FSM symbol sighting
I don't see many of these Flying Spaghetti Monster symbols on the road, but I saw this one this week. They are far outnumbered by the Jesus fish and the Darwin fish.
I don't see many of these Flying Spaghetti Monster symbols on the road, but I saw this one this week. They are far outnumbered by the Jesus fish and the Darwin fish.
Richard Dawkins once wrote a letter to his ten-year old daughter, explaining the difference between belief based on evidence versus authority. This letter addresses the appropriateness of extrapolating from evidence in making solid scientific conclusions. The title of this article from a book of Dawkins' essays entitled "A Devil's Chaplin," is "Good and Bad Reasons for Believing." And I do believe that any reasonable ten year old who keeps an open mind can see the difference. After all, we do informal science all day every day. The problem for some of us is when we start discussing the undeniable reality of humans as animals, thus highlighting our kinship with "lower" animals and suggesting that our creation was natural (and is ongoing). Understanding this basic point made by Dawkins doesn't require great intelligence. It requires intellectual courage. It requires that one quits screwing around with the burden of proof when testing propositions.
Strap on your seat belt and learn about the reality of primates:
“Primates” are collectively defined as any gill-less, organic RNA/DNA protein-based, metabolic, metazoic, nucleic, diploid, bilaterally-symmetrical, endothermic, digestive, tryploblast, opisthokont, deuterostome coelemate with a spinal chord and 12 cranial nerves connecting to a limbic system in an enlarged cerebrial cortex with a reduced olfactory region inside a jawed-skull with specialized teeth including canines and premolars, forward-oriented fully-enclosed optical orbits, and a single temporal fenestra, -attached to a vertebrate hind-leg dominant tetrapoidal skeleton with a sacral pelvis, clavical, and wrist & ankle bones; and having lungs, tear ducts, body-wide hair follicles, lactal mammaries, opposable thumbs, and keratinized dermis with chitinous nails on all five digits on all four extremities, in addition to an embryonic development in amniotic fluid, leading to a placental birth and highly social lifestyle.
See here for the full transcript. This video constitutes a highly condensed summary of some of the basic principles of evolutionary biology so often overlooked by creationists. The author goes to pains to point out that scientists don't just make claims about evolutionary development because they want to make these claims. Rather, the conclusions of evolutionary biology are compelled by an elaborate well-documented scheme of development based on massive collections of evidence, verified by thousands of scientists over hundreds of years, including more than a few scientists who were conservative Christians. Using this evidence, we can trace the development of a species from antecedent related species , but the phylogenetic tree of life . . . can be just as objectively confirmed from the top down when re-examined genetically. This is why it is referred to as a “twin-nested hierarchy.”The next time you hear people arguing about nature versus nurture in the area of neuroscience, tell them to cut it out. Nature versus nurture is no longer a meaningful debate, according to Mriganka Sur, wriging in the Dec 12, 2008 edition of Science (available online only to subscribers): Among…
It would seem according to this report that University and College presence of Intelligent Design is on its deathbed. Perhaps this is premature, but if true it would signal that the basic inability of ID to support its own conclusions are now becoming evident to all but the thoroughly committed.…