Fearful bunnies

I was walking the dog last night when Holly (the collie) spotted a couple bunnies in the nearby grass. The bunnies stood perfectly still as we walked past, even though Holly was pulling at the leash trying to run over to take a closer look. This Good Friday anecdote illustrates a common phenomenon. When they sense that potential predators are nearby, many types of animals get as still as statues, thereby blending into the background to avoid confrontation. It’s not hard to see how such a behavior has been naturally selected. For some reason, it occurred to me that many of the conservative religious folks who visit this site do something analogous when they feel threatened by freethinkers. They intellectually freeze. Instead of engaging on the topic, they pull out a pre-packaged arsenal that includes a handful of platitudes that they repeat ad nauseam in order to avoid intellectual confrontation. These platitudes are not invitations for meaningful discussion, but rather inert utterances such as the following:

  • The Bible is inerrant.
  • Science doesn't know everything.
  • Humans are not “animals.”
  • Science can't disprove God or supernatural occurrences.
  • People who question religion are arrogant.
For some conservative believers (and for all fundamentalists), these platitudes (which range from ambiguous to disproved) constitute their entire "intellectual" arsenal. When the predator freethinkers have moved on, these believers spring back to intellectual activity, even going so far as to vigorously question everything else in their lives. They aren’t fools, you see. They only fear taking a close look at their own cherished beliefs. In other words, many religious conservatives are unwilling to make any meaningful intellectual moves when it comes to discussing their own religion. They're unwilling to consider new evidence, even evidence that is overwhelming. They are unwilling to consider new proven-reliable ways of analyzing evidence. Hence, evolutionary biology is an anathema. Why? [Repeat the platitudes over and over]. In short, many people who are religiously conservative use a strategy of intellectually freezing in place, hoping that all of the scientist-predators simply move along. In their own minds, this is a strategy that has been proven to “work.”

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MIT votes open-access regarding scientific papers

According to Wired, Scientific publishing might have just reached a tipping point, thanks to a new open access policy at MIT. . . [MIT's] faculty voted last week to make all of their papers available for free on the web, the first university-wide policy of its sort. MIT's Hal Abelson argued that this move "changed the power dynamics between scientific publishers and researchers." He pointed out that publishers "have been reluctant to give up control of the informational resources they have." Open access advocates have argued that "the current scientific publishing paradigm is broken because publishers control the scientific record, not academics"

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Flooded With Data

I had an urge to think through some implications of a world-wide flood, such as the one Biblical Literalists claim happened a few thousand years ago. Let's suppose that it happened, that the entire world was inundated all at once to cover the highest mountain, and that all surviving land animals and short-range birds were preserved in a single boat. What would the ecological landscape look like? gray worldFirst, all land animals would only be found on a single connected land mass. There is no way that any crawling creature could have reached Australia or the Americas from the Middle East. Most especially tropical animals. Secondly, we expect to see floral panspermia. That is, the waters would have carried every species of seed to every land mass all at once. Vanilla and cocoa and peppercorns should all be found growing in the same places throughout human history. Same for and chile peppers and coffee and potatoes. Wheat and maize should also be seen as combined staples of every ancient diet. Or the opposite: The flood waters killed off all the seeds except what was carried on the ark. Therefore, only the plants found in the middle east could exist anywhere in the world. Also, all modern animal species should be represented in every geological flood stratum. After all, a single massive drowning event doesn't distinguish between creatures of comparable size like an allosaur and an elephant or a trilobite and a mouse. Surely there must be abundant examples of these combined fossils. So it is easy to prove that such a flood actually happened. In fact, it must have been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt when Europeans first sailed to the Americas and found everything there to be just the same as back home.

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A Master’s in Creationism

LOL*cough* Excuse me. I nearly choked on a handful of almonds. My created/intelligently designed oesophagus is just a little too close to my trachaea, making it very easy to block the latter with particles of chewed food whilst laughing my arse right off its hinges when I read stuff like this FOX article:

State Rep. Leo Berman (R-Tyler) proposed House Bill 2800 when he learned that The Institute for Creation Research (ICR), a private institution that specializes in the education and research of biblical creationism, was not able to receive a certificate of authority from Texas' Higher Education Coordinating Board to grant Master of Science degrees.
So. "Education" and "research" (grin) of biblical creationism (chortle). OK, well, although I'm no theologian or creation scientist (snort) , allow me to sum up the entire proposed course for you: Education: God did it. Research: it says in the Bible that God did it. Thesis: the Bible says God did it; the Bible is always right because God wrote it; God is always right; the evidence for this is in the Bible which God wrote; my conclusion is that God did it (and is always right, just like the book He wrote). Well done, here's your diploma & whimsical "WWJD" t-shirt that all the kids are wearing. That'll be several thousand dollars. Hmm?

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How to spot religion in science clothing

How can you easily spot religion in science clothing? According to New Scientist book review editor Amanda Gefter, look for these code words:

  1. Scientific Materialism
  2. The invocation of Cartesian dualism
  3. Misguided interpretations of quantum physics (also a "New Age" giveaway)
  4. The terms "Darwinism" or "Darwinist" (scientists refer to "evolution" and "biologists")
  5. Referring to natural selection as "blind", "random" or an "undirected process"
There's also a censorship story within this story. Click the above link for more.

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