Shhh. The creationists are listening.

It’s a little odd to find myself cited in a Polk County, Florida newspaper as evidence that their pro-ID activities have received “national attention.”

Otherwise, it’s an article that testifies to the inevitability of a conflict. A majority of the school board members in Polk want to insert creationism into the curriculum, and they’ve got a few supporters in the schools.

…an eighth-grade science teacher at Union Academy in Bartow spoke in favor of intelligent design, a belief that living organisms are so complex that they must have been created by some kind of higher force.

“When you talk about laws in nature it shows some order or design,” said Lawrence Hughes, who has taught at the academy for 16 years. “The laws of nature don’t support change from one organism to another organism.”

What utter tripe. What we see in nature is that the boundaries are extremely fuzzy, and that there are no “laws of nature” that block change. Perhaps Mr Hughes would like to state what these laws are, exactly?

A few people are arguing strongly on the side of reason, but one gets the impression that the creationists have made up their minds and are spoiling for a fight.

Road trip!

One of our Minneapolis Christian talk radio stations, KKMS, is organizing a trip.

Join Jeff & Lee as they travel with Heartland Tours & Travel to the Creation Museum in Cincinnati, Ohio! Jeff & Lee will be doing a live broadcast from the museum, and you can be there to see it all happen! of course, there will be other great stops along the way – Chicago (and famous Chicago pizza), the Wisconsin Dells with it’s huge waterpark, shopping at the Tangier Outlet Mall and more! this is a tour that will inspire your faith and make lasting family memories.

Don’t you think they could really use a scientific guide to go along with them? Call me, Jeff & Lee — I’m willing to waive my usual fee to accompany your bus as a consultant.

I am rather amused that what will inspire their faith is Chicago pizza, a tacky amusement park, and shopping.

(h/t to Eva)

Creationist crooks pilfer Harvard’s work

Once upon a time, a company named XVIVO put together a beautiful computer animation of molecular activity in the cell — you may have already seen it. I have some quibbles with it — there is no water shown, and the behavior of the molecules is too simplistic, without enough noise (molecular behavior at the scale shown ought to be rich with Brownian phenomena) — but it’s dramatic and spectacular, which was the intent. The whole thing was made to inspire and inform Harvard biology students, so it’s actually owned by Harvard and XVIVO.

Now for the curious and nefarious part of the story. Fellows of the Discovery
Institute love this video. It shows the complexity of the cell, and that there are all kinds of specific functions going on within it, so to them, ignorant as they are of the evolutionary history of any of the molecules involved, it seems to support their contention that cells are full of arcane molecular machines that must have been designed. Never mind that these are proteins and other molecules; never mind that we have identified gene families and patterns of descent within these molecules; never mind that complexity is a hallmark of evolutionary processes and products. This is a movie they can show the rubes and say “Wow! I don’t understand that (always true)! You don’t understand that (usually true)! Therefore, JEEEZUS!” That’s their goal.

So what would a group of good Christians with the aim of renewing American culture do? Simple. Steal the video. They’ve grabbed the video, retitled it, removed the biological explanations for the phenomena, dubbed in a really bad, unprofessional narration on top of it, and stripped off the credits. Now, in their various traveling patent medicine shows, they flaunt this unattributed, modified video ripped off from Harvard Biology, and use it in their generic argument from ignorance for anti-evolutionism.

They are shameless thieves.

ERV has documented one example — Dembski used it in his talk at the University of Oklahoma, at which he profited to the tune of about $10,000. If you find yourself at a DI event and see the video played, you might want to take note and let her know.

Prism-induced reversal of retinal images (student post)

I was happily absorbed in my slightly vegetative stupor on the couch when my roommate walked into the room and starting talking about physics. Ugh, physics, I thought, but I politely listened as she began talking about lenses, specifically how they are related to sight. It is common knowledge that the images we see are inverted on the retina, and then further processed. However, my roommate was discussing experiments done on humans that inverted their vision by 180 degrees and found that, though at first they could not function normally, eventually they adapted. I thought this was fascinating, and wondered what the brain had to do with this process. Unfortunately my roommate’s knowledge was pretty limited, so I decided to do some research of my own.

Research on visual distortion of the retina has been going on for quite some time. Devices have been used that invert the retinal image, so that everything is seen upside down. At first subjects wearing this device will reach for things and miss, or will bump into things as they travel about a space. Eventually, they adapt. What I wanted to know is how do they adapt? What changes take place in the brain that allow them to do so? Is it just simply learning to reach a little farther to grab something, or walk a bit differently to avoid bumping into something? What is happening at the neural level?

[Read more…]

Pharyngula kindled?

Look: you can buy me on Amazon now, for 99¢ cheap. It’s all through this strange new device Amazon is selling, called a Kindle, which is a fancy new e-book reader with some nice display technology and an absolutely evil business model. Now instead of buying books that you can do with as you please, you can lease them and get digital copies all bound up in DRM hindrances. The hardware is a step forward, the software lock-up of all the content is a big leap backwards, one that is going to doom it all to failure.

Kottke seems unimpressed, Business Week likes it, John Gruber hopes it flops. I’m with the nay-sayers.

Hey, is anyone reading this on a Kindle?

I ♠ missionaries

If there actually were a god, Cyclone Sidr would have spun through Bangladesh, selectively eliminating all the two-faced scumbag missionaries who exploit the poor in the name of their deity. Chris Mooney cites an example from the Baptist Press:

In the hours before Cyclone Sidr reached the coastal areas of Bangladesh, Southern Baptists and other Christians began praying — aware that the Category 4 storm potentially could usher hundreds of thousands into an eternity without Jesus.

…

“Last night a lot of people died and entered an eternity of suffering,” Neely said. “Almost none of them has heard a Christian testimony or biblical explanation of who Christ really is. They have never heard the truth about who God really is, who they are in His sight or what God’s plan is to save us from our sin through Christ.”

The title of the source article is also offensive: “Their prayer: that faith in Christ follows cyclone “. That’s looking on the bright side, I guess — all the destruction, the desperation, and the displacement represent marvelous opportunities for the scoundrels and scalawags of religion to move in and harvest souls for Jesus.

I sometimes hear people claim that religion provides consolation to the bereaved. This is a perfect example of the opposite: a manipulative religion used to incite anguish and fear and misery in the minds of survivors.