Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he’s been wondering about, but it’s actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Tom Tomorrow has a list of things he’s been wondering about, but it’s actually a list of things I suspect but would rather not have confirmed.
Has anyone seen a positive review of Behe’s book from a science source? Discover Magazine joins the ranks of those that find it awful:
As unpersuasive as Behe’s ideas are scientifically, they are even less convincing philosophically. Behe professes agnosticism on whether the designer was a dope, a demon, or a deity, although he seems peculiarly inclined toward the second possibility. His is a strangely impoverished worldview, one that leaves little space for awe, much less for future scientific advance; he never even raises the obvious question of who the designer is and how it works. Contrast this with Darwin’s starry-eyed summation in Origin of Species: “There is grandeur in this view of life . . . from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
That’s pretty much my opinion, too. It’s a bizarre exercise in bogus math and bad biology to arrive at a sterile conclusion, with no reasonable future scientific efforts proposed.
A little knowledge would short circuit a lot of strange speculation. That picture to the right is of a shark caught in Malaysia, and people are calling those odd dangly bits “legs”. Despite the fact that someone said what they actually are in a comment early on, there are people arguing both that a shark with legs is evidence for evolution, and that it is evidence for creation.
They’re both wrong.
It’s a male shark. Those are the shark’s claspers, or intromittent organs. The shark does the usual act you’d expect with a female of the species, and like many shark species, it has clasper spurs, or little poky bits that help lock the organ into the female’s cloaca while he gets happy.
They aren’t homologous to legs at all. We also wouldn’t expect to find legs on a shark — they aren’t in the lineage that led to tetrapods.
I’m actually most surprised that a worker at the Malaysian Fisheries Development Board, who found this animal, didn’t recognize that these were just ordinary claspers. Anyone who has worked with sharks for even a little while would know about these structures. I suspect someone at the board is pulling the media’s, and the public’s, leg.
You know you want to see this: here’s a photo of two sharks getting affectionate. Shark lovin’ often involves a fair amount of biting and tearing, and leaves scars that you can find in captured specimens, so I don’t recommend trying this at home. Especially since sharks don’t believe in safewords.
Here’s a cool tool: Walk Score. Type in an address, and it uses Google Maps to look up destinations like parks and stores and theaters that are in walking distance of the place, and gives you a score out of 100 on walkability. A place like Manhattan will give you high scores; one of those desolate suburbs where you have to drive to get anywhere (like my old address in Pennsylvania) will give you lousy low scores.
Morris is middling: I get a 52.
There’s funny stuff in the Google data base, though. It places a Donnelly grocery store a few blocks from my house and says it’s 24 miles away; there are also a whole lot of appropriate businesses that simply aren’t listed.
(via Mercury Rising)
I am appalled. A man in New York was arrested for throwing a copy of the Quran in a public toilet. He deserved arrest—everyone knows it is vandalism and criminal mischief to clog a public toilet with debris.
Oh, hang on — the guy was arrested for a hate crime? Are toilets now on the list of victims targeted by fringe fanatics? What’s their slogan: “Bring Back the Open Trench!”? It is a shame to see innocent and useful toilets persecuted in this ghastly way …
Wait, never mind. He was arrested for being mean to Muslims, which also makes no sense. He destroyed a book and clogged a toilet. If some local nut started setting fire to copies of The God Delusion, I wouldn’t feel personally victimized — let her burn all the copies she can buy, it’s just more money in Richard Dawkins’ pocket. (If she started stuffing copies into the toilets, though, then I might feel oppressed. When you gotta go, you gotta go.)
You know, there is a tradition around here, one that I’ve practiced for a few years: overwrought sanctimony must be met with disrespectful insolence. So I’m thinking of picking up a cheap copy of the Qu’ran. And I’m thinking … what to do, what to do. It will, of course, be something in the privacy of my home, with my very own copy — none of this public vandalism and veiled threats to people who believe. It will just be a demonstration of my right to treat my property as it deserves and of my opinion of this silly book.
So here are a few ideas. Maybe you can think of some more.
I could simply urinate on it, but that’s old hat.
If I had a puppy, I could use the pages for paper training. But I do not have a puppy and I’m not going to get one for this horrible reason.
The traditional approach: keep it near the fireplace, and use the pages for kindling. Of course, there’s no way I’m going to start a fire in the fireplace in August in Minnesota, so that’s going to have to wait a while.
I could doodle cartoons in the margins and make my own crudely illustrated (I have no talent) version of the Qu’ran. Then I could put it on ebay and make a profit.
Here’s an artsy option: I could make a new cover and a bookmark for it … out of bacon.
That last one sounds fun, and I could also put up photos on the blog (there’s also a tradition there) but perhaps some of you can come up with a better suggestion.
(via Deep Thoughts)
If you’re considering purchasing some supplies for home repair from one of the mega-chains, you might want to consider their advertising policies. Archy makes a good case that you should shop at Lowe’s—they don’t support barking mad reactionary freaks.
Of course, it’s a bit irrelevant to me, since I don’t have either one near me. Instead, we’ve got four or five small locally owned hardware stores. Their owners might be sympathetic to Bill O’Reilly, but they don’t have enough money to buy air time on his show.
A while back, I floated the idea of a logo for the godless. There was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea, and a lot of good design ideas came out of it … maybe too many good ideas. And being a mob of atheists, there was absolutely no consensus on what was the best symbol to use. Finally, I didn’t want to impose a logo on anyone, so I just let it drop to see if anyone would simply start using one of the suggested designs, that maybe a consensus might coalesce. I saw a few of the logos on scattered sites, but there wasn’t much of a spontaneous response, and alas, every single site used a different logo. Typical atheists.
Now, though, there is one possible option: the RDF has started the Out Campaign, an effort to get atheists to publicly and proudly declare their status. It has a slightly different meaning — it’s not exactly a symbol of atheism, but more a symbol of the willingness to come out about your disbelief — but it’s nice, it’s simple, it’s clean. It’s a simple red Zapfino “A”, the scarlet letter.
Go ahead, use it. I’ve got one on the sidebar to testify to my openness about my ideas of the nature of the universe, we should all spread it far and wide. I’ll even make it easy for you: you can use this code to put one on your website, if you’re one of us loud and proud atheists.
<div style="text-align:center"><a href="http://outcampaign.org/"><img src="http://pharyngula.org/images/scarlet_A.png" border="0" alt="image" width="143" height="122" /></a></div>
One weird thing about this development, though, is that it sure
brings out the whiners and concern trolls. I’m a little bit surprised at the response at the Dawkins site, with far too many rushing to complain. You’ll see two kinds of negative reactions.
The nay-sayers who complain that this is too much like Christianity, it’s a uniform, it’s Dawkins trying to enforce conformity. How ridiculous. It’s a freakin’ t-shirt or bumper sticker, not the High Holy Cathedral of the Sacred Letter A. You can wear it or you can skip it. You can use it to wipe the sweat off after a workout. You might wear it to a barbecue at the park. Wear it while you’re doing the dishes. It’s casual wear. It’s a nice shirt that sends a straightforward message about your willingness to be unafraid, nothing more, with no other deep significance. It will not be part of the dress code.
The shrinking violets who complain that it’s too bold, it’s too in-your-face, it’ll make us a target. Talk about missing the point: yes, it’s supposed to be bold. You are supposed to be bold. Begging for a tiny little delicate bit of subtle embroidery on a shirt pocket means this movement is not for you. Don’t wear the shirt. Don’t put the bumper sticker on your car. Don’t say a word — it’s easy to pass as a Christian or a Muslim, you know.
Just don’t try to claim that you’re helping.
The Myers family ordered a few t-shirts, and my car will have the bumper sticker on it. We aren’t afraid. Especially not to make such a trivial commitment.
Let’s bring up that atheists and civil rights issue once again — it makes everyone so happy. The Science Ethicist is really peeved with DJ Grothe, who in a recent Point of Inquiry podcast repeated his assertion that a) atheism is not a civil rights issue, and b) lots of atheists are making their civil rights a major issue.
The curious twist here is that he’s interviewing Peter Irons, author of God on Trial, who at the very beginning makes the point strongly that religion is the most divisive issue in the country after race, and that there is a deep intolerance towards atheists. Then Grothe springs his traditional assertion that those other atheists are making too big a deal of civil rights. Irons comes back with the argument that the discrimination against atheists does make it an issue of civil rights. I don’t quite get the point of Grothe’s argument. I agree with Irons that it is a civil rights issue, but I also agree willingly that there is no comparison with the oppression faced by women and homosexuals and blacks; most of the atheists I know would probably agree, that it’s a real issue, but it’s probably not the most important struggle we face right now.
I’m not quite ready to give up on the podcast as Aerik is since they get such good guests (and the Irons interview is very good), but I do think Grothe is flogging a dead horse. Can we at least agree that it has been settled somewhere close to the position that it is a civil rights issue, but not one that imposes the kind of discrimination that we need to resolve by new legislation? And that Grothe can stop complaining about all those nonexistent atheist leaders who think they are the next Martin Luther King?
First we had that Wisconsinite caught trying to have sex with roadkill in Minnesota. Then it was decreed that it is illegal to have sex with dead animals, which I’m sure has distressed many a leather fetishist. Now I learn that the three Wisconsin boys who conspired to dig up the body of a dead young woman in order to have sex with it can only be charged with misdemeanor attempted theft, because it is not illegal to commit necrophilia in Wisconsin. I guess necrophilia is a victimless crime, after all, and our disgust at the perpetrators isn’t sufficient cause for serious criminal charges.
Still, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead in Wisconsin.
This is just a slideshow of album covers for the most annoying songs of all time, and it’s fairly safe to view—it doesn’t actually play any music clips. I was just thinking (like an evil mad scientist—occupational hazard, you know) that if someone did string together the musical hooks for all of those bad songs, you’d either get the most devastating earworm ever, or they’d all just cancel each other out and you might get an earworm cure. Anyone want to try the experiment?
(via that Chimpanzee Refuge)
