Here’s a great opportunity for Minnesota fossil freaks: Minnesota Atheists is organizing a fossil hunting trip to Lilydale park on Saturday, 20 June. Sign up and go collect 440-480 million year old marine fossils. Maybe I’ll have to rummage around and find my old rock hammer.
The Irish are looking for ideas and assistance in stopping the imposition of blasphemy laws. Got something to say, or want to volunteer? Leave them a comment.
David Perlman celebrates Darwin’s birth year with a short list of evolutionary transitions. It’s a strange thing; these kinds of examples are thick on the ground everywhere, published in the scientific literature every week, and somehow, the creationists never seem to be able to find them.
Once upon a time, four blind men were walking in the forest, and they bumped into an elephant.
Moe was in front, and found himself holding the trunk. “It has a tentacle,” he said. “I think we have found a giant squid!”
Larry bumped into the side of the elephant. “It’s a wall,” he said, “A big, bristly wall.”
Curly, at the back, touched the tail. “It’s nothing to worry about, nothing but a piece of rope dangling in the trail.”
Eagletosh saw the interruption as an opportunity to sit in the shade beneath a tree and relax. “It is my considered opinion,” he said, “that whatever it is has feathers. Beautiful iridescent feathers of many hues.”
And her name is Karta, and she is an orangutan. Karta escaped from her zoo pen by using a stick to short out an electric fence, then building a crude ladder to climb over a wall.
If only she’d had some coconuts and vines, she would have built a radio and called the Orangutan Liberation Front for rescue.
This morning at 9am, Chris Hallquist will be on Atheists Talk radio to discuss skepticism of Christian apologetics. In addition, it’s that time of year — find out about godless summer camp, Camp Quest.
I’ve been doing it wrong. I was looking over creationist responses to my arguments that Haeckel’s embryos are being misused by the ID cretins, and I realized something: they don’t give a damn about Haeckel. They don’t know a thing about the history of embryology. They are utterly ignorant of modern developmental biology. Let me reduce it down for you, showing you the logic of science and creationism in the order they developed.
Here’s how the scientific and creationist thought about the embryological evidence evolves:
Scientific thinking
An observation: vertebrate embryos show striking resemblances to one another.
An explanation: the similarities are a consequence of shared ancestry.
Ongoing confirmation: Examine more embryos and look more deeply at the molecules involved.
Creationist thinking
A premise: all life was created by a designer.
An implication: vertebrate embryos do not share a common ancestor.
A conclusion: therefore, vertebrate embryos do not show striking resemblances to one another.
I like the title of this post: Texas School Board votes on the age of the Universe. In case you were curious, the board decreed 11:3 that maybe it isn’t the age all those egghead physicists, geologists, and astronomers say it is.
