I think I’m going to have to order this book, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Jeff Sharlet, on the basis of this interview. I know, it’s Bill Maher, who drives us frothing mad with his inconsistencies, but ignore Maher and just pay attention to the story Sharlet is telling.
It’s a very charitable review of a creationist movie, the latest bit of dishonest propaganda since Expelled. It is apparently very professionally made, which means less and less nowadays as digital video gear gets cheaper and easier to get, but I was surprised at one thing: it’s not really a movie. It’s only 52 minutes long! This looks like something they’re aiming at the television market, so look for it sometime soon on TBN or maybe even the History Channel.
Among the usual mangled creationist nonsense, it seems to be arguing for some revisionist history, claiming that science only advocates gradual change, but the evidence supports catastrophism, which is a biblical view. This is ridiculous, of course; the Bible is not a science textbook and provides no supporting body of evidence for anything, while science strives for an accurate model of the history of the earth that includes both gradual events and sporadic major changes.
No surprises. Bad science and bad history, but polished to a nice shiny gloss. If it comes on TV, I’ll probably watch it and take notes, but I’m not going to go out of my way looking for it.
The American education is a hellish mess, run by the ghastly, inefficient school board system that is too often dominated by anti-education hacks (Texas comes to mind as the preeminent example, but really, the problem is everywhere in the country). The system is so bad that Mark Twain was making jokes about it, and nothing has changed since. Could anything be worse?
Maybe. Paddy K has begun a series of articles on the Irish school system. Imagine the chaos of conflicting interests that tug our schools in different directions at every election banished…and replaced with old men in dresses committed to a common, archaic dogma that provides unity of purpose. That purpose, unfortunately, is not necessarily to produce well-educated citizens, but to produce people who will obey the Catholic church.
It could be an interesting series. We have plenty of schadenfreude to go around.
Various bits of red tape have been cleared, and the feds are about to seize the bulk of Dino Adventure Land in Pensacola, Florida, so that it can be sold off to cover the Hovind’s pending debts and penalties. You might just be able to pick up some plywood dinosaurs for cheap!
That crank pseudoscience site, Watt’s Up With That, got thoroughly reamed out with the video below (just the fact that the chief crackpot, Anthony Watts, would show up on Glenn Beck’s show is indictment enough, though). Watt was not too happy with his public evisceration, however, and scurried off to get it taken down. Here it is, reposted. Enjoy — it’s a very good takedown of the climate denialist claims.
(via Deltoid)
We are often told that religion is a different way of knowing, that it can provide us with a different perspective and different information. I have not believed this at all, because no one has ever been able to give me an example of actual, useful information obtained from a religion, that could not have been generated by a reality-based approach.
Until now.
This is a question that I had never even considered before; it was unexpected and surprising. I think I’ve finally experienced an insightful religious question.
Are you allowed to eat a mermaid?
Apparently, the Koran or some of its promoters discussed mermaids at some point, therefore they are presumed to exist. The question is then a reasonable one: if you throw a net over the side of your dhow, and haul in a mermaid along with a nice catch of ordinary fish, is she halaal? Can you chop her up, sell her at the market, or take her home to the family for dinner?
There is a fatwa on the subject of eating mermaids that cites many scholarly Islamic sources. Here are a few.
Al-Durayr – a Maaliki scholar – said in al-Sharh al-Sagheer (2/182): Sea animals in general are permissible, whether it is dead meat or a ‘dog’ (shark) or a ‘pig’ (dolphin), and they do not need to be slaughtered properly. End quote.
Al-Saawi said in his commentary on that: The words “or a ‘dog’ or a ‘pig’ also include a ‘human’, referring thereby to mermaids. End quote.
Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen (may Allaah have mercy on him) said, after stating that it is more likely that it is permissible to eat crocodiles and sea snakes: The correct view is that nothing is excluded from that, and that all the sea creatures which can only live in water are halaal, alive or dead, because of the general meaning of the verse – i.e., “Lawful to you is (the pursuit of) water game and its use for food” [al-Maa’idah 5:64].
Well.
That was a revelation. I’ll never be able to watch Splash with the same eyes again.
Now I just need recipes. I’ve gutted enough salmon that I probably don’t need cleaning instructions.
Oh, and a mermaid. I wonder if the Asian market in the Twin Cities would have any?
(via Salty Current)
A much-abused study showed that in poor neighborhoods with low academic opportunities, better scholastic performance was correlated with church attendance. This slim thread has been seized upon by religious apologists to justify claims that church attendance improves kids’ grades, and is usually accompanied by anecdotes about good church-going children being studious and diligent. The evidence is poor and getting worse, how low can it sink?
You know where it can go, to the worthless world of the internet poll.
Do you think attending church can improve kids’ grades?
Yes 52%
No 36%
Don’t know 12%
I think it is completely unsurprising that academic scores can be improved with discipline, and that part of that family discipline will be expressed in church attendance, in religious families. It’s a long reach to claiming a causal relationship between church and grades, though.
Here is a piece of text from a textbook used by fundamentalist Christians in a biology class.
Have you heard of the ‘Loch Ness Monster’ in Scotland? ‘Nessie,’ for short has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses, and photographed by others. Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.
Could a fish have developed into a dinosaur? As astonishing as it may seem, many evolutionists theorize that fish evolved into amphibians and amphibians into reptiles. This gradual change from fish to reptiles has no scientific basis. No transitional fossils have been or ever will be discovered because God created each type of fish, amphibian, and reptile as separate, unique animals. Any similarities that exist among them are due to the fact that one Master Craftsmen fashioned them all.
Oy, that’s familiar tripe — creationists repeat this kind of nonsense over and over again. The cryptozoology angle is also drearily common: many creationists think dinosaurs and humans coexisted recently, and that dinosaurs even still exist in exotic locations like the Congo and Canada. The existence of modern dinosaurs is considered evidence against evolution.
So that book is unsurprisingly stupid. There is something surprising about it, though: a UK government agency has just decided that such garbage is legitimate education, and has declared the fundamentalist young-earth creationist curriculum to be equivalent to their international A-levels. This agency, the National Recognition Information Centre (Naric), is blithely advising employers and universities that students who have gone through the creationist indoctrination and propaganda program have received a respectable education in science.
Well, you now know how much to trust a Naric recommendation. Not at all.
Edge hosted an amazing session that described the looming future of biology — this is for the real futurists. It featured George Church and Craig Venter talking about synthetic genomics — how we’re building new organisms right now and with presentiments for radical prospects in the future.
Brace yourself. There are six hours of video there; I’ve only started wading into it, but what I’ve seen so far also looks like a lot of material that will be very useful for inspiring students about the future of their field. There is also a downloadable book (which is a dead link right now, but I’m sure will be fixed soon) if you don’t want to watch the talks…but the talks are pretty darned good. Somehow, I’m going to have to make time to soak these up. Here’s the overview of the six sessions:
Dreams & Nightmares
Overview, safety/security/policy, nanotechnology, molecular manufacturing
Smaller than life
What is life, origins, in vitro synthetic life, mirror life, computing and DNA, computing with DNA
Engineering microbes
Bio-petrochemicals & pharmaceuticals, accelerated lab evolution
Engineering humans
Electronic-biological interfaces, bioengineered personal stem cells, humanized mice, bringing back extinct species
The sorceror
The diversity of life, constructing life, from Darwin to new fuels
The near future, big questions
Terraforming earth, creating extraterrestrials, the singularity, human nature
There goes your weekend.
