If ever I run out of creationist pseudoscience (it will never happen), I can always turn to another source, the Men’s Rights movement, especially their radical anti-woman wing. Here’s a prime example from RooshV: Research Suggests That A Woman’s Body Incorporates DNA From The Semen Of Her Casual Sex Partners. Would you be surprised if I told you that everything in that title is wrong? Would you be shocked to learn that everything Roosh concludes from misreading that research is also wrong?

The above study has two seismic implications. The first is that a woman can absorb enough DNA during her lifetime that it changes her phenotype (i.e. her appearance and overall health state). There could be some truth to the phrase “slut face” in which highly promiscuous women suffer a change to their appearance because of all the variable sperm from different males that have been deposited inside them.

The second implication stems from the fact that it’s scientifically conclusive that single mothers have DNA of their bastard children residing permanently within their bodies. Any man who reproduces with a single mom will have a child that contains DNA from the bastard spawn, which of course includes DNA from the absentee father. This means that men can be genetically cuckolded without being traditionally cuckolded, and that having a baby with a single mom is essentially giving the father of her first child a bonus prize in the game of evolution.

There’s literally nothing correct in any of that mess. Nothing. Roosh has imposed his faulty, biased interpretation on the work in a way that would certainly horrify the authors.

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I saw it coming. The octopus genome was sequenced, and one scientist gushed about the differences between cephalopods and vertebrates, calling them “alien”, and that became the news. People really need to read the paper before reporting on it, because it emphasizes the relatedness of octopuses to other animals.

But the creationists don’t care about facts. They’re motivated to lie. The latest: Darwinism Versus the Octopus: An Evolutionary Dilemma.

No, it’s really not.

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Can you bear a little more Ben Carson? Some yahoo going by the name @CARSON4POTUS has been yammering at me on Twitter: he insists that I’m completely wrong, that Carson is not a young earth creationist, and as evidence he dredges up some godawful talk on creationism that Carson gave in 2011. It convinces me that Carson is even stupider than I thought.

Here are a few quotes from it. The numbers in brackets refer to times in this video, which I have not watched, because listening to Carson talk makes me want to sit him down at the kids’ table with a coloring book and tell him to leave the grownups alone.

[19:41] “You know, I am not a hard and fast person that says the earth is only six thousand years old, but I do believe in a six day creation. And, because, you know, it says in the beginning that God created the heaven and the earth. [19:56] It doesn’t say when he created them except for ‘in the beginning’, so the earth could have been here for along time before he started creating things on it. But when he did start doing that he made it very specifically clear to us, the evening and the morning were the next day, because he knew that people would come along [20:15] and try to say that ‘oh it was millions and millions of years.’ And then what else did he say in the very first chapter: ‘that each thing brought forth after its own kind’, because he knew that people would come along and say you know that this thing changed into that [20:34] and this changed to that and this changed to that. So at the very beginning of the Bible he puts that to rest.”

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I took an awful grainy cell phone picture yesterday, one where it’s hard to see the subjects for the sun glare. But really, this is amazing:

Fifteen years ago when I started out at UMM, our intro biology course had an exercise where students were given butterfly nets and sent out to capture, tag, and release monarch butterflies. It was relatively easy: you’d find a tree with a swarm — and I do mean swarm, they’d be covered with butterflies dripping from every branch, and there’d be clouds of them flying about — and you’d swish that net and catch dozens. Then every year after that, we saw fewer and fewer, until it was an exercise that was frustratingly impossible to do. Most years of late I’d see only an occasional solo monarch, and some years I’d see none.

But yesterday, I was seeing scattered monarchs everywhere, and then I found this tree across the street with masses of butterflies hanging from a few branches. It was nothing like the glory days, but still…maybe they’re making a comeback?

Earlier this summer, Michael Shermer wrote a column for Scientific American to explain Why Do Cops Kill?. I was rapturously unaware of it because he’s an author I long ago decided I could ignore, but just recently a reader had to destroy my state of ecstatic ignorance by pointing it out to me. I read it with growing disbelief, my jaw sagging further and further at the dreadful illogic and the scientismic insipidity of the thing. How does he still get published?

To make it short, for those who prefer not to read anything associated with The Shermer, his answer is…it’s not racism, it’s because they have brain circuitry. No, really. It’s even illustrated with a cartoon of a clockwork murder-bot.

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