Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
PZ Myers is a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris.
…and this is a pharyngula stage embryo.
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Throughout the 1970s I had been mainly studying black holes, but in 1981 my interest in questions about the origin and fate of the universe was reawakened when I attended a conference on cosmology organized by the Jesuits in the Vatican. The Catholic Church had made a bad mistake with Galileo when it tried to lay down the law on a question of science, declaring that the sun went round the earth. Now, centuries later, it had decided to invite a number of experts to advise it on cosmology. At the end of the conference the participants were granted an audience with the pope. He told us that it was all right to study the evolution of the universe after the big bang, but we should not inquire into the big bang itself because that was the moment of Creation and therefore the work of God. I was glad then that he did know the subject of the talk I had just given at the conference — the possibility that space- time was finite but had no boundary, which means that it had no beginning, no moment of Creation. I had no desire to share the fate of Galileo, with whom I feel a strong sense of identity, partly because of the coincidence of having been born exactly 300 years after his death!
Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time (New York: Bantam, 1988), pp. 115-16.
Patterning the nervous system with Bmp
The proper reverence due those who have gone before
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Category: Creationism • Entertainment • Weirdness
Posted on: February 26, 2006 2:01 PM, by PZ Myers
Mr Chicken, the Night Stalker, and now…Henry Morris. There is a kind of cosmic harmony to that trio, in that they all made a living with supernatural silliness to some degree, although Morris…nah, let's not speak ill of the dead.
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Comments
Well, shit. I've been calling and e-mailing Morris for years to challenge him to a debate over "Time and Starlight". He's consistently refused, and now to get out of having a debate with me, he's gone and died.
Chicken.
Posted by: Dustin | February 26, 2006 2:32 PM
So Henry Morris, leading proponent of the worldwide Biblical flood is gone. Someone should name a University after him or something.
Posted by: wamba | February 26, 2006 2:35 PM
Oh, wait. I'm getting my Morrises mixed up. I'm thinking of one of his sons.
Posted by: Dustin | February 26, 2006 2:42 PM
But how does Don Knotts fit into this?
Posted by: Orac | February 26, 2006 2:59 PM
It's the first link. Don't you remember the Ghost and Mr Chicken?
Posted by: PZ Myers | February 26, 2006 3:08 PM
You know what? I'm a total ass. The guy I've been harassing is Henry Morris, III. He gave a presentation which included the central claim of "Starlight and Time", which I decided to go to (God only knows why). Evidently, he didn't even write the thing. I had somehow been under the impression that he'd written it. Of course I'd have known better if I'd read it, but the presentation was such palpable tripe that it could be shown wrong with computations that I did on the back of the brochure.
Anyway, I'm just going to shut up now. I think I'll start bothering the guy who *did* write the book.
Posted by: Dustin | February 26, 2006 3:16 PM
I just got word that Octavia Butler died. That sucks ass more than I can say.
Posted by: RavenT | February 26, 2006 4:20 PM
Octavia Butler, too.
Posted by: Keith | February 26, 2006 5:48 PM
The only way to remember Don Knotts is as Barney Fife!
Posted by: AndyS | February 26, 2006 8:02 PM
Handsome is as handsome does. As long as you speak accurately of the dead, you do them the service they deserve. No more and no less.
Posted by: Moses | February 26, 2006 8:44 PM
Octavia Butler is a loss. She died way too young.
Posted by: Kristjan Wager | February 27, 2006 1:56 AM
I prefer to call it 'The Rule of Mentally Partitioning Things Into Threes.
Posted by: Mike Nilsen | February 27, 2006 12:20 PM
I just read that Morris was an alum of U.Minn. (though presumably not Morris).
Posted by: lt.kizhe | February 28, 2006 10:21 AM
A debate over "Time and Starlight" would be extremely interesting... nice article.
Posted by: Maç Günü | January 11, 2008 11:23 PM
Thank You
Posted by: Msn Nickleri | February 14, 2008 1:32 PM