Let us review

You can tell class started for PZ, what with all the videos posted around here. ;)

I do love videos that show things effectively with an entertaining, lively feel, rather than just point-by-point debate breakdowns.

They especially make good lead-offs into certainly threads, as more people are likely to watch them. ^_^

That literally gave me goose pimples. What an awesome video. Thanks PZ.

But, but, but, the Bible is so much easier to understand!!!

this is one of the very best videos on this theme -- and highly appropriate after self-comfort's drivel.

Goes great with a cup of coffee and a doughnut!

Some of those visualizations are astounding (the one labeled "ribosomes" nearly brought me to tears). They're light years further than what was available before as stills pasted into a textbook (stick figure chemistry). Where an we find the sources? I'd love to track them down (hopefully they're on public websites).

You can tell class started for PZ

Yeah, it takes a while to settle back into the rhythm of the classroom. That, and we're doing a job search right now and I've been staring at way too many CVs.

Killer video.

It's funny (sort of) that the Bible can be shown to be "advanced" only after science has demonstrated something. Then someone roots around in the Bible to find some verses that can be interpreted to "predict" the scientific fact or result. It's unkind of them not to tell us these things in advance. And too bad for them that they can't.

Absolutely beautiful. I am glad I came in early so I could play it with the music.

I just finished reading a book by the suitably named J.P.Luminet called "Black holes". The description of the processes taking place in our beautiful, wild universe just blow my mind. All more interesting and awe inspiring that anything the nuns tried to tell me. Jebus ain't got nothing on science, we got ourselves a bunch of supernovae :*)

Very nice video.

Man, if we could get THAT into fundamentalist churches, "to let students decide for themselves," it would be great.

...

(Whoever made the video, you could lose the "Look to the skies" word-graphic in the middle and it would be just as good, maybe a teeny bit better.)

I need rhabdomeric photoreceptors for viewing this one.

OMG I had seen this awhile ago. PZ, you're killing me with ray comfort and now this. I must be a masochist to come back here again and again.

Though, that hot young "positive atheist" did sorta make up for it.

*still dreaming about her in a non-creepy way....*

*purrs*

I found that one by sorting the Science & Technology category at YouTube by rating for the past month. The one about fireballs was mildly interesting, but this one had to be passed on (and what better place?).

From gagging to exhilaration in under 2:00 minutes.

I saw a couple DNA-mRNA clips that I have seen on dnatube.com. They are mindblowing. The TEDS are on that site too.

Oh. My. Non-god.

I can't usually watch videos in the office as it's a shared space, but I'm by myself right now so turned the volume up and watched away!

That was brilliant. Great use of music. Great graphics (I agree, the RNA graphics are brilliant). All round greatness. It made me feel proud to be a scientist, twas almost a tear in my eye...

Some of those visualizations are astounding (the one labeled "ribosomes" nearly brought me to tears). They're light years further than what was available before as stills pasted into a textbook (stick figure chemistry). Where an we find the sources? I'd love to track them down (hopefully they're on public websites).

Charles, those came from DNA Interactive. It's run by Cold Spring Harbor Lab, and has some really nice stuff. The videos used are in the Code section, subsection Reading the Code, subsection putting it together, and subsection Copying the code/putting it together.

Sorry, forgot italics tags. First paragraph was quoting from #7.

Wow, Thanks PZ! My morning self went from zombie to inspired.

I noticed after the video plays, you can select other similiar videos from Youtube.

There is a multi-part set from the same filmmaker called Why Do People Laugh At Creationists. The set has some great stuff!

Great music: it's them hot chicks with the eletric fiddles and such eh?

But Quadrupeds morphing into whales?! This part P*SSES me off! (Hey, BACK OFF! I'm an evolutionist!)
Plays right into the hands of them "Hey I ain't never seen no monkey change into no human" boneheads.
Put some selection into that part, and I'd be happy.

That's an amazing video.

Does anyone know where that beautiful "Toccata and Fugue" came from? I'd love to find a copy.

Cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling, cling...

Oh. Sorry. I lapsed into Creationist mode there for a sec.

I despair that so many people are either unwilling or unable to recognize the astronomically huge knowledge gap illustrated not only by this video, but by the most casual observation of the world in which they live. The real militants in this culture war aren't people like Dawkins, Hitchens or PZ - it's people like this Bill Foster who would march their armies of ignorance into the town halls of communities both large and small all across the nation.

Wow! Great video!

Kris Verburgh

sometimes i hear so much creationist/religious nonsense that i forget to step back and remind myself what this video demonstrates: thats creationism/ID and general religiosity tell us ZERO about our condition, well other than that as a species we believe all sorts of crap. To look at the images in that video and think of that womans (i forget her name) recent 'predictions of ID' and all I can visualise is a malfuncioning brain, twinkies, oprah praise and the general horrid nonsense that seems to go hand in hand with the religious mind.

toccata and fuge works well here, i remember as a kid a history cartoon called 'once upon a time man' that opened with the same music and a neat evolutionary transition of fish to man in a similar vein to the whale transition, very cool.

For the companion video, called, "The Bible, One of the Most Stupidest Books Around," show endless pictures of people with their jaws hanging open, staring up at idiots in pulpits blathering their feel-good nonsense.

Very cool. Can anybody explain what's going on from about 1:09 to 1:16?

Thanks!!!!

Thanks PZ, a video is worth more than a thousand words. Also, somewhat Philip Glass-esque.

Wow.

That is unbelievably beautiful. I actually burst into tears. Thank you Thunderf00t for posting it, and PZ for finding it.

I don't know what you guys are talking about, the Bible clearly shows that God made rockets on the 6th day when he made everything else. Dumbasses.

I'm sure it's been said before, but one of the most bothersome things for me is that this amazing technology we have built, computers, the internet, telecommunications, audio and video reproduction, etc. are all being employed to promote an ideology that is against advancement of human knowledge and technology. It's a bone-chilling irony that science has made the goal of these people easier.

Fortunately, if the community is smart, we can be equally savvy and promote the fruits of human intelligence in the same way with the same tools - like this video.

That is unbelievably beautiful. I actually burst into tears. Thank you Thunderf00t for posting it, and PZ for finding it.

I got little teary too. Last night I finished, "Your Inner Fish." There's a bit in the epilogue where he talks about seeing the actual Appllo 8 Command module and getting choked up and losing his voice for a little bit before he could describe it to his son.

Think about how much we had to know and get right to send humans into space and bring them back. That's fucking amazing. We landed them on another body and brought them back. Then there's all we've been able to figure out, combined with how we came into being. WOW!

I just don't get the impulse to say "Look, mystery! so profound!" Instead of "that's so cool; i wonder how it works."

That latter is far more interesting, fulfilling, and potentially useful.

Wow. That was incredibly affecting -- had me tearing up at some parts and cheering and yelling "SCIENCE, IT WORKS BITCHES" at others.

anon1234, that song is on this album. (Vanessa Mae: the Violin Player)

Great video...

...except for science taking credit for a bunch of engineering achievements!

Kudos to the film-maker who put all that effort in. The best possible ending would have been the lady with the bible being carted off in a strait-jacket by men in white coats.

Every time the shuttle launches and returns to earth I watch with the same excitement as when I was a kid watching the Apollos take off on our regularly-slapped (to make it work) black and white TV. I want to rush out into the road, and shake people who've become indifferent to such an incredible feat of science (and yes, engineering), but it would probably cause consternation in a small rural village, and would get me talked about at Primitive Methodist Chapel.

>>anon1234, that song is on this album. (Vanessa Mae: the Violin Player)

Thanks. Off to Amazon I go.

Peter, I used to live a bit south of Cape Canaveral, and we'd watch the Saturn V launches with our naked eyse. Incredible, at more than 15 miles distant, you could make out that rocket atop that enormous flame. And we had Hope, back in the day, when we had the Appolo-Soyuz mission.

Now we only go high enough to get a good view down. ~sigh~

Yeah because engineering isn't science at all...

what?!

Wow.

That is unbelievably beautiful. I actually burst into tears. Thank you Thunderf00t for posting it, and PZ for finding it.

PZ found it in his inbox, like probably most other videos he posts.

Yes, but isn't it true that science gives us what we needs, magic gives us what we want?

You only need to read Grimm's fairy tales to realize that a good deal of what people want is the spectacle of torture and killing of particularly wicked people--anyway, enemies. The hot-iron shoes put onto the "witch's" feet so that she dances until she is dead, hot lead poured down certain person's throats, God killing those who "deny Him," or actually, those who would deny O'Leary's ignorant prattling.

We're not beyond that, not at all. Sure we want rockets and DNA sequencing, but medieval blacksmithing was good enough to give us reveleries of blood against heretics and apostates, and fire is the gods' gift to humans who wish to cause pain to other humans.

So the latter part was beautiful, just don't ignore the appeal of the earlier portion. No one will admit to wanting the first part, not even to themselves, yet the pleasure at causing another's pain is still one of the more appealing ones (in a mild way we engage in this pleasure, as we take on the task and joy of ridiculing and laughing at IDiocy). We know which images are supposed to sell, but it would be wrong to think that they are the only ones that do and shall sell, particularly to those who really don't understand the later images.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

Glen, it sounds like you are talking about schadenfreud done berserk. I always asserted that if god loves everyone, he loves the antics of the Three Stooges, and even the monkeying around of Mengele, Pol Pot, Stalin, Genghis, etc. Nothing like a good eye gouge to remind you of those good ole OT days.

Science is all !

@30

Very cool. Can anybody explain what's going on from about 1:09 to 1:16?

The part from 1:09 to about 1:12 is the replication of DNA. The old parental strand extends down toward the lower right and the new strand that is being synthesized in a continuous fashion is going off to the upper right. The discontinuous strand is made in fits and starts at the upper left.

The part from 1:13 to 1:16 is synthesis of proteins by ribosomes (the blue blobs - large subunit on top of the yellow messenger RNA, small subunit on the bottom). The green parts are transfer RNAs carrying in amino acids that will be linked into proteins. The very next segment of the video (after 1:17) is labled 'Ribosomes', but it is just a different representation of the same process seen from outside the ribosome. The first part (1:13 - 1:16) shows a cutaway view where more of the mechanism can be seen.

Glen D in #44 don't despair, it could me much, much worse. I am reading Gregory Clark's A Farewell to Alms (borrowed from a friend, got interested after watching his talk from Beyond Belief 2) and he makes a convincing case that settled agrarian societies have civilised themselves, if you analyse deaths by violence from hunter/gatherer societies and long settled ones you find we have very much lower rates of violence than we used to.

I was once of the opinion that civilisation was entirely taught, often at the point of a sword, meaning kids were savages who needed to be civlised (and I have worked in molecular genetics too). Now I am not so sure. The thing is that the very small proportion of society who have those atavistic urges have state sanctioned avenues through the armed forces and adjuncts to go unleash them. These people are largely self selected, Stanford prisoner/guard experiments notwithstanding.

If we were chimps no way would we live in anything larger than a village and even then, watch out! So don't be too hard on us as a whole, though we need some serious discipline applied to those atavisms and those who would so wantonly unleash them. At the point of a sword if necessary.

I don't know who that bitch is, but she really makes me want to punch her in the face.
Lucky I'm a non-violent person.

Beautiful! Science is so exquisite. Thanks!

Thanks, Tex. Wow!

.

..except for science taking credit for a bunch of engineering achievements!

Has someone else been reading fstdt.com too much? (e.g. http://www.fstdt.com/fundies/comments.aspx?q=13940 about halfway through.)

...was...that...
...Switched-On Bach?

Awesome use of music, whoever's version that may have been.

WOWZA! Can't wait for the younglings to come home from school so I can show this to them -- boy twin has a passion for classical music, and both have a passion for science. (Geez, I love Bach. I have the orchestral version, which isn't quite as dramatic.) I just wish we'd seen Bible chick at the end, looking gobsmacked, or at least shamefaced. An Emily Litella would do . . . "Oh. Nevermind!"

Thanks for a great start to the day -- I'm feeling really pumped. Which is pretty cool, given that I worked from midnight to four this morning . . .

(Geez, I love Bach. I have the orchestral version, which isn't quite as dramatic.)

Sorry, but nothing beats the organ for drama with that piece. If it isn't an intersection in Cambridge, then God is JS Bach.

"Do you like being on the cutting edge of knowledge, the Bible has always been years ahead of Scientists, as one of the most advanced Science books around."

Speaker is being :

1) extremely dishonest
2) severely brain damaged
3) completely ignorant

In the case of this lady, I'd go for 50% of 1), 15% of 2) and 35% of 3).
The fundies that are used for speaking purposes always seem to show a larger proportion of 1) than 2) or 3).

It seems Fox News has been a particular rich breeding ground. It's all in the intonation.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaa!

I've recognized too many videos (SpaceX launch being my favorite) and images. I guess I need to spend less time reading blogs...

The ending was a little weak, but the rest of it was great. (I wasn't sure what the animation of the spacecraft launching a projectile into a meteor-like object represented though.)

However, Tim Krider's comic with the caveman throwing a rock at the passing rocket is an even more concise summary. :)

Cue the whiners stating that many of the people responsible for the advancements shown in the video were actually Christians or other religionists in five...four...three...

This video is the mayor of Rad Video City. Science is so pretty!

@ Rey Fox

(I wasn't sure what the animation of the spacecraft launching a projectile into a meteor-like object represented though.)

I assume it was this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Impact_(space_mission)

I've got a big smile on my face from watching that.

It also led to a link of a pretty good series on YouTube called Why do people laugh at Creationists?

I watched the one refuting Kent Hovind, (part 12) and it was very well done.

Awesome. Thanks for sharing that.

Heh.
From the why do people laugh clip: "Our earth happens to be in a perfectly spherical orbit around our star."

'Perfectly' As in God created the heavens and therefore they are perfect in all respects?

'Spherical' I suspect he wasn't confused by the probabilistic density distribution of an electron orbit around a nucleus.

Creationists say the darn'dest things. So cute.

Very nice, quite impressive, but I don't get how it can move people to tears. It was too fast for my taste...

Does someone recognise the animated summary of whale evolution, and know where that part of the video comes from? I'd love to watch that at a more leisurely pace, perhaps with commentary. There's something slightly similar in the preview of PBS's video "Evolution: Learning and Teaching Evolution" - see http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/11/2/e_s_3.html

I dunno from "Switched on.." but that is J.S. Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Here it is on the organ.

Just watched all 15 parts... the last 3 are on the author's userpage...

Additionally, this one is nice, as are those showing Ken Miller giving a talk on the chromosome fusion that made us have one fewer chromosome pair than the chimps.

Relax Steve_C and Frank Mitchell, I was just giving you hard scientists a poke. Of course science and engineering overlap, but engineers deserve most of the credit for things like the internet and global communication. Though certainly, undoubtedly, without science those things would not have happened.

We've just got an inferiority complex about that kind of stuff.

Found in the "About this video" box on the YouTube page (click on "more"):

Music Toccata in D, Bach
Performed Vanessa Mae

There is also a partial list of clips used.

very neat visual representation of the counterpoint Bach used. It really brings home the complexity intertwining voices neatly.

Brilliant. Simply brilliant!

JM #65 The whale evolution section is from the new exhibit at the Te Papa Museum in Wellington, New Zealand. There is a longer version on You Tube. Unfortunately, the ratio of the screen isn't quite right and makes the animals appear shorter and heavier than the original animation. The exhibit will travel to the US in the Summer? Fall of this year.

That was great! Though I think it went on a bit too much during the middle and toward the end--though it also had a good ending.

Did anyone else notice that the picture of the space shuttle launch wasn't the US, but the Soviet, space shuttle (Buran)?

#6

Doughnuts: SCIENCE!

lol!

Even better--

The computer you are watching this on: SCIENCE!

The claim that the Bible contains science beyond its time reminds me of claims that Nostradamus predicted many major historical events. Sure it does -- that's why we always figure it out *retrospectively*.

Thanks PZ, a beautiful and inspiring way to wake up on a grey damp Thursday morning here in the UK. Coincidentally, I had a Vanessa Mae playlist on the go just to get the old brain into gear and the very track used had just finished when I started this video, must be magic :)

I think science won that round.

Oh man. The phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and other amniotes at 0:44 is not just a tree. Genome size is mapped on it. The illustration comes from one of the recent papers where it was found that bone cell size is correlated to genome size and can be measured in fossils.

That is fascinating. It should have been shown for at least as long as the apple figure was shown (which is math, not science).

It gets funnier if you explore others in the series. Part three makes mention of a "-300° meteor". There is not even such temperature as -300! Unless the laws of physics have changed since I was at school, you can't get below -273.16°. That's why it's called Absolute Zero, why scientists often tend to think in terms of absolute temperatures and why examination questions often talk of experiments at 27° (which is 300K).

Mind you, as far as funda-mentalists are concerned, one significant figure is good enough for π; so perhaps he just means some temperature warmer than absolute zero but cooler than -250 degrees.

Carl (#72) - thank you; I'm honoured by your reply! Your work? I imagine that, if the maker of the video didn't seek permission from the animator, using an extract in this way counts as 'fair use'. (Contrasted with some unfair uses of other scientific animation we've heard about of late!) You can tell from my (British!) spelling and my interest that I'd like that exhibition to come over the pond sometime!

op99, #66,

Thank you for that link. I love Bach, but I don't have the training nor ear to keep track of the counterpoint. The visual representation is a great help.

It's funny how if Bach had not been a believer the world might well have been robbed of this beauty. It's a tough question, really. Is Bach really worth all the evils of religion? Not a choice I'd be happy to make ...

As Bill Nye would say, "Science rules!"

So, this video would have started my day on a happy note, if not for the tragic and consistent tone of *malevolence* against Christians here, and the implied (intended?) misrepresentation that creationism is the mainstream view within modern Christianity. The science demo fly-bys and the orchestration are awesome. Truly inspiring. But including the creationist moron in the video just made me cringe and angered me.

It would be absolutely splendid if you'd all recognize a straw man when you see one ... and not perpetuate it. Not all Christians are creationists with sub-par intellect. Hey, some Christians (and I fall into this group, I think) actually understand highschool science, and do believe the theory of evolution.

To be clear, a literal interpretation of the entire Bible is uneducated even from a theological point of view. The purposes of including various books of the Bible are legion. A couple examples: The Song of Solomon (a.k.a. Song of Songs) is literally an extended love poem, there for the purpose of recognizing and celebrating romantic love in marriage. How about Job? Swallowed by a whale? Not possible. It is a parable about the stupidity of ignoring your calling.

Within Genesis there are differences / inconsistencies about the order of creation, and this is doubtless because the story is so old that it was primarily an oral tradition, and when it was finally written down no-one wanted to possibly get it wrong, so they took the versions they had and wrote them all down. Genesis must be viewed through that lens or you are being an ignorant git. (Argh! Literal creationists are so illogical they drive me crazy!)

I shake my head at this "debate" which seems to have no point but to drive both groups *further* from mutual understanding. No-one is scoring points. Trying to convince a Christian not to believe in God is equally as stupid as trying to convince an atheist that there is a God (or god, choose the capitalization that you prefer).

I gladly stand with anyone who defends education ... unless they also feel the need to insult me while they do it. Keep fighting the good fight for proper education, which is all too often sadly lacking in the U.S. of A, but IMO it does the cause a disservice to spit vitriol at Christians (et al.) at the same time.

Attacking religion in the name of science is misguided and counter-productive. Many fine scientists were and/or are people of faith. e.g. Gregor Mendel, the "father of modern genetics" was an Augustinian priest!

Sadly, a viewer has to be scientifically literate to recognize the images in the video or their meaning - preaching to the choir, as it were.
I have never understood why devout readers of Genesis fail to recognize that those old Hebrew authors guessed pretty correctly and the sequence of creation there and the "theory" of evolution are awesomely similar. So there really is no controversy.

Very nice, quite impressive, but I don't get how it can move people to tears. It was too fast for my taste...

Just watched all 15 parts... the last 3 are on the author's userpage...

Additionally, this one is nice, as are those showing Ken Miller giving a talk on the chromosome fusion that made us have one fewer chromosome pair than the chimps.

Oh man. The phylogenetic tree of dinosaurs and other amniotes at 0:44 is not just a tree. Genome size is mapped on it. The illustration comes from one of the recent papers where it was found that bone cell size is correlated to genome size and can be measured in fossils.

That is fascinating. It should have been shown for at least as long as the apple figure was shown (which is math, not science).