The bigotry is going too far. Now the Diocese of Bath and Wells has banned garden gnomes from their cemeteries. What are we to do with the poor wee buggers, then? Let them rot in the streets?
I do appreciate the excuse given, though.
A spokesman for the Diocese of Bath and Wells said: “There is no such thing as a real gnome so why should we have such unnatural creatures in churchyards?”
Indeed. And what of the unnatural creatures that stock the interior of the churches?
Twelve year old Motl Brody has died. A tumor destroyed his brain, and the consequences are unambiguous.
Unlike Terri Schiavo or Karen Ann Quinlan, who became the subjects of right-to-die battles when they suffered brain damage and became unconscious, Motl’s condition has deteriorated beyond a persistent vegetative state, his physicians say. His brain has died entirely, according to an affidavit filed by one of his doctors.
His eyes are fixed and dilated. His body neither moves nor responds to stimulation. His brain stem shows no electrical function, and his brain tissue has begun to decompose.
This is sad, but final…except for one little problem. The boy’s family belong to a sect of Hasidic Jews who cling to an archaic belief that life is determined by the presence of a beating heart, and this particular body is hooked up to drugs and machines that keep the tissue flailing away futilely, and so the parents are taking the hospital to court to keep prodding the corpse into this semblance of life.
There’s another weird twist to the story. The parents are not in denial. They know there is no hope at this point. They are sticking to their insistence that the hospital must tie up their facilities in this useless endeavor entirely because they must dogmatically follow their religion’s laws.
Jeffrey I. Zuckerman, the attorney for Motl’s parents, says they have been “utterly shattered” by the hospital’s actions.
He stressed that the family’s demand for continued life support was based on their obligations under religious law, not an unrealistic hope that their boy will recover.
In other words, they know their religious beliefs are invalid, but they’re going to abide by them, and damn the pain and grief and expense and waste. It’s zombie religion.
No way am I going to get sucked into this little physics-based game, Assembler. I know a black hole of time when I see one.
Darksyde has an interesting post up about the future of NASA. We’ve got a new president coming who has promised change — let’s see if one of the changes he will make is to kick the space program out of its rut. I don’t know if he can promise more money to every science program we’ve got, but he could at least put effective, principled administrators in place who will use their budgets more appropriately.
We do have a list of Obama’s promises on science and technology. They do include more investment in the space program, as well as opening up stem cell research, more money for science education, and lots of green energy research. We now have to wait and see if and how he fulfills them.
It’s tomorrow! Send those links to me pronto, so they can appear on A Candid World on Wednesday!
How can I resist when they name it THE GOD POLL? There are several questions there: Does god exist (currently tied between yes and no)? Is there life after death (roughly tied, with yes in a slight lead)? Do humans have souls (yes is leading, 50%:34%)? Can an atheist be ethical (Yes is way ahead, fortunately)? Is evolution accurate (yes is at 64%, not bad)?
Vote on ’em all!
I think we have discovered the most pathetic online poll ever. The creator is jacking around the numbers now to whatever he feels like; he has left a comment here to complain; he’s playing a little game of sockpuppetry (“Dorfus” and “tgp” are the same person); and he just sent me email saying, “I’ve asked seed to remove your blog. I hope they do.” Whatta maroon.
Don’t do this. Don’t steal crackers.
During mass at around 9 AM, Ricci accepted a wafer on the Communion line, but “walked away without taking the communion into his mouth.” After refusing a priest’s requests to “accept” the wafer,
If he’d just stopped there, all would be well, but then he did this:
Ricci “turned to the priest and grabbed a handful of the wafers from the plate and attempted to leave” St. Martin de Porres Church, according to the report.
Sorry, but that is unacceptable. Blasphemy is something you can feel free to do on your own, but not when you’re disrupting other people’s rituals, no matter how silly they are.
One of the oldest canards in the creationists’ book is the claim that evolution must be false because it violates the second law of thermodynamics, or the principle that, as they put it, everything must go from order to disorder. One of the more persistent perpetrators of this kind of sloppy thinking is Henry Morris, and few creationists today seem able to get beyond this error.
Remember this tendency from order to disorder applies to all real processes. Real processes include, of course, biological and geological processes, as well as chemical and physical processes. The interesting question is: “How does a real biological process, which goes from order to disorder, result in evolution. which goes from disorder to order?” Perhaps the evolutionist can ultimately find an answer to this question, but he at least should not ignore it, as most evolutionists do.
Especially is such a question vital, when we are thinking of evolution as a growth process on the grand scale from atom to Adam and from particle to people. This represents in absolutely gigantic increase in order and complexity, and is clearly out of place altogether in the context of the Second Law.
As most biologists get a fair amount of training in chemistry, I’m afraid he’s wrong on one bit of slander there: we do not ignore entropy, and are in fact better informed on it than most creationists, as is clearly shown by their continued use of this bad argument. I usually rebut this claim about the second law in a qualitative way, and by example — it’s obvious that the second law does not state that nothing can ever increase in order, but only that an decrease in one part must be accompanied by a greater increase in entropy in another. Two gametes, for instance, can fuse and begin a complicated process in development that represents a long-term local decrease in entropy, but at the same time that embryo is pumping heat out into its environment and increasing the entropy of the surrounding bit of the world.
It’s a very bad argument they are making, but let’s consider just the last sentence of the quote above.
This represents in absolutely gigantic increase in order and complexity, and is clearly out of place altogether in the context of the Second Law.
A “gigantic increase in order and complexity” … how interesting. How much of an increase? Can we get some numbers for that?
Daniel Styer has published an eminently useful article on “Entropy and Evolution” that does exactly that — he makes some quantitative estimates of how much entropy might be decreased by the process of evolution. I knew we kept physicists around for something; they are so useful for filling in the tricky details.
The article nicely summarizes the general problems with the creationist claim. They confuse the metaphor of ‘disorder’ for the actual phenomenon of entropy; they seem to have an absolutist notion that the second law prohibits all decreases in entropy; and they generally lack any quantitative notion of how entropy actually works. The cool part of this particular article, though, is that he makes an estimate of exactly how much entropy is decreased by the process of evolution.
First he estimates, very generously, how much entropy is decreased per individual. If we assume each individual is 1000 times “more improbable” than its ancestor one century ago, that is, that we are specified a thousand times more precisely than our great-grandparents (obviously a ludicrously high over-estimate, but he’s trying to give every advantage to the creationists here), then we can describe the reduction in the number of microstates in the modern organism as:
Now I’m strolling into dangerous ground for us poor biologists, since this is a mathematical argument, but really, this is simple enough for me to understand. We know the statistical definition of entropy:
In the formula above, kB is the Boltzmann constant. We can just plug in our estimated (grossly overestimated!) value for Ω, have fun with a little algebra, and presto, a measure of the change in entropy per individual per century emerges.
Centuries are awkward units, so Styer converts that to something more conventional: the entropy change per second is -3.02 x 10-30 J/K. There are, of course, a lot of individual organisms on the planet, so that number needs to be multiplied by the total number of evolving organism, which, again, we charitably overestimate at 1032, most of which are prokaryotes, of course. The final result is a number that tells us the total change in entropy of the planet caused by evolution each second:
-302 J/K
What does that number mean? We need a context. Styer also estimates the Earth’s total entropy throughput per second, that is, the total flux involved from absorption of the sun’s energy and re-radiation of heat out into space. It’s a slightly bigger number:
420 x 1012 J/K
To spell it out, there’s about a trillion times more entropy flux available than is required for evolution. The degree by which earth’s entropy is reduced by the action of evolutionary processes is miniscule relative to the amount that the entropy of the cosmic microwave background is increased.
This is very cool and very clear. I’m folding up my copy of Styer’s paper and tucking it into my copy of The Counter-Creationism Handbook, where it will come in handy.
Styer DF (2008) Entropy and evolution. Am J Phys 76(11):1031-1033.
It’s another example of weird fundie obsessions. In this case, it’s all about an angry god who sends hurricanes and is appeased by prayer, and just what do you think he’s angry about? We haven’t been hardline enough about Israel.
Here’s a fun account of a four-way debate on Intelligent Design in Fort Worth, Texas. Actually, it sounds like it was more of a two-way, with Lawrence Krauss, who is very, very good, speaking on the side of science, against David Berlinski, who is very, very supercilious (that word always comes up when Berlinski’s name is mentioned) speaking on the side of … well, it’s not clear. He doesn’t really have any pro-ID arguments, but mainly seems to be on the side of cashing checks from the Discovery Institute.
You know the debate went well when creationists have temper tantrums afterwards.
