#50263: franky — 11/22  at  12:08 PM
They did caution that more testing and verification from international experts. Gotta love those scientists. Willing to subject themselves to peer review.

#50264: Raven — 11/22  at  12:13 PM
So, what's that hippo/rhino looking animal that is one of the rotating set of Pharyngula images at the top left corner of the page?

#50265: — 11/22  at  12:16 PM
Speaking of miracles, I was disappointed to see last night on San Francisco nightly news a report on a statue of the virgin mary somewhere in northern california that was allegedly "weeping blood."

The anchor soberly announced that "some people were coming to see the statue and bringing sick family members in hopes of healing them. Others believe that the statue is weeping over a disaster that has occurred somewhere or is going to occur sometime in the future."

And that was it.

There was no mention of the fact that "many others believe that inanimate objects do not weep tears of any kind, and the entire event is a hoax intended to bilk gullible or uneducated Vietnamese immigrants out of money that would be better spent on insulating their houses for the upcoming winter season."

#50270: charlie wagner — 11/22  at  12:41 PM
Thanksgiving Dinner
Sometimes you just have to wonder when the individual paths of mortals come together in such a way as to make one believe that it had all been laid out in some kind of elaborate scheme that was designed to make things right in an often senseless world. It was November 23, 1998, graduation day at the Marine Corps recruit depot at Parris Island, South Carolina. Like most every Friday, the members of Platoon 1104, 1st Battalion, "D" company were to cease being sub-human life forms and were about to become Marines. The ceremonies would be over by 1800 hours and six of them from the New York area would pile into a car and begin the long trip home. With any luck, they'd be home by Thanksgiving Day, to be with their families.
But these were not just any sons any more, they were Marines. They had endured the 13 weeks of relentless pain and suffering that had molded them into the fiercest, meanest most aggressive fighting men that ever lived. They were ready, willing and able to kick some serious butt, should the need arise.
Mavis Jackson lived a little ways off I-95, just south of the North Carolina border on a tiny farm that she and Walter had bought with her mother's insurance . During the summer of '93, Walter was killed when his plow overturned on a hill. Little Walter was only one year old at the time. Mavis tried to keep up the farming, but even in the best of circumstances, it only allowed a meager existence for her and the boy. In '96, Mavis opened a little lunch room on the side of her house and cooked food for the local field hands. Some days, no one at all would come, and Mavis would sadly put the food away for another day.
It was Thursday, November 23, 1998, and Mavis Jackson was down by the side of the road putting up a little sign that she had painted on white cardboard- "Thanksgiving Dinner, All You Can Eat! $5.99" Shortly before 7:00 p.m. a car drove by. It slowed down a little way down the road and then turned around and came back, parking in front of Mavis' house. Out of the car piled six hungry Marines. Now Mavis had prepared one turkey and one ham and some sweet potatoes and collard greens and had baked a pecan pie. Hopefully, it would be sufficient for these boys. After only a little while, it became obvious that she had offered more than she could deliver. The turkey and ham were completely demolished and so were the vegetables and potatoes. Yet these boys still demanded more. Mavis went back to her kitchen in search of more food. Her heart began to sink lower and lower as she emptied her pantry to satisfy the hungry Marines. By 9:00 o'clock, it appeared that the rampage was finally subsiding. They sat around talking for another half hour while Mavis sat quietly in the front room, contemplating the situation. If nothing else, Mavis Jackson was a woman of her word. She had made a terrible blunder, and now she would pay the price. Perhaps God was punishing her for some unknown transgression. But she had promised "all you can eat" and she had no intention of asking for any extra compensation.
As the first Marine approached her, she quietly said to him "that'll by $5.99 sir, just like the sign says." He paid with a ten dollar bill and she gave him back his change- four dollars and a penny. It took a little doing to negotiate the exchange of money, since she didn't have much change, but the boys managed to collect it among themselves and pay her the grand total of $35.94. The boys left and she heard the car pull away down the road. Mavis pulled the shade down and turned off the porch light. The world had dealt her a cruel blow. But she had no one to blame but herself. She thought about little Walter and her beloved husband and she wept.
She had planned on going to the service at church, as she had every past Thanksgiving. But tonight she just didn't think she could. But she must go on. Despair is not becoming of a Christian woman, she thought and she stepped over to the table and began to clear away the dishes. She picked up the first dish, and there under the plate was a hundred dollar bill. She didn't know what to make of it. And then she found another...and another...and another...and another...and another. And there in the middle of the table, handwritten on a piece of paper, a note. And it said....


Happy Thanksgiving, U.S.M.C

And Mavis Jackson put on her hat and went to church and the preacher was speaking these words: "Do not forget to entertain strangers, for by so doing some people have entertained angels without knowing it." Hebrews 13:2

(and don't forget to listen to "Alice's Resaurant Massacree" on Thursday)

#50271: — 11/22  at  12:47 PM
I see my alma mater is treating the Kansas BOE decision with the contempt that it deserves.

A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled "Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies."

I love it. Go Jayhawks!

#50279: — 11/22  at  01:18 PM
I've been meaning to ask ever since the BBC interview:

How the heck do you pronounce "pharyngula?"

#50287: — 11/22  at  01:34 PM
Carl Zimmer has an article up about evolution of snake venom (the venom is older than the snake) and nosing around I came across a site (http://www.curator.org/LegacyVMNH/Whatsnew/venomous_snakes_of_iraq.htm) with info on snakes of Iraq, prepared for Australian, British and American forces near Baghdad. Amusingly, the source for anti-venom for many of the snakes is "Inst. d’Etat des Serums et Vaccines Razi (Tehran, Iran)". So, against the snakes, it appears even The Great Satan and the Axis of Evil can make common cause.

#50290: — 11/22  at  01:45 PM

Sometimes you just have to wonder when the individual paths of mortals come together in such a way as to make one believe that it had all been laid out in some kind of elaborate scheme that was designed to make things right in an often senseless world

A heart warming tale to be sure Charlie Wagner, but unfortunately many people do not have such good fortune including many people who are just as generous and religious as Mrs. Jackson.

#50300: — 11/22  at  02:39 PM
Thanks for that very long story, Charlie. In that spirit, let me offer Zippy's Thanksgiving prayer:

We give THANKS today,
for handkerchiefs, HEIROGLYPHS,
bindlestiffs, jars of JIF,
anti-freeze, CANTONESE,
pleats, treats, PARAKEETS,
syntax, HALIFAX,
Ajax, BIG MACS,
Rayon, Dacron, Antron, NYLON,
Sunday, Monday, toothpicks and POGO STICKS...

Oh, yeh... And the sudden, unexplained disappearance of JOAN RIVERS!!

#50305: — 11/22  at  03:01 PM

#50279: rrt — 11/22 at 01:18 PM
I've been meaning to ask ever since the BBC interview:

How the heck do you pronounce "pharyngula?"

What, you've never watched Star Trek?

#50308: coturnix — 11/22  at  03:17 PM
KU is starting a religion course on Intelligents Design, Creationism and other Myths:
http://edcone.typepad.com/wordup/2005/11/religious_mytho.html

#50309: coturnix — 11/22  at  03:18 PM
sorry - did not see it was already mentioned above....

#50311: RPM — 11/22  at  03:31 PM
Sounds like an old episode of South Park. Christopher Reeve eats stem cells and overcomes his paralysis. Where's Cartman when you need him most?

#50313: — 11/22  at  03:57 PM

What, you've never watched Star Trek?

Star Trek?

/bewildered

Erm...this is the first place I ever remember even reading the term...and that's with a biology education (sorry, PZ...either my profs didn't use it or I just don't remember.)

#50315: Josh Braun — 11/22  at  04:04 PM
I wasn't able to view the link - it appears to be down. However, it is true that spinal cord injury is likely to be one of the first injuries treatable with embryonic stem cell therapy. Hans Keirstead's lab at UC Irvine has been trying treatments out on rats and mice for several years and getting animals with acute spinal cord injuries to walk again after paralysis.

The trick is that most researchers before Keirstead tried to regrow the nerve tissue itself, which meant integrating new neurons into the spinal cord. that's tricky stuff. What Keirstead found, though, was that he could re-myelinate the spinal cord with oligodendrocytes, which he's been able to grow in high purity in successive experiments.

Re-myelinating what was left of the existing nerve - which is something like putting a new layer of insulation over a copper wire - allowed the nerve to conduct signals again and allowed the rats to regain function.

Spinal cord injuries and heart disease are likely to be the first injuries treatable with embryonic stem cells, simply because the cells produced don't need to do a whole heck of a lot. As a counterpoint, consider Parkinsons, in which new neurons would have to integrate themselves into a complex neural network, extending new axons and making correct connections. In other disorders, new cells have to find their way to the site of an injury and integrate themselves into tissue that may be damaged and dangerous. I'm not saying it ain't gonna happen. But it's going to take awhile.

By contrast, cardiomyocites can be injected into the heart. They stay where their placed and all they have to do is flex when they're exposed to a current and they can keep the person's heart in service. Oligodendrocytes are also placed at the site of the injury - no need find their way to it. And all they have to do is stay put and they serve as insulation, doing the job they were intended to do.

These therapies are going to be the ones that come around in the near future, and while, as I say I haven't seen the particular study you're linking to, which may be all hype, spinal cord injuries are indeed likely to be the first injuries to be repaired with stem cell therapies.

#50316: — 11/22  at  04:07 PM
Well, Kent Hovind came to town and nobody even noticed. As far as I can tell, this...
http://www.thedakotastudent.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/11/17/437d10710d9b3?in_archive=1

...has been the only published comment on his appearance to date. I had to miss his performance myself, so I can't comment on his facile faux flip-floppery foolishness.

#50317: — 11/22  at  04:08 PM
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3040&program=CSC&callingPage=discoMainPage

This may be the stupidest crap the ID peddlers have ever published. I challenge Jay W. Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez to defend the bullshit in their article, knowing full well that these professional liars are not up to the task.

Let's look at some of the garbage these slimy cretins have spewed forth from the creaky tin towers of the Disclaimery Institute for Weak Christian Propaganda.

Design theorists argue that certain features of the natural world bear markers of intelligent agency. For instance, a whole series of physical parameters, it turns out, are eerily fine-tuned for complex life

Really? How do they know that those "physical parameters" were "fine-tuned" for complex life or for anything else?

Answer: they don't. Lie number 1! In the first paragraph! They're going to give Lyin' Luskin a run for his money at this rate.

And what a pathetic lie, too. Where are the Nobel Prizes for these incredible "fine-tuning" discoveries that these two clowns are crowing about? There are millions of rubes in the United States but are the rubes really that dumb? Our two clowns sure hope so.

The dogmatic response is that scientists may appeal only to impersonal causes.

First, that's not the response. The issue is not whether a cause for an observed phenomenon is "impersonal". It's whether a proposed explanation relies on a "mysterious alien beings with undefined powers" for which zilcho evidence exists. So we have lie number 2.

Moreover, it's not "dogma." It's a rational conclusion drawn from the fact that science is a process and the process becomes useless or absurd if scientists must rule out "mysterious alien beings with undefined powers" as a possible explanation for every observed phenomenon. That's lie number 3.

Note, by the way, that my comments are not invoking any concepts that wouldn't be familiar to your average high school student. Richards and Gonzalez -- our two lying bozos -- are supposed to have "higher degrees." Of course, they could be lying about that or they could have lied to obtain their degrees. Given what we are saying today, I'd say it's likely they've been lying for quite a while. They are professional liars.

Thus, leading ID critic Eugenie Scott

Hahahaahahaha. Nice try, guys. Eugenie is just one of thousands upon thousands of people who think you two losers are lying idiots. You can smear Eugenie all you want. The line to take her place is extremely long! Would you rather that reporters go to PZ Myers for evaluations of your credibility?

argues that attempts to detect design in the form of extraterrestrial radio signals "is indeed a scientific project" because "it seeks natural intelligence" while "any theory with a supernatural foundation is not scientific."

Oy, the SETI project argument again. Look, my professional lying twits: let's say that SETI detects a signal that, when translated, says "We are from galaxy 934RX2. We designed all life. Go to Stonehenge. Go to Stonehenge. Dig deep, brothers. Find blueprint for all life forms. Also find recording of our favorite music groups. And control box for changing physical parameters of universe. Enjoy."

Guess what happens then, my two pathetic liars? Your "intelligent design" theory will actually have some evidence. Until then, you're full of shit.

Whether the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey was designed by aliens or a transcendent god, one still could tell it was designed, and on precisely the same grounds.

Uh, dudes, 2001:Space Odyssey was a movie. The black monolith was designed -- by a human being working on a movie set.

Wow.

But what if intelligence did play a role and its effects are detectable?

Then scientists should be able to detect it. Duh.

Why don't you start doing some actual research to figure out how to detect whether some "mysterious intelligent design" might have designed every life form that ever lived on earth.

You can start by ruling out the possibility that humans from the future designed all the life forms on earth by travelling back in time.

Good luck, my two professional lying stooges. You'll need a lot of luck to accomplish your goals. Why? Because you're both retarded buttheads.

If we want science to give us knowledge about nature, scientists must be open-minded and not apply materialist blinders to their investigations.

Geebus, what a whopper! That's lie number four and it's a huge one. I already dealt with a similar falsehood above but this is one is much more blatant. Science has already given us knowledge about nature without systematically resorting to hypotheses relating to the "mysterious actions" of poltergeists, gremlins or deities.

Some critics even claim, in the same breath, both that ID is unfalsifiable and that it has been falsified.

Perhaps that's because in the same breath some ID peddler said that the designer could be God and that mutations can't lead to a gain in information.

Where have these two profesioonal lying clowns been all this time? In professional liar school, probably (aka the Discovery Institute).

We recently received a set of questions from a reporter doing a story on ID. One question asked how we dealt with the fact that intelligent design was unfalsifiable. Another asked for our response to biologist Ken Miller's refutation of Michael Behe's design argument. But these objections can't both be true. If ID can't be falsified, then scientific evidence can't falsify it. And if evidence can falsify it, then ID can't be unfalsifiable. Such contradictory objections should arouse our suspicions.

Ok, let's get this straight. Here we have two alleged gentlemen with higher educations. They are arguing that when two different anonymous people ask two different questions that are "contradictory" our suspicions should be aroused.

Really? No, I don't think so.

What is more appalling about these stupid pathetic liars is how they pretend not to understand how someone could easily demonstrate that Behe's argument (that, e.g., the flagella must have been designed) is a bogus argument but still admit (as Ken Miller does) that it is impossible to prove that some all-powerful undefined mysterious being isn't somehow responsible for all sorts of phenomenon.

Again, this is not difficult stuff. That is how we know that Richards and Gonzalez are professional liars. Did I say they were retarded buttheads up above? Yes. Is that somewhat contradictory? Perhaps. Should it arouse your suspicions that I am mistaken about my conclusion? No, it shouldn't.

This is why contemporary arguments for intelligent design spend a lot of time on empirical evidence, and only then defend design as the best explanation for the evidence.

I'm sorry, my clowns -- do you mean to say that you spend a lot of time on empirical evidence which distinguishes between a natural explanation and your "mysterious alien beings with undefined powers" explanation for all the life forms that ever lived on earth?

If so, then that's lie number ... what are we on? Five or six? I'll say five. You haven't presented any such evidence. Your own self-serving claptrap propaganda piece proves your own dishonesty. What a pathetic pair of tools we have in you two disgusting charlatans.

Stonehenge looks like someone built it, but who built the builder? .... We don't know.

Oh. My. Fxcking. Gob.

First of all, shit-for-brains, Stonehenge looks like multiple people built it. (Lie number six). Second, we know where the people who built Stonehenge came from: they were born from humans, just like our simple-minded lying twits, Richards and Gonzalez.

There we have it folks. Seven easily identifiable lies that require no deep scientific understanding to see straight through. And these lies were spun and promulgated by people with high degrees! Gonzalez has a Ph.D.!!!! How could he not know better? Answer: he does know better. He's a professional liar.

ID will stand or fall on the evidence of nature, not from red herrings and question-begging attempts to dismiss it by definition.

Lie number eight.

ID has been dead for many years. Richard and Gonzales, our two professional liars and prostate massagers, have their hands up the corpses' rectum so they can make it dance for the rubes.

And get this: they accept money to perform this trick. Just like Dembski. And Luskin. And Calvert. And Jon TWitt. And Jon Ryland.

Disgusting.

#50318: — 11/22  at  04:08 PM
Well, Kent Hovind came to town and nobody even noticed. As far as I can tell, this...

http://www.thedakotastudent.com/vnews/display.v/ART/2005/11/17/437d10710d9b3?in_archive=1

...has been the only published comment on his appearance to date. I had to miss his performance myself, so I can't comment on his facile faux flip-floppery foolishness.

#50319: — 11/22  at  04:18 PM
Whoops, sorry for the double post. Dang fraggle-frazzled rushem-razzled new-fangled computer type machine thingies.

#50321: — 11/22  at  04:34 PM
Raven: It's a titantothere, one of those great tertiary fossils that I loved as kid whenever I went to Rancho La Brea.

http://members.aol.com/Waucoba5/dv/dvfossils.htm

Mike

#50322: — 11/22  at  04:41 PM
"For instance, a whole series of physical parameters, it turns out, are eerily fine-tuned for complex life,"

This is most probably null or even backwards. The later case would happen in the hypothetic case that some anthropic argument makes the observed physics probable instead of inevitable.

For example the Weak Anthropic Principle: if physics allow for a range of some fundamental parameters, and they are nonuniformly probable, the fact that we observe life may decide those parameters.

Wikipedia on WAP: "The observed values of all physical and cosmological quantities are not equally probable but they take on values restricted by the requirement that there exist sites where carbon-based life can evolve and by the requirements that the Universe be old enough for it to have already done so."

"Though the concept of the precise interplay of physical constants being necessary for known life is widely accepted within mainstream science, the argument that they imply that the universe was purposely fine-tuned to support life is not. The assertion that the universe is fine-tuned is largely promoted by advocates of intelligent design and other forms of creationism though there are fine tuning arguments that are naturalistic."

A more complex argument is found at http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/anthropic.html .

WAP are currently suggested in some versions of string theory. If it is correct it would give some Nobel prizes in _opposition_ of the ID position.

#50323: — 11/22  at  04:44 PM
I have a simple question, why when addressing creationists we don't make them fully aware that the horse phylogeny also includes tapirs and rhinos? Kind of beats that macro evolutionary crap to pieces, unless they want something bigger (which gets them as being obstructionist with infinite reductionism.).http://www.digimorph.org/resources/tapirs.phtml

#50326: — 11/22  at  05:22 PM
Nice to see a hodge podge thread. I have this weird idea rolling around that's been bugging me, and I don't know how to present it without seeming like a troll.

If marsupials are designed for the easy production of feti that gestate in an easily accessible outer pouch, and; the advantage of gestation outside of the body is to conserve energy through early termination when resources are scarce, and; a designer designed marsupials...

...does that make the designer pro-choice?

#50335: Federico Contreras — 11/22  at  06:03 PM
WEWT!



http://www.citypages.com/newsfeatures/

#50341: Raven — 11/22  at  06:39 PM
Mike: very cool! Thanks for the pointer to the titantothere.