The Rarity Of It All

So many things had to happen at just the right time in just the right order - it gets easier to understand how people would invent the Argument From Ignorance Fallacy (God did it because we can't think of any other explanation)

It's also pretty easy to see how the religious (ie: political) systems that grew out of that ignorance got to be the monstrous problem they've been for so long.

Today's Lesson

We are now a little less dumb - I am anyway.

A Little Silliness

Most of us remember this one:

I guess my favortite bit was Miss Virginia saying she thought bits and pieces of all kinds of theories should be taught so we can all figure out what we wanna believe is true.  Isn't she just so fucking precious?  Bless her heart.

Then this:

"Math is a theory - it's not what the bible tells us"

hat tip = FB buddy RBW

Telomeres And Centromeres

Read all about it at NIH.  But that'll give you a headache unless you're Amy Farrah Fowler - and besides, I put that up there just to pump up my public image by inviting you to infer that I actually read that shit, and that I might have some remote chance of understanding it.  I don't read it, and while I insist on believing I could understand it if somebody explained it to me in very simple terms, I really just don't fuckin' get it.

But, I found this helpful:



And here's one from Carl Sagan:



I love the part when Sagan points out that Creationists have to knock down the thing about the 4.5-billion-year-old Earth - cuz if they don't, they've got exactly bupkis when it comes to their denial of evolution.

Mr Deity On Evolution

Today's Poem

We don't need miracles or miracle workers.
We are the miracles, and we can do the work.

5th Philosopher's Song --Aldous Huxley

A million million spermatozoa
All of them alive;
Out of their cataclysm but one poor Noah
Dare hope to survive.

And among that billion minus one
Might have chanced to be
Shakespeare, another Newton, a new Donne--
But the One was Me.

Shame to have ousted your betters thus,
Taking ark while the others remained outside!
Better for all of us, forward Homunculus,
If you'd quietly died!

Best be makin' the best of your miraculous little self.

Yo - Goddies

One of the Anti-Evolutionist's favorite crapola arguments is usually along the lines of, "you can't show me one example of one species evolving into another" or some such.

This might be one:

Amphibians are ectothermic, tetrapod vertebrates of the class Amphibia (Greek ἀμφí, amphi, "both" + βíος, bios, "life"). They inhabit a wide variety of habitats with most species living within terrestrial, fossorial, arboreal or freshwater aquatic ecosystems. Amphibians typically start out as larva living in water, but some species have developed behavioural adaptations to bypass this. The young generally undergo metamorphosis from larva with gills to an adult air-breathing form with lungs. Amphibians use their skin as a secondary respiratory surface and some small terrestrial salamanders and frogs lack lungs and rely entirely upon skin.

It's most widely accepted that life started in the ocean, and some of the critters evolved ways of getting out of the water and up onto the land.  Seems to me an amphibian just might be the example that way too many god-botherin' dingle-butt derps keep telling us can't possibly exist.

Have You Ever Seen Bird Balls?

Watching The Science Channel the other night, I learned where hiccups come from (a "theory" about it anyway), and as I was looking around for evolution stuff, I stumbled on this.



Here's the teaser for Mankind Rising:

Random Question

If evolution is "just a theory" and nobody can actually prove it's for real, how do we explain selective breeding?

Creationism vs Evolution (cont'd) Updated 10-17-09 1110 EST

We're a nation of laws, and law requires factual evidence.

Creationists claim that their faith (ie: absence of evidence) is the same as the presence of the factual evidence of science.

If I'm in a position of authority, and I've established my Belief as The Law, then I should be able to drag anyone into court and convict them of the worst crimes imaginable simply by saying I believe them to be guilty.
 
UPDATE:
Kansas decided a couple of years ago that science courses in public schools would deal with teaching Evolution and not Creationism.  The full force of law is now behind Science - meaning that the use of deadly force can be brought to bear on anyone teaching anything else in a science class in Kansas.
 
Logical Extreme: If I teach Creationism in my science class when Creationism has been banned, I can be fired.  If I refuse to leave the building, then I can be forcibly removed.  If I resist being removed, then the authorities have the option to escalate all the way to the point where they can kill me if they deem it necessary.  It's not good straight-line logic, but the net effect is that I've been killed for trying to do what I tho't was right.  Is this something of a Logical Fallacy?

One point remains clear: The law is not a trifling thing.

New Mr Deity Episode

Now go watch the banana video.