Creation museum revisited

I know, I know, it's old news by now, but if you want a good laugh check out this guy's review of the museum... Sample after the break, (and that's only the first paragraph!) :

"Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit. The kind of load of horseshit that has accreted over decades and has developed its own sort of ecosystem, from the flyblown chunks at the perimeter, down into the heated and decomposing center, generating explosive levels of methane as bacteria feast merrily on vintage, liquified crap. This is a Herculean load of horseshit, friends, the likes of which has not been seen since the days of Augeas."

Global Warming Still Happening: James Hansen Strikes Back on Climate Data, Scores Points for Team God

In a newly-released statement, James Hansen, NASA scientist responsible for their temperature data, explains "what's really going on" with recent headlines that described errors in reported climate data and raised concerns regarding the realities of global warming. Yes, says Hansen, we made errors, the blogger told us about them, and we corrected them. The corrections are insignificant he claims, (see fig.) and were blown out of proportion by the conservative media in an effort to enable "the royalty" in power to go on destroying the Earth. In fact, he says, we already knew that 1998 wasn't the warmest year on record, and they reported this previously. He should've just stopped with the data ("Just shut up James. You had me at no significant difference). But no. The latter half of the letter is a fervently emotional rant about, "usufruct (WTF?), gorillas, captains of industry, court jesters and how Hansen is just working to save "Creation". Freaky.

Hey, I appreciate the man's passion and I'm all in favor of individuals and industries taking responsibility for their impact on the environment. But it would be nice to see scientists approach the issue with a balanced, objective perspective, not as Crusaders fighting to protect God's creation from Satan's evil oil-hungry minions. I don't care what God or Satan think. I just want some reality please. And don't tell me your too busy defending God's domain to get your data straight.

Scientists, please visit your local Chapters

I want to give a shout out to the folks at biologist helping bookstores, who browse the science sections of local bookstores and move creationist books to the religion section, and astrology to the science fiction section. I applaud you!

If only for entertainment purposes, check out Behe's last book, "the edge of evolution", or better yet, just read dawkin's review. oh snap:

"I had expected to be as irritated by Michael Behe's second book as by his first. I had not expected to feel sorry for him. The first — "Darwin's Black Box" (1996), which purported to make the scientific case for "intelligent design" — was enlivened by a spark of conviction, however misguided. The second is the book of a man who has given up. Trapped along a false path of his own rather unintelligent design, Behe has left himself no escape. Poster boy of creationists everywhere, he has cut himself adrift from the world of real science. And real science, in the shape of his own department of biological sciences at Lehigh University, has publicly disowned him, via a remarkable disclaimer on its Web site: "While we respect Prof. Behe's right to express his views, they are his alone and are in no way endorsed by the department. It is our collective position that intelligent design has no basis in science, has not been tested experimentally and should not be regarded as scientific.""

Discussion: Religion as Bad Science

I was following an interesting email exchange at Impressions Bioblogiques regarding creationism vs. evolution. The discussion spans several posts that can be read here, here and here (anglophones be warned, the discussion and commentary are exclusively in french). As is usually the case, this turned into a debate-by-proxy about the existance of God. That got me thinking about whether the right questions were being applied (The proper argument for an atheist should be: 'God does not exist', not 'Evolution happened'. Using the latter to argue the former is a straw man argument.)

Of course, Science has a duty to interact with Religion when Religion makes scientific claims, and even more of a duty to take them on when those claims are false (Young earth creationism, for example). But the question of religion, or more specifically the existance of God, is not a scientific question. It is not a testable hypothesis, makes no predictions from that hypothesis, and is not falsifable. I had concocted a post asking whether religion can and should be held up to scientific scrutiny (beyond actual scientific claims it makes, as my example above) when I came across this discussion between Richard Dawkins and physicist Lawrence Krauss in Scientific American which covers much of the ground I was going to attempt to, but far more eloquently. At the very least, it's an interesting read.

Left-Handedness is the Pinnacle of Evolution

Enough with the molecular reductionism. We all know it's fun to theorize and hand-wave about the molecular basis of life, but of course real biologists ignore molecules and go right to the in vivo models. And what have we learned about the evolution of left-handedness from these more relevant human studies?

• Left-handed men are worth more to society than right-handers, as evidenced by the fact that their salaries are 26% higher.
• Left-handers get their own special scissors, because they are better at arts and crafts.
• The QWERTY keyboard was designed specifically for lefties, with all the important letters on the left, becuase left-handers are the only ones who have thoughts worth typing.
• Bike helmet straps designed for right-handers, because lefties more co-ordinated and don't need to wear helmets.
  
• The leaders of the most successful empires of human history were left-handed - most of the British Royal family, Alexender the Great, Charlemagne, Julius Caesar and Napoleon were lefties. This obviously contributed to their success and TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION. For example Napoleon taught all his soldiers to be kick-ass left-handed swordsmen and based his military strategy around this special ability...the rest is history.
• George Bush Sr. (the smart one) is left handed. George Bush Jr. (the illiterate one who invaded Iraq) is not.
• In music, Jimi Hendrix was left-handed and the greatest guitar player to ever live.
• The most intelligent two humans ever born were left-handed. Albert Einstein and Leonardo DaVinci.

You might ask, why then, if left-handedness is superior and therefore under positive selection, are there currently much fewer lefties than right-handers around? Actually this has nothing to do with evolution. The true reason for this discrepancy is that God is jealous of left-handers because they are better than him in all ways, which he did not intend when he first began to direct the evolution of humans. He therefore banded with the right-handers, convincing them to form a right-handedness conspiracy in an effort to wipe out the lefties. It is well known that the church persecuted left-handed children as "devil-spawn", and school-masters tried, with significant success, to beat the left-handedness out of young children. The church also refused to marry left-handed "agents of satan", directly leading to diminished reproductive success.

Fortunately, enlightened lefties like Joan of Arc, Leonardo da Vinci, Pablo Picasso, Jack the Ripper, Benjamin Franklin, Fidel Castro, Gandhi, Buzz Aldrin, Ted Koppel, Bart Simpson, Ross Perot, Tom Cruise (in Mission Impossible), Rocky Balboa (especially in part III), Rambo (the original) and Bob Dylan refused to cave to oppression and fought to overthrow the church's dominance of society, establish human rights and develop more just societies. As a result, human evolution has been freed from the reign of the right-handed conspiracy, and the frequency of lefties has been on the rise for the past sixty years (see fig below). Obviously, left-handedness is superior and that is why life evolves to be left-handed, not just at the molecular level, but the important ones too (although there is an outside chance that it may be caused by global warming).





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