Don’t be surprised—it’s just another couple of clueless creationists bumbling into science they don’t understand, extracting single sentences out of context, and coming to faulty conclusions that contradict the actual results of the paper. Orac gets to have a little fun ripping up an easy creationist mark.
Who would have thought Wonder Woman sprang from such an unusual source?
Well, actually, I guess in retrospect that it was obvious.
I usually like Cornelia Dean’s science reporting, but this recent collection of book reviews put me off from the opening paragraph. She begins with the tired old claim that “scientists have to be brave” to embrace religion. Malarkey. I’ve never heard a scientist bring up the subject of religion, pro or con, at a scientific conference or associated informal gathering. You can be as devout as you want to be with no risk to your professional career (you may even find yourself an icon for the compatibility of science and religion!), and as for your personal life, being religious in a country in which 90% of the residents self-identify as religious, and in which religiosity has become a defining character of our political leadership, is hard to characterize as boldly bucking a trend. The rest of the review is an exercise in credulity.
That army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids idea? It looks like it might be old hat. Owlmirror found an old and rather cryptic
Japanese print of armored warrior cephalopods…and there’s a much, much higher resolution image of the same at that link. I can’t quite make out what they’re fighting, though…an army of dumplings? Meatballs? Who reads Japanese out there?
Ricky Santorum has us scientists down cold.
Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.
So, you see, scientists are amoral, with nothing to hold them back from pursuing their dreams of unbridled, raging power. I’m sure if we asked Li’l Ricky about atheists, he’d turn pale and tell us all kinds of horror stories.
Atheist scientists, of course, are absolutely the worst. Watch out—when my army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids is assembled, I won’t hesitate to use it.
Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it’s a very badly done gimmick that doesn’t say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don’t have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.
Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to start with forms you know are linearly related and you’ve got to define and align anatomical features very carefully. Picking random photos of various primates and blending them ain’t it.
Mark Chu-Carroll has a post up that does two admirable things: it deflates yet another creationist and his grandly fallacious claims, and it gives me a new toy to play with.
Since I was just griping about the false claim that the political left is as anti-scientific as the right, I will mention one exception where I think the argument has some merit: alternative medicine. I am not a fan of the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), which had a 2005 budget of 123 million dollars—123 million dollars that was sucked away from legitimate science and placed in the hands of quacks. The latest issue of Science has two articles, pro and con, on NCCAM, and you might be able to guess where my sympathies lay.
How could I have ever said a charitable word about Alan Dershowitz? In penance, I urge you all to read Juan Cole’s dissection of Dershowitz’s grading of civilianity, or if you’d prefer something lighter, try Kung Fu Monkey’s demolition by amusing anecdote.
If anyone were in the mood to revisit my earlier post, you could easily undermine my appreciation of Dershowitz’s argument there by pointing out that it is Alan Dershowitz talking about morality, and I would have to sheepishly admit that he has no credibility on the matter.
Digby’s argument, that the Bush administration language about the war in the Middle East is loaded with code words to pander to the looney fundamentalist base, isn’t entirely convincing. Just the fact that Rice used a word, “birth-pang,” that Rapture nuts have loaded with all kinds of millennialist meaning doesn’t mean she consciously chose it to make the fundies all giddy.
I admit, though, that the only reason I reject the hypothesis is that this administration has been so incompetent that I suspect they babble this kind of stuff all the time without putting any effort into thinking about it. These guys aren’t geniuses; overestimation of their abilities is something we should leave to their sycophants.
