750 Million Dead, No End In Sight
Scientists: “No cure yet”
New York, Chicago, L.A., World Capitols Shut Down
How about that?
It could happen.
A couple of microscopic, inanimate bits of protein could actually save the world from the plague of humanity that’s brought the biosphere to the abyss of destruction.
Considering that we came from some bits of amino acids, proteins, microstuff, way back when, we could be looking at the ultimate ironic justice.
Yeah. We could. How about that?
No, this isn’t about the law down in Tennessee that will sneak religious fairy tales into science classes. Not directly anyway.
NPR’s Takeaway program this morning featured a discussion on the Tennessee law. On one side they had a representative from a national science organization. In the middle they had the usual not-too-competent interlocutor, John Hockenberry. And representing Tennessee they had a seventh grade science teacher.
Okay.
And then Hockenberry says the science teacher doesn’t believe evolution is true.
Think about that for a second. A certified science teacher, teaching seventh graders, who believes one of the most fundamental theories of science isn’t true.
The State of Tennessee certified this guy to teach science. To children. A guy who doesn’t accept the Biblical flood of evidence, of fact, of research, that support evolution.
This same State of Tennessee wants to make it okay to teach Biblical fairy tales in science classrooms. Or rather to protect teachers who want to do so. It’s all a little ambiguous, no doubt designed that way to cover its sins.
And during this little colloquy did Hockenberry ask the teacher to explain why he didn’t believe evolution is true? Barely in passing, and getting the answer, “There’s some problems with it,” which Hockenberry just brushed past. I should note that Hockenberry has had a distinguished career in journalism, but on this show he inserts his opinion too often, asks questions that roll on forever, and ignores key items, i.e., why was this guy certified to teach in Tennessee, and what the hell was Tennessee thinking when it certified him.
There’s about a dozen states trying to pull this off. It’s a little fluid, but the states where this is going on or has gone on (it never goes away) include Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, and Indiana. And that’s likely not an exhaustive list.
What we’ve got here is a case of severe stupidity being enshrined in law and education, and in children’s minds, by the state, where citizens have chosen to elect incredibly narrow-minded, ignorant religious fundogelical freaks to their legislatures and state offices.
Never mind ‘America the Beautiful’. A more accurate song would be titled ‘America the Backward’.
#
Here’s another argument for requiring educational, intellectual, and emotional testing of people who want to serve in public office. A Republican (of course, again) is sponsoring a bill to force the teaching of creationism in school classrooms, which is not unusual from the intellectual Neandertals on the right, but this one has an ugly twist to it.
It would require science teachers to address scientists’ “political and ideological viewpoints and their position on the concept of atheism.”
The bill’s sponsor, Republican Jerry Bergevin, explained:
I want the full portrait of evolution and the people who came up with the ideas to be presented. It’s a worldview and it’s godless. Atheism has been tried in various societies, and they’ve been pretty criminal domestically and internationally. The Soviet Union, Cuba, the Nazis, China today: they don’t respect human rights. As a general court we should be concerned with criminal ideas like this and how we are teaching it… Columbine, remember that? They were believers in evolution. That’s evidence right there.
Believing in evolution is evidence of criminality? Believing in science means you are a criminal? What’s next from these brilliant thinkers – legislation demanding that we burn witches?
Two other Republicans have introduced another bill that is fairly standard fare for the brain damaged religionists of the right. From the Huffington Post:
As the Concord Monitor noted, "[Representative Gary] Hopper points to the state constitution and its order that teachers support their students’ ‘morality and piety’ for the justification of his bill." The article goes on to explain, "He would like to see intelligent design – the idea that a creator controlled how early life on Earth developed – taught in classrooms, but hasn’t been able to find an example of the philosophy being successfully legislated into schools."
Gee, Gary, there’s reasons for that. One, it’s not a philosophy, it’s simple ignorance. Two, the courts, including the Supreme Court, have said over and over that you can’t foist your religion on students in public schools.
Unfortunately New Hampshire is not the only state these dim bulbs of the religious right are attempting to pollute with their profound desire to return to the tenth century, or perhaps they have the Stone Age in mind.
Apparently the old religious saying is still true: “The dumbass religionists we will always have with us.”
#
Go ahead, read the article at Common Dreams about the fundogelicals from Liberty University, the child of viper evangelist Jerry Falwell, who want to be doctors, researchers, and lawyers, but utterly refuse to accept the solid scientific research and study underlying evolution.
Do we really want people this stupid, this arrogant, this childish, to be working in any job other than digging ditches or flipping hamburgers?
These are people who want to be doctors, but given their beliefs they won’t be able to accept the germ theory of disease. After all, bacteria evolve.
These are people who want to be lawyers, but mentally and emotionally can’t handle facts and evidence.
These are people who want to do research. Why? Everything they need to know is in their pathetic holy book written thousands of years ago for a society barely out of the Stone Age. Turn these fools and idiots loose on society and they’ll take us right back to those times.
Condemning his school and his students and himself, out of his own mouth, is professor of paleontology Marcus Ross, who teaches his students the utterly idiotic nonsense of creationism as if it were fact and evolution was nothing more than a pack of lies. He says, at the end of the article, “The attitude is when you are a creationist you are ignorant of the facts.”
He teaches his students that dinosaurs were wiped from the face of the Earth 4,000 to 5,000 years ago during the flood that Noah survived by building an ark.
Yeah, Ross, you are willfully ignorant, and you should be stripped of whatever academic credentials you bought at the fundogelical dime store, because you and your buddy professors are a disgrace to learning, to intellect, to education. You’re the vipers that mislead, that poison the world, that cripple the minds of youth.
Do the world a favor and go crawl back into your cave and tell your fairy tales by the fire.
#
James Dobson, of the Family Research Council, a fundogelical organization of low origin and mean tactics and little knowledge, typical of fundogelical organizations everywhere, should be more than pleased to learn that scientists have have discovered the earliest known ancestor of man, a being nicknamed Ardi.
The Lion might suggest, if he were in a mean mood, that Ardi demonstrated superior intelligence relative to Mr. Dobson and his crew of fundogelicals, but The Lion is not a mean person. So The Lion will just say it: Ardi was smarter – she accepted the real world for what it was and dealt in the facts of it, not the fantasies and lies and distortions the fundogelicals revel in.
Fundogelicals everywhere, meet your mama!
Stephen Bergman wrote a column for the Globe today about… well, read the damned thing. You might be ready to pack your bags and go when you’re done.
The Opinion page in today’s Globe carries a piece by a Stephen C. Meyer, identified as the Director of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture. Among other things he is pimping his new book.
The Discovery Institute, for those of you who have no clue, is the place where fake scientists concoct phony science to push religious creationism. Meyer’s piece is full of delicious ludicrousisms (hey, if they can make up science, The Lion can make up words).
The piece is headlined ‘Jefferson’s support for intelligent design’.
Among other things, Meyer ignores that Thomas Jefferson, astute politician and revolutionary leader he may have been, lived long before Darwin and well before the discoveries of modern science. To consider him an informed and authoritative source on science and evolution suggests that Meyer and his cronies are at the worst desperate, and at the best, desperate.
In his opening paragraph Mr. Meyer calls down the spirit of Jefferson to invest his opinion with authority and immediately dives deep into the waters of the ridiculous.
Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution.
IDism is in no legitimate way an alternative to Darwin’s science, which includes the scientific investigations of thousands of legitimate scientists in a wide variety of sciences. The legal case, Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, convincingly settled that idea.
But consider the other bit of fakery and falsehood in that statement: IDism cannot be discussed under the Constitution. That is ridiculous on its face. Anyone can nail the Constitution to the ceiling and discuss whatever they want under it. Anyone can talk about IDism whenever they want. What Meyer is not saying is what he really means, and that is that IDism cannot be presented in science classes as legitimate science. It is not science. It has no place in a science curriculum. It is not an alternative to the science of evolution. It is nothing more than a paean to supernaturalism, to ignorance, to blind ideology, to religious authoritarianism.
And to suggest that ID is not exclusively religious simply beggars belief. These people have done no science, but they present as their conclusion that the universe and all life was designed by some being of vast power, a being for whom they offer no evidence other than a supposition based on their non-science. We can be pretty certain that the being in question was not Yogi Berra, who in his worst moments made more sense than the IDists, and certainly the being was not any human who ever trod the planet. So what we have left is some alien of incomprehensible power, which, if true, would remove the taint of religion from IDism, but which is assuredly not what the IDers have in mind.
They have in mind a god, a capital G god, indubitably Christian of course, as in ‘In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth’. Sounds suspiciously religious to The Lion. Since their entire thesis rests on this being and since they have no science to support their theories, the IDers are promoting an exclusively religious idea. Religion is the whole reason IDism exists.
But The Lion digresses, of course. Getting back to the abused Thomas Jefferson, we have this from Mr. Meyer.
In 1823, when materialist evolutionary ideas had long been circulating, Jefferson wrote to John Adams and insisted that the scientific evidence of design in nature was clear: “I hold (without appeal to revelation) that when we take a view of the Universe, in its parts general or particular, it is impossible for the human mind not to perceive and feel a conviction of design, consummate skill, and indefinite power in every atom of its composition.’’ It was on empirical grounds, not religious ones, that he took this view.
Contemplating everything from the heavenly bodies down to the creaturely bodies of men and animals, he argued: “It is impossible, I say, for the human mind not to believe that there is, in all this, design, cause and effect, up to an ultimate cause, a fabricator of all things from matter and motion.’’
Empirical?
Let’s see, here’s a couple of accepted definitions of empirical:
‘Derived from experiment and observation rather than theory’ and an archaic one, but apt, ‘Relying on medical quackery’.
What Meyer has done is take as fact an opinion of Jefferson’s, an opinion not derived from scientific investigation, not derived from experiment, but based merely on his assumptions and opinions about what he could see. And he could obviously not see much. He was not doing science. Belief is not science.
He says it himself when he says it is impossible for the human mind not to believe in a fabricator of all things. He was wrong, of course. There are hundreds of millions of human minds who do not believe such a thing today, and assuredly there were quite a few then.
Belief is not science. The Lion suspects that if Mr. Jefferson had access to the real science done since Darwin he would repudiate his view that a fabricator existed, and likely adopt the view that the fabricators are those who spew their foolishness from the Discovery Institute. Jefferson was not stupid: he simply lacked accurate knowledge. The IDists cannot make that claim. The knowledge and facts are there in front of them, easily accessible, but they choose to deny them and to pursue their fantasy of the supernatural.
Mr. Meyer, though, pursues his beliefs into the modern day, into the researches of Watson and Crick into DNA, which he claims vindicate Jefferson’s view. He calls DNA a ‘four-character digital code’ and drags in Bill Gates of Microsoft, who said, ‘DNA is like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.’
Then Meyer embellishes:
DNA functions like a software program. We know that software comes from programmers. Information – whether inscribed in hieroglyphics, written in a book, or encoded in a radio signal – always arises from an intelligent source. So the discovery of digital code in DNA provides a strong scientific reason for concluding that the information in DNA also had an intelligent source.
His argument states, in sum, that because computer software is written by programmers, and DNA is like software, therefore god created life.
Let’s look at that. God, as postulated by the believers, doesn’t make junk, so we might assume that his software would be tight, clean, precise, and contain nothing extraneous, the way top-quality software is supposed to be written.
DNA ain’t like that. It’s messy. It’s got sequences that bring on disease, malformations, death. It’s got sequences that have no use at all, no purpose, though some may at one time have had a reason to exist (a sneaky way of saying DNA has evolved).
And that’s not a digital code in DNA. It’s chemical. It’s subject to variances and mutations and changes that digital codes don’t undergo. Imagine if the binary math that underlies modern technology changed and varied itself on some random basis. It wouldn’t be digital anymore, would it? It would be something else, something with states other than one and zero, on and off. It would have evolved into something unpredictable and unreliable. Hardly the stuff of intelligent, purposeful design. Rather it would be a thing out of control. It would be something that could evolve, or devolve, if you will.
To finish off his descent into the lakes of the ludicrous, Mr. Meyer says:
Design is an inference from biological data, not a deduction from religious authority.
Apparently he wishes his readers to assume that because an inference is made, it must be true. The Lion can infer from certain biological data, to wit, the girl next door smiled at him, that The Lion is going to get her into bed. The Lion would be wrong, as scientific experiment would soon show.
Further, to claim that IDism is not a matter of religion is simply laughable. The whole point of IDism is to prove that god exists and created the universe and all things in it. Mr. Meyer and his ilk simply want to make IDism the religious authority, and, no doubt, themselves the high priests, making their living peddling their indulgences and books to the ignorant and the willingly misinformed.
They are, indeed, engaged in empirical quackery.
Grumpy Lion 