Unclear on the concept

Fox News carried out a phone survey to find out what people thought of god and science. Here are the results:

Which do you think is more likely to actually be the explanation for the origin of human life on Earth:

The theory of evolution as outlined by Darwin and other scientists 21%
The Biblical account of creation as told in the Bible, 45%
or Are both true? 27%
(Don’t know) 7%

It’s nothing at all surprising; a little less than half the American population typically answers these sorts of questions with dumb piety. The fact that a quarter are trying to claim compatibility is a little weird, but otherwise, whoop-de-do.

Ken Ham has commented on the results.

I’m sure many of you saw this poll. If it accurately represents the population in the USA, then why is evolution taught as fact in schools? Why do secularists have so much control over what is taught? I think there are a number of reasons and will comment later–but thought you would be interested to read this.

Somebody is unclear on the concept. Science is not determined by public opinion, and you don’t settle it by running a poll. Shall we vote on math, chemistry, physics, psychology, history, literature, and Spanish, too?

(Also on Sb)

Would you consider changing your life-status?

I know some of you out there are in that phase of your life where you are engaged in this painful process called “dating” (I have evolved beyond it, thank the blessed Mary, and have no interest in ever entering that high-anxiety stage ever again). Being an atheist would tend to add new levels of complexity to it all, I would think: not only does it make a majority of an otherwise attractive population repellent to you, but they’re likely to regard you as something nasty. This comic is for you (note: only part of the whole is shown here, follow the link to see the whole thing).

It made me think, though, that maybe zombification would be a good thing to go for if you were trying to make yourself more desirable to others.

Advertise gods away

As an exercise, a couple of Australian advertising agencies were asked to make some ads advocating the banning of religion.

The bad news: Most didn’t even want to do it as an exercise. The show apparently did some previous ad games, for instance advocating euthanizing everyone over 80, and that was acceptable…but getting caught suggesting that religion was a bad thing? Uh-oh.

The good news: The judges. They didn’t bat an eye and all seemed to think it was a fine idea (well, except for the last guy, maybe).

I liked the first video better than the second, myself. I’m not a fan of this idea that religions cause the majority of warfare. I don’t think it’s true, and I don’t think you could even argue that religion has been the pretext for a majority of war. Wars have had too many causes.

Ricky Gervais in the New Humanist

You’ve probably heard already that Gervais was interviewed by the New Humanist — he does give a great interview, stuffed full of juicy quotes. I like this one:

I always expect some people to be offended. I know I ruffle feathers but some people’s feathers need a little ruffling. And remember: just because someone is offended doesn’t mean they’re in the right. Some people are offended by multiculturalism, homosexuality, abortion, atheism – what should we do? Ban all those things? You have the right to be offended, and I have the right to offend you. But no one has the right to never be offended.

I don’t know about this, though. This is just showing off.

Creationism evolves by jerks

I think one thing Razib says is exactly right:

One of the most interesting things to me is the nature of Creationism as an idea which evolves in a rather protean fashion in reaction to the broader cultural selection pressures.

Creationism has evolved significantly, but it’s not exactly protean: it’s punctuated equilibrium. If we had a time machine and could bring a typical creationist who came to age after Whitcomb and Morris’s The Genesis Flood face-to-face with a pre-Scopes trial creationist, there would be a fabulously ferocious fight, because their theology and their basic beliefs would be so radically different. They do change in response to the environment, but reluctantly and not without a lot of hysteresis.

[Read more…]

Why isn’t this an example of the falsification of the power of prayer?

Texas has had several extremely high profile, prominent prayer events led by that braying ninny, Rick Perry, all in the name of ending the drought that afflicts the state. He even made it official, making a government proclamations calling on God to fix the weather.

WHEREAS, throughout our history, both as a state and as individuals, Texans have been strengthened, assured and lifted up through prayer; it seems right and fitting that the people of Texas should join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, RICK PERRY, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on those days for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.

That was back in April. God has had 4 months to respond to those desperate entreaties. Here is the result.

Isn’t that amazing? It’s like Texas is getting blasted almost specifically — with a bit of collateral damage to Oklahoma, but then, God has always had lousy aim.

But shouldn’t this be a good strong datum that prayer doesn’t work?

Not like a worm?

Ann Coulter is back to whining about evolution again, and this week she focuses on fossils. It’s boring predictable stuff: there are no transitional fossils, she says.

We also ought to find a colossal number of transitional organisms in the fossil record – for example, a squirrel on its way to becoming a bat, or a bear becoming a whale. (Those are actual Darwinian claims.)

Darwin postulated that whales could have evolved from bears, but he was wrong…as we now know because we found a lot of transitional fossils in whale evolution. Carl Zimmer has a summary of recent discoveries, and I wrote up a bit about the molecular genetics of whale evolution. Whales have become one of the best examples of macroevolutionary transitions in the fossil record, all in roughly the last 30 years — which gives us a minimal estimate of how out of date Ann Coulter’s sources are.

But then she writes this, which is not only wrong, but self-refuting.

To explain away the explosion of plants and animals during the Cambrian Period more than 500 million years ago, Darwiniacs asserted – without evidence – that there must have been soft-bodied creatures evolving like mad before then, but left no fossil record because of their squishy little microscopic bodies.

Then in 1984, “the dog ate our fossils” excuse collapsed, too. In a discovery the New York Times called “among the most spectacular in this century,” Chinese paleontologists discovered fossils just preceding the Cambrian era.

Despite being soft-bodied microscopic creatures – precisely the sort of animal the evolution cult claimed wouldn’t fossilize and therefore deprived them of crucial evidence – it turned out fossilization was not merely possible in the pre-Cambrian era, but positively ideal.

And yet the only thing paleontologists found there were a few worms. For 3 billion years, nothing but bacteria and worms, and then suddenly nearly all the phyla of animal life appeared within a narrow band of 5 million to 10 million years.

It’s so weird to read that: yes, people have been predicting that the precursors to the Cambrian fauna would have been small and soft-bodied (what else would you expect), and that they would be difficult to fossilize…but not impossible, and further, scientists have been out finding these fossils. Somehow this is a refutation of evolution? What we’re seeing is exactly what evolution predicted!

What we have is a good record of small shelly fossils and trace fossils from the pre-Cambrian — before there were fully armored trilobites, there were arthropod-like creatures with partial armor that decayed into scattered small fragments of shell after death, and before that there were entirely soft-bodied, unarmored creatures that left only trackways and burrows. Even in this period Coulter wants to call abrupt, we find evidence of gradual transitions in animal forms.

And then to claim that there is an absence of transitional forms because all that was found were worms! Um, if you take an animal with an armored exoskeleton or bones, and you catch it before the hard skeleton had evolved, exactly what do you think it would look like? Like a worm.

As evolution predicted. As the evidence shows.

I can’t even guess what Ann Coulter was expecting a pre-Cambrian animal to look like. Not like a worm, apparently…but like what?

(Also on Sb)