Hey, look, everyone! Canada
has
creationists! Ha ha!
If you look at a map and notice how that big peninsula Toronto is on is protruding into the US, and note that that penetration has been going on for hundreds of years, I guess it’s not surprising that they’d catch a nasty disease.
Scott Lanyon, director of the Bell Museum, has an article on two disease we should worry about, VHSv and EAS.
Personally, I think VHSv is the worst. It’s a virus that causes hemorrhagic septicemia in fish; just from the name you know it’s bad, involving blood and sepsis. My most horrible experience raising zebrafish was the time hemorrhagic septicemia swept through my colony and I had to euthanize every animal and bleach every last bit of plumbing to eradicate it. This disease has been detected in waters of Wisconsin, and it’s definitely not good.
EAS may not be as dramatically gory and lethal in its effects, but it strikes humans directly. It’s Evolution Avoidance Syndrome, and it causes the brains of scientists and journalists to seize up when circumstances are appropriate to discuss evolution in public. Apparently, we want local fish populations to develop, acquire, improve or have arise resistance to the hemorrhagic septicemia virus; we can’t possibly suggest that evolution might be at work.
Next time you hear the tornado-in-a-junkyard argument (almost as common as the why-are-there-still-monkeys argument!), remember this rebuttal:
Creationists seeking to argue against evolution often liken the evolution of complex organisms by natural selection to the building of a DC-10 by a hurricane blowing through a junkyard. Their conclusion? Since such an event is staggeringly unlikely, a special sentient hurricane must have built the plane deliberately.
That’s going to be handy!
Especially since some of the creators of these ideas seem to have confused “theory” for “brain fart”. The latest example: Zygote Theory!
Gather ’round, children, and dear old Unca Jack will explain to you how the dinosaurs went extinct. It’s not how you think. There were no meteors or comets, no egg-eating mammals, no saurian pandemics. It’s because so many plants died in the great flood.
The story of the Robert Marks debacle has now made the pages of The Chronicle of Higher Education. If the account is accurate, I’m going to do something you’ll only rarely see: I’ll take the side of the creationist.
Uncommon Descent must have noticed ERV’s comment that no one reads their site, because now they seem to be frantically chumming the waters with bizarre bait. I’ll bite; like a shark, I’m a mindless eating machine, exquisitely sensitive to the thrashing of victims and the scent of blood. And it makes for great street theater!
I knew this was going to happen, but I’m no prophet — it’s just what the creationists always do. Frank Pastore follows the lead of our national news media and declares evolution debunked because of recent discoveries in paleontology. You can probably guess which ones.
Oh, no! Now Tiny Frog is giving ammunition to the producers of Expelled by revealing The Stifling Dominance of Secular Academia! At least biologists aren’t being picked on in this case — it’s those biased secular theories of physics that are being blamed.
