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Filed under: Administrative | Leave a comment »
New Jerry Coyne blog
Posted on February 7, 2009 by Michael
Jerry Coyne has a blog. It’s worth checking out.
Filed under: Misc | Tagged: Jerry Coyne | Leave a comment »
Awesome
Posted on February 6, 2009 by Michael
WASHINGTON – Flitting across your yard, butterflies seem friendly and harmless. But at least one type has learned to raise its young as parasites, tricking ants into feeding it and giving special treatment.
The pupae of the European butterfly Maculina rebeli exude a scent that mimics the ants and make themselves at home inside the ant nest. Once they become a caterpillar they even beg for food like ant larvae, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.
But, not content just to be fed, the butterflies even manage to demand special treatment, Jeremy A. Thomas of Britain’s University of Oxford and colleagues report.
It turns out that ant queens make subtle sounds that signal their special status to worker ants. The caterpillars have learned to mimic those sounds, the researchers say, earning high enough status to be rescued before others if the nest is disturbed.
In times of food shortage, nurse ants have been known to kill their own larvae and feed them to the caterpillars pretending to be queen ants, they added.
In nature, the real ant queen and the caterpillar keep to different parts of the ant colony and would not encounter one another, the report said.
But in an experiment, a butterfly pupa pretending to be an ant queen was placed in a chamber with worker ants and four real ant queens. The ant queens began to attack and bite the caterpillar, but the workers intervened, biting and stinging their own queens, which they then pulled to a far corner of the chamber while other workers attended the pupa.
Filed under: News | Tagged: Ants, Awesome, Butterflies | Leave a comment »
Great fossil find
Posted on February 5, 2009 by Michael
Maiacetus inuus is a a four-legged creature ancestral to modern whales that was recently discovered. Two adult fossils were found in in Pakistan dating close to 50 million years old. One of these fossils are carrying a fetus. The interesting thing is that the fetus was faced head first. This likely means it was born on land, not water – it does an oxygen breathing animal no good to be born head first in water if it needs to get to some air quickly. Modern whales are borned tail first. This conveniently prevents drowning before they are fully born.
This ancestral whale was far smaller than its modern day lineage. It weighed roughly 600-850 lbs and came in near 9 feet long. This makes sense if the animal was to give birth on land (dragging one’s self is more consistent with laying eggs).
Here’s kind of a crappy idea of what it looked like.
Filed under: Evidence, Evolution | Tagged: B. Holly Smith, Eocene, Habib Rahi Formation, Iyad S. Zalmout, Maiacetus inuus, Mineralogie und Paläontologie, Munir ul-Haq, Museum of Anthropology, Museum of Paleontology, Philip D. Gingerich, Protocetidae, Steinmann-Institut für Geologie, Universität Bonn, University of Michigan, Wighart von Koenigswald, William J. Sanders | Leave a comment »
Jerry Coyne
Posted on February 4, 2009 by Michael
Jerry Coyne has a very succinct article regarding the inability of science and religion to work together in any viable manner. He primarily focuses his points against two prominent evolutionary theists, Ken Miller and Karl Giberson. Both men are good scientists, but make great stretches to fulfill their desire to marry their science and religion.
The article can be found here. (I would normally give a direct link, but RichardDawkins.net organizes the article far better.)
Filed under: Creationism, Evolution | Tagged: Edge, Jerry Coyne, Karl Giberson, Ken Miller | Leave a comment »
Oh, Conservapedia
Posted on February 3, 2009 by Michael
It’s well known that Conservapedia is filled with a large contigent of dumb people. I mean, not just ignorant people. They’re outright stupid. Take this from their “news” section on the front page.
For those who cannot see the text, it reads:
An overweight and over-the-hill Bruce Springsteen is performing songs from the 1980s at the Super Bowl halftime. Wonder why? He supports the liberal agenda hook, line and sinker. But he hasn’t yet performed his “Born in the U.S.A.” … perhaps Obama types wouldn’t like that one???
Apparently, Conservapedians believe “Born in the U.S.A.” is a patriotic song, or at least in someway anti-liberal. On an aside, they also believe multiple question marks make good writing. They are wrong on both counts.
The Springsteen classic is about a young man who goes from his small town to killing people in a foreign country. Upon return, the man is given the crap we all know (except the morons at Conservapedia) was common for returning war vets.
Got in a little hometown jam
So they put a rifle in my hand
Sent me off to a foreign land
To go and kill the yellow manBorn in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Born in the U.S.A.Come back home to the refinery
Hiring man says “Son if it was up to me”
Went down to see my V.A. man
He said “Son, don’t you understand”
The song goes on to deride the war for being so meaningless and costly. The cost in the case being human life.
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong
They’re still there, he’s all goneHe had a woman he loved in Saigon
I got a picture of him in her arms now
Far from being a song about how crazy, awesome, cool the U.S.A. is, it’s about working-class people who lost their lives during a pointless war. Conservapedia is composed of idiots who are repeatedly shown as idiots. Nothing more.
Filed under: Misc, Politics and Social | Tagged: Born in the U.S.A., Bruce Springsteen, conservapedia, Khe Sahn, lenski, Viet Cong, Vietnam | 1 Comment »
The sad state of science
Posted on February 2, 2009 by Michael
At least it’s sad among the public. There’s a new survey in Britain that confirms this.
In the survey, 51 per cent of those questioned agreed with the statement that “evolution alone is not enough to explain the complex structures of some living things, so the intervention of a designer is needed at key stages”
A further 40 per cent disagreed, while the rest said they did not know.
The suggestion that a designer’s input is needed reflects the “intelligent design” theory, promoted by American creationists as an alternative to Darwinian evolution.
Asked whether it was true that “God created the world sometime in the last 10,000 years”, 32 per cent agreed, 60 per cent disagreed and eight per cent did not know.
A third of people in Britain believe the world began sometime around the agricultural revolution. That’s inanity. These people do not believe with any reason, but with stupid, stubborn, ill-formed faith. The worst part is that some of the same numbers are reflected in the teacher population.
Interestingly, this article takes on the subject a little more directly. Rather than simply remain topical and report on the survey plus a few recent events, it ventures into some of the points in the creationism-evolution debate.
Paul Woolley, the director of Theos said: “Darwin is being used by certain atheists today to promote their cause.
“The result is that, given the false choice of evolution or God, people are rejecting evolution.”
There is a tad bit of truth in what Woolley is saying, but not in his primary message. The choice is clear: either the world needs a designer or it does not. The answer is that it does not. Of course, that does not mean God does not exist. He very well may. That, unfortunately for theists, does mean God is a superfluous idea, whether he be a personal god or simply a deity.
Where Woolley gets it right is that people do perceive this choice and thus reject evolution. These people are known as “dumb”.
Prof Dawkins expressed dismay at the findings of the ComRes survey, of 2,060 adults, which he claimed were confirmation that much of the population is “pig-ignorant” about science.
“Obviously life, which was Darwin’s own subject, is not the result of chance,” he said.
“Any fool can see that. Natural selection is the very antithesis of chance.
“The error is to think that God is the only alternative to chance, and Darwin surely didn’t think that because he himself discovered the most important non-theistic alternative to chance, namely natural selection.”
Methinks the journalist is rather familiar with the issue and knew what questions to ask Dawkins. I almost want to say he simply quoted Dawkins from some writings not directly related to this article, but that would be irresponsible of me. At any rate, it sounds like we have some attempt at a tad bit of science education going on here. Natural selection is not chance. We don’t need to know that for the purposes of the article, but it is good to know, none-the-less.
Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, accused Dawkins of evolving into a “very simple kind of thinker”.
He said: “His argument for atheism goes like this: either God is the explanation for the wide diversity of biological life, or evolution is. We know that evolution is true. Therefore, God doesn’t exist.
“I’m an evangelical Christian, but I have no difficulties in believing that evolution is the best scientific account we have for the diversity of life on our planet.”
That’s a honker of a strawman. Dawkins argument is closer to this: God is necessarily complex. Complex things do not come about by chance. Either God came about by chance or he is the product of natural principles. If the answer is chance, then we’re just proposing the question we sought to answer. That is, we want to know how all this complexity (the Universe and all it entails) came to be. It cannot be random chance. By postulating God, we’re postulating something more complex. If the Universe cannot be chance, God cannot be chance. If the answer is natural principles, then he isn’t much of a God, is he?
Of course, there is another option: God is beyond Nature and thus neither chance nor the product of anything. At this point we’ve ventured into la-la land. This is blind guessing with no basis, no evidence. It may be true, but we have no reason to be postulating it, much less any reason to think it remotely reasonable. If God is beyond Nature, not only can we not study him, we cannot experience anything related to him. If we can experience him, then he is within Nature and thus we are able to study him. Of course, there is nothing in Nature which shows a link to some exo-Universe being, so let’s move on and discuss things that make sense.
Filed under: Creationism | Tagged: Britain, British Association Festival of Science, Catholic Church, ComRes, darwin, Dawkins, Lord Carey, The God Delusion, University of Liverpool, Woolley | 4 Comments »
Examining Deuteronomy 22
Posted on January 31, 2009 by Michael
I was glancing through Deueronomy 22 and noticed a few odd items. The first is that the dual use of an oxen and a donkey while plowing is prohibited by God (22:10). It displeases him. The second is God’s Sarah Palin-like attitude toward rape victims.
23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;
24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
I guess God’s rape kit is a handful of stones and a pocket full of hatred.
Here’s the clear interpretation of this: a man who rapes a woman in a city should be stoned to death. Okay, immoral enough reaction in itself, but there’s more. The woman, because she did not scream for help, should be stoned to death as well.
…
and people claim God is a source of morality? I wonder if the guy even has a clear idea of what constitutes a moral system. Life is not being black & white (as most conservatives think it is, incidentally). Aside from being a rape victim, the woman could have been afraid, mute, gagged, or threatened. God seems to assume by not screaming that the woman liked it. Illogical fella, no?
But, this deity isn’t all evil. He has some empathy for country rape.
25 But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die.
26 But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:
27 For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her.
Since the woman couldn’t scream out for help, she’s in the clear. What if there was a farmer? Shouldn’t the woman have screamed to him? Simply being in a field does not necessarily change the situation. The principle in 22:23-24 seemed to be that the woman had help available to her yet did not seek it. Given that not all fields are empty and devoid of humans, she should have screamed out, even if it was to no avail. It’s almost as if people who lived in highly rural areas where it would be uncommon – in their personal experience – to see a farmer wrote this. Hey, crazy idea! Maybe people did write this fundamental evil? I’d expect God to cover a few more angles. Like, all of them.
So let’s break down what’s important here. It’s perfectly fine for my point to grant that the coming of Jesus somehow changes the immorality we see here. It’s a common tactic of Christians: the Old Testament should be interpreted through the lenses of the New Testament. Okay, sure, whatever. But there still remains the problem that at some point in time, God was telling people to stone rape victims. Even if it is granted that the New Testament changes how we should interpret these words insofar as how we should act now (i.e., we do not stone rape victims because we recognize that as evil), there still remains the problem that God told people to murder women who were raped. He still did these things. God is still guilty of these crimes, even if he corrected his misbehavior down the line.
Filed under: Creationism, Misc | Tagged: City rape, Country rape, Deuteronomy 22, evil, God, immoral, Moral, Rape victims | 8 Comments »
Cool Hubble contest
Posted on January 30, 2009 by Michael
NASA is asking the public to vote on what Hubble should image next.
The U.S. space agency is inviting the public to vote for one of six candidate astronomical objects for Hubble to observe in honor of the International Year of Astronomy, which began this month. The options, which Hubble has not previously photographed, range from far-flung galaxies to dying stars. Votes can be cast until March 1.
Hubble’s camera will take a high-resolution image revealing new details about the object that receives the most votes. The image will be released during the International Year of Astronomy’s “100 Hours of Astronomy” from April 2 to 5.
Everyone who votes also will be entered into a random drawing to receive one of 100 copies of the Hubble photograph made of the winning celestial body.
Voting can be done here. I personally cast my vote for the interacting galaxies. I find it exciting to see two massive, gravity-bound clusters of stars tear each other apart. But maybe I’m too mundane. The spiral galaxy is currently in the lead.
This image is called “The Antennae Galaxies in Collision” (and is just eye-candy for this post; it doesn’t have anything to do with the voting).
Filed under: Astronomy/Cosmology/Physics | Tagged: Contest, hubble, NASA, Spiral galaxy, The Antennae Galaxies in Collision | Leave a comment »
For the Sake of Science 
