I know the summer is coming to an end when the Stevens County Fair opens. I’m going to be spending a good chunk of my afternoon and evening there tonight — I’ll be holding down the Stevens Community Humane Society booth from 6-8pm, and the Stevens County DFL booth from 8:30-10:30pm. I’ll have a whole free half hour in there to duck into the beer hall.
I’m being prayed for.
A prayer for the soul of PZ Meyers
Dear God of Enduring Love, The atheist evilutionist and liberal elite college professor PZ Meyers has lost The Way and says some of the MOST hateful things about Your Work on this Earth and Republic that it is easy to understand why good Christians would pray for the Absolute Damnation of his soul to an eternity in the Hellfire of the Beast. The darkness of his Soul must cause you at least as much pain as do the souls of Muslims and Jews. Dear God, please find in Your great Heart warmth to share in the heart of PZ Meyers, or otherwise, he will continue to perform the Demon’s Duty and steal other souls from you. And please make it difficult for the computers of children and teenagers to visit his many websites where he proclaims his Dark Message of despair and secularization so that their impressionable bodies and minds are not brought under his spell.
I am always so pleased to see my opponents appeal to the impotency of a non-existent being through the ineffectual medium of talking to themselves.
Here is an excellent article on the biology of sexual orientation. We all know this is a contentious issue — are we born with an orientation, or is it a ‘choice’ that people make? — and the article just lays the facts out for us and points out some of the lacunae in our knowledge.
First Luskin, now Vox Day rushes to say something incredibly stupid (so what else is new?) about the new hominin fossils.
It doesn’t matter what the evidence is, evolutionary biologists are happy to change their story to suit.
Errm, what?
There’s a problem in principle with his objection: yes, that’s what scientists are supposed to do. They’re supposed to follow the evidence where it leads, not cling to a story in spite of the evidence. Religious fruitcakes like Day are the ones who think sticking to a falsified story in spite of the evidence is a virtue.
There’s also a problem in detail. He’s buying into one of the many extremely poor media stories about this discovery that claims the difference in ages of the two specimens means Homo habilis could not possibly be a human ancestor. In this case, the media aren’t entirely to blame — some of the authors have been making similar claims — but it’s still bogus and contradicted by the conclusions of the actual paper.
Day also complains that there are different versions of the theory of evolution, and cites this story as an example. He’s screwed up pretty thoroughly: while there are different mechanisms that play a role in evolution, this is an example of a historical detail, not something broadly related to theoretical concerns, and it does not call into question any mechanisms. In particular, scientists arguing about the precise relationships of species within a specific mammalian lineage does not mean there’s room for god-went-poof explanations.
These guys should just read John Hawks, who actually knows something about the subject.
But this idea of contemporaneity of H. habilis and H. erectus is neither interesting nor new. Recall yesterday’s story about the African and Asian clade hypothesis? News stories had the same lede — “hominid family tree more complex than thought.” This is the ultimate paleontological “dog bites man”: “Human Evolution A Bush, Not A Ladder.” It’s just not interesting anymore.
He goes on to say that there are very interesting things about these fossils: they just aren’t the ones that a poorly informed media or the actively delusional creationists are battening on.
Amateurs. The Discovery Institute has already weighed in on the recently discovered hominin fossils, and wouldn’t you know it … Casey Luskin squeaks that we must simply disown Homo habilis, and of course he claims that Jonathan Wells has been vindicated in his ‘refutation’ of a straight line of human descent. And of course he quote mines scientists who say the transitions in human evolution are complex and incompletely understood — as if anthropologists have been claiming to have a complete and perfect answer.
The real irony, though, is that little Casey Luskin, pretentious junior lawyer, pompously declaims that he must “favor abandoning theories that aren’t working.” Exactly what theory is he abandoning? The theory that humans descended from an African ancestor with a smaller brain, that they evolved from more primitive apes? Because that theory isn’t refuted at all by the latest evidence, although I’m sure he’d like to pretend it is.
What this evidence reinforces is the observation that humankind was not a specially privileged lineage, that the ape family tree was diverse and complex, and that we had distant cousins who were following several different paths in their history. This is no comfort to creationists of any ideological stripe.
Somebody else has visited Darwin’s house and taken a stroll on the sandwalk. I can testify that it is surprisingly difficult to get to the place, unless you have a trusty native guide — but once you get to the village, it really ought to be easier than that to find the place.
Two new Homo fossils are described in this week’s Nature, and here they are.
Pity the children at Castle Hills First Baptist School. It is a truly god-soaked institution, where everything is distorted to fit a fundagelical vision. I’ve heard of inserting God into biology, obviously, but the description of godly calculus has got to be seen to be believed. And history is apparently the study of the nature of god as revealed by social studies, while Jesus’ preferred economic model is capitalism.
It’s in Texas, of course.
I wonder if it is the perfect model of what McLeroy wants done with the public school system?
