Evolution Is True

That is the name of the Facebook page that I have been graciously granted administrative access to, surprisingly alongside biologist and veterinarian Amiee Miller, and physicist and mathematician W. Steven Schneider.  What a privilege! 

You can find the page, tarnished with my first couple posts here. 

Creationist anti-science bills shot dead

Over the past few months, ten anti-evolution and anti-climate change bills have been introduced into the legislatures of nine different states in the US (including two in Missourri). Most of these bills echoed traditional Creationist subterfuge in the form of "teach the strengths and weaknesses", and "academic freedom", style arguments. A couple, however, were shamelessly explicit in their aims. Missouri's House Bill 291, for example, would have required "the equal treatment of science instruction regarding evolution and intelligent design".

But the highlight of this story?  All ten bills either died in committee, or shortly after on the floor.  

Unfortunately, not all afflicted states were able to cleanse themselves of toxic legislature. In Louisiana, an attempt to repeal the Louisiana Science Education Act was recently tabled.

A field of frost flowers

Thousands of cheeky little frost flowers formed on this pond just beside one of my wells. Warm, supersaturated water vapour created when the pond ice sublimates (becomes a gas) meets the colder atmosphere above the ice, and condenses into crystals. Pure natural complexity :-)

Curiously,  some of the hoar frost-like structures even formed on parts of the well itself. 

"Design", by Robert Frost

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,

On a white heal-all, holding up a moth

Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth –

Assorted characters of death and blight

Mixed ready to begin the morning right,

Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth –

A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,

And dead wings carried like a paper kite.



What had that flower to do with being white,

The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?

What brought the kindred spider to that height,

Then steered the white moth thither in the night?

What but design of darkness to appall?–

If design govern in a thing so small.



A fascinating critical analysis of "Design" can be found here.

What Is Creationism?

It should be added that its modern manifestation is better known as, "Intelligent Design". 

Bilateral what?

Bilateral assymetrical gyndromorphism.  The phenomenon where one half of an organism's body is male, the other half is female.

A gynandromorph Papilio glaucus

 

 

The condition typically occurs early in an organism's development, when a cell fails to divide it's sex chromosome properly, resulting in, for example, one XXY-Y cell and one Y cell, as opposed to an XX and a YY.  These ... confused... cells will continue to reproduce, and as the affected creature grows, will end up with equal half-male and half-female tissues.

 

More information can be found here

Even More Geological Reasons the Noachian Deluge Did Not Happen

Another, "Reports of the National Center for Science Education", has been released, and within it was a PDF file containing nine decent-sized pages of anti-Flood arguments, dealing with the supposed "deposition" of the Grand Canyon, the formation of sandstone, and radiolarian cherts (minerals made from the left-over silica skeletal structures of tiny organisms).

"More Geological Reason Noah's Flood Did Not Happen"

Yea, I just got a little aroused.

The page to see the article can be found here.  For whatever reason, I had difficulties with actually loading the PDF on the page itself, so I downloaded it. 

For the convenience of the average uninformed reader, a quick introduction is given to Young Earth Creationism, and a larger one is given to the uniformitarian interpretation of geology.  For the satisfaction of the informed reader, the author does choose to completely dissect and disarm the arguments at hand. 

Anyway, the entire article focuses on the claims made by one Michael Oard, in a paper that was published in Creation Ministries International's wannabe-science outlet "The Creation Journal".  What Oard, an atmospheric meteorologist, is doing fooling around in stratigraphy is beyond me, but the NCSE is quick to point out the errors of his logic and methods: ignoring decades worth of geologic literature, relying on miracle circumstances, and neglecting to address certain important factors.  You know, typical Creationist scientific procedure.  He also makes several factual mistakes, such as making highly misinformed statements about the geological formation of sandstone and orthoquartzites, among other things. 

But that is all I will say, lest I ruin the ending for you, which goes something like this:

 

The scientific evidence strongly suggests that a global Noachian Flood did not happen.

Oard’s (2002) model requires not only the rejection of strict uniformitarian models, as he

claims, but also a repudiation of practically all the geologic processes that geoscientists

have studied and confirmed for decades. A model of geologic processes that only works by rejecting the fundamental knowledge in the geosciences is not a scientific model at all, but little more than wishful thinking.