Property values in St Paul just plummeted

In an unfortunate twist of fate for the former home of the Science Museum of Minnesota, the Church of Scientology is moving in.

The Church of Scientology has purchased the former Science Museum of Minnesota building in downtown St. Paul

Eric Rapp, a Welsh Cos. broker who marketed the space, said the church plans a major renovation of the building that once housed exhibits and has since been the home of the failed Minnesota Business Academy.

Rapp wouldn’t disclose the sale price of the 80,000-square-foot west building of the former museum complex. The sale closed Friday. A number of financial institutions had come to own the building, which was on the market since May 2006, he said.

It’s depressing, but the new building the Science Museum of Minnesota is in is wonderful, and you all ought to visit it. Skip the scientologists, though.

Portrait of my alter ego

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(click for larger image)

Uh-oh. My actual identity has been exposed, and one of my true forms has actually been published in a publication of the American popular press. Now people are going to understand why I am so pro-choice: “I AM PHARYNGULA, THE HARVESTER OF STILLBORN SOULS!”

About the English thing—I’ve been working on it, ‘k? And I have no idea who the cheerleader chick is.

Otherwise, though, sure, that’s exactly what I look like. Horns, red glowing eyes, muscles like boulders stuck under my skin, armful of squirming babi…hey, wait a minute. What’s with the babies? “I’m a fierce demon and I’m gonna kick your ass…right after I change little Phillipe’s diaper and settle Brittany with a bottle. Hey, know any lullabyes?” What kind of demon is all motherly? And where are the tentacles? They left off the tentacles and drew me with freaking RUG RATS?

All I’ve got is this one panel from DC’s “Countdown” series (thanks for sending it, Marc!). I hope he at least has the power to stun his opponents with boring lectures on development, genetics, and molecular biology. And that he puts the babies down now and then. Maybe he runs a daycare?

P.S. I just got a note from Jim Kakalios: the cheerleader is Mary Marvel, and he’s wearing dead babies. At least that minimizes the fuss of taking care of them, and opens the door to dead baby jokes. Hmmm…I wonder if he’d get offended at dead baby jokes? He might take them very personally, you know.

Dubito Ergo Sum has a scan of the full page. Pharyngula has some unpleasant dietary preferences, it seems.

It’s junk. Get over it.

Now, see, this is why you shouldn’t read a gadgets & fashion magazine for information on science. Wired has run an awful little article that breathlessly claims that junk DNA ain’t junk—it’s all got a purpose, because opossum junk DNA is different from human junk DNA (I know, that makes no sense at all, but there it is in the article).

Then, just to make it even worse, that non sequitur is followed up by bunch of “we knew it all along” quotes from creationists. And then they’ve got Francis Collins chiming in and saying that he doesn’t use the term “junk” because he thinks it’s all lying around in case there’s a future use for it. Gah. He’s supposed to know what he’s talking about; it sure doesn’t show whenever he opens his mouth.

Fortunately, Larry Moran shreds this one. In addition, one scientist who was quoted as saying something sensible in the article, T. Ryan Gregory, expands and clarifies his sole comment. It’s really too bad the writer didn’t spend more time with him than with Michael Behe.

The silence of the sheep

I mentioned before that there has been a peculiar silence on the ID blogs about Michael Behe’s new book, The Edge of Evolution. Behe was the one marginally credible biologist on the Discovery Institute team, the guy who got everything rolling with Darwin’s Black Box and their old magic mantra of “irreducible complexity,” and it’s been like an information blackout from Dembski and Luskin and West and Meyer on his latest effort.

Now John Lynch has cataloged the responses. There are some complaints about the critics, but almost no one is trying to defend any of Behe’s conclusions.

So far, this is nothing like the circus we got when Darwin’s Black Box was released—we were constantly slapping down little creationists who were enthused to pieces that they had this serious book that they were sure completely refuted all of evolution. I suspect there are two general responses from ID-leaning readers out there:

  • “Wut? I din’t come from no monkey!”
  • “How am I going to use his criticisms of random mutation and natural selection without endorsing common descent and this scary idea that god is intentionally creating every parasite and disease?”

That is, they’re torn between the clueless rejection of the parts of evolutionary biology Behe has accepted (which is probably the majority view) and the realization that Behe has said too much about the nature of their designer—so much, in fact, that it’s going to turn off their backers who want evidence that they are the creations of a loving god.

There may also be some reluctance for a proponent to do a thorough review because they’d feel compelled to criticize major parts of his claims…and doing that would be fomenting a schism.

We’ll have to wait and see if ever any of the fellow travelers in the ID movement ever get around to articulating their views.

It’s Big Bird! No, it’s Gigantoraptor!

This is Gigantoraptor erlianensis, a newly described oviraptorosaur from late Cretaceous of China. It’s a kind of nightmare version of Big Bird — it’s estimated to have weighed about 1400kg (1½ tons for non-metric Americans).

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Histological examination of the growth structure of the bones suggests that this fellow was a young adult, about 11 years old, and that they grew rapidly and reached nearly this size by the time they were 7. And since it is a young adult, there were probably bigger gigantoraptors running around. They also compared limb length to other dinosaurs, like the tyrannosaurs—gigantoraptor had longer, slimmer legs and was more of a runner than they were.

There’s no sign whether it was covered with bright yellow feathers.

Xu X, Tan Q, Wang J, Zhao X, Tan L (2007) A gigantic bird-like dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of China. Nature advance online publication, 13 June 2007.