest repeatedly chanted “DEI,” apparently in a reference to the recent ban Hegseth has placed on some books in defense department schools. Hegseth last week ordered the restriction of learning materials covering subjects that included psychology and immigration in DOD schools.
Is anyone else ironically amused by the fact that all these regressive people have been whining that DEI is weakening the country and corrupting governing agencies and universities, but now it turns out that the anti-DEI fanaticism is the force tearing everything apart? All you had to do was accept that some women have penises and some men can get pregnant, and there was absolutely no problem and we could all get along, but now that they’ve acquired a taste of power the heterosexual purity brigade is using their obsession to do harm. They need to realize that they’ll get the tolerance they’re willing to give.
