Gary Farber explains our family’s eating habits

Not mine—the weirder and more peculiar the food, the more likely I am to snarf it down—but those of certain other members of the Myers clan whose identities I will abstain from mentioning, lest they decide to add some really interesting ingredients to my next meal. Anyway, it’s an interesting study that explains why some people get queasy at the thought of food “touching”—it’s a common response to fear of contamination. It’s basically documenting the psychological reality of cooties.

Now if only he had provided an explanation for how to overcome it — the prohibition on mixing too many flavors in our meals is constraining the menu too much around here.

Students and schools behaving badly

This is an ugly story, and it’s ugly on both sides. First, rude students make a nasty, mocking video of one of their teachers and post it to YouTube, which is bad enough; these are kids who definitely need some discipline. But then the school district suspends the students for 40 days in punishment. Forty days is almost a quarter of the school year. They deserved a harsh response, but kicking them out of school just deprives them of the education they need, and they’re probably going to regard it as a vacation.

I must confess, though, that what first caught my eye about the story is that it’s from Kent, Washington — where I grew up. I read it wondering if it was my alma mater, Kent-Meridian High School, that was going to be the scene of the crime…and no, it wasn’t. It was Kentridge, our hated cross-town rivals, the school that was even more despised than Auburn. I felt relief.

It’s funny how those silly scholastic enmities can come back to you after 30 years…

The Creation Museum

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This week, the creationist Ken Ham and his organization, Answers in Genesis, are practicing the Big Lie. They have spent tens of millions of dollars to create a glossy simulacrum of a museum, a slick imitation of a scientific enterprise veneered over long disproved religious fables, and they are gathering crowds and world-wide attention to the grand opening of their edifice of deceit. You can now take a photographic tour of the exhibits and see for yourself—it’s not science at all, but merely a series of Bible stories dolled up in dioramas.

The blogosphere is also giving them some attention — almost none of it favorable. What I’ve done here is collect recent reactions from all over to the Creation Museum, and compile them down into a link and a short and (I hope) representative extract. Browse through this long, long list, and when you find some quote that tickles your interest, follow the link to find the complete article. The National Center for Science Education has also compiled reactions from journalists, educators, scientists, and scientific organizations for yet more reading on the subject.

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Patience!

I’d planned to have that Creation Museum carnival done early this morning, but the response has been huge—I’ve culled it down to about 65 entries, and I’m busily trying to sort them out in some semblance of order, so it’ll be a little longer. Have patience.

Boy, you guys really hate Ken Ham’s Propaganda Palace. It warms me right down to the black, empty void at my heart, where I think the temperature might have risen to a whole tenth of a degree above absolute zero.

Three Wise Fools

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Fresh off his earthshaking debunking of the whole of evolutionary biology with his classic “banana” and “coke can” arguments, Ray Comfort has a compelling new argument against atheism: the electricity argument. It’s a little story about “three wise fools” who are exposed to electricity for the first time, and who refuse to believe in this amazing invisible force, and refuse even to test it. Obviously, the “wise fools” are supposed to be modern scientists, and the invisible force they refuse to acknowledge is a god. Comfort tells the tale to make the scientists look like obstinate idiots who refuse to look at the evidence in the natural world and instead make rabbinical arguments about authorities and texts and…hey, wait a minute! Who’s being parodied here?

Anyway, his parable is a patent lie, and he completely misrepresented the events in the encounter. I know. I was there. The full and accurate transcript of the actual test follows.

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Step away from that ladder

We’ve often heard this claim from creationists: “there is no way for genetics to cause an increase in complexity without a designer!”. A recent example has been Michael Egnor’s obtuse caterwauling about it. We, including myself, usually respond in the same way: of course it can. And then we list examples of observations that support the obviously true conclusion that you can get increases in genetic information over time: we talk about gene duplication, gene families, pseudogenes, etc., all well-documented manifestations of natural processes that increase the genetic content of the organism. It happens, it’s clear and simple, get over it, creationists.

Maybe we’ve been missing the point all along, though. The premise of that question from the creationists is what they consider a self-evident fact: that evolution posits a steady increase in complexity from bacteria to Homo sapiens, the deep-rooted idea of the scala natura, a ladder of complexity from simple to complex. Their argument is that the ladder cannot be climbed, and our response is usually, “sure it can, watch!” when perhaps a better answer, one that is even more damaging to their ideology, is that there is no ladder to climb.

That’s a tougher answer to explain, though, and what makes it even more difficult is that there is a long scientific tradition of pretending the ladder is there. Larry Moran has an excellent article on this problem (Alex has a different perspective), and I want to expand on it a little more.

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