I have never been a fashion model before

Oooo, you're getting to be like Dembski, a trend-setter in fashion.

Not until you've got something as stylish as his sweater can you equal him, though.

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

try here

http://t-shirts.cafepress.com/item/study-hard-be-evil-colored-tshirt/65…

I found these two sites

http://t-shirts.cafepress.com/item/study-hard-be-evil-colored-tshirt/65…

http://www.zazzle.com/knowledge_is_power_shirt-235384194815292939

There are several versions of that t-shirt (not the exact same one modeled unfortuntately) on CafePress. Sorry, still learning html tags:

http://t-shirts.cafepress.com/item/study-hard-be-evil-colored-tshirt/65…

Friend of mine at work found the original shirt that PZ has at the following:

http://www.instantattitudes.com/shirts/t006.html

I ordered one for a friend who really needs it. I hope I beat the rush.

That site has great t-shirts!

http://www.instantattitudes.com/shirts/t061.html

:)

The model that PZ is sportin' is also available from Pegasus Publishing. No idea if they're the original retailer or not.

Thanks PZ and ElfPirateMonarch. My neighbor's wife had better be medium, or else I've got a new t-shirt.

I think PZ needs one of these, too:

http://www.threadless.com/product/1268/Magic_Is_Just_Stuff

Threadless, home of democratic t-shirt design, only does limited runs of their shirts, so act fast!

This is my favorite t-shirt. My students loved it when I wore that to teach on Valentine's Day.

Rod Dreber reckons you're a Threat To Democracy, PZ. No, America can't afford to have liberal science-heads running around discarding superstitions. Whatever next, free speech?

I'm so ordering a couple of those, one for me, and one for my 12 year old son to wear to school, you see he goes to a private Christian school. Thankfully here in Australia ALL schools have to follow the state approved curriculum so there is no ID or creationist crap there. and being a small school it affords my son the attention he needs as he has a fairly mild case of Aspergers Syndrome.

You're such a trend setter PZ. Lookin' good.

Damn! Now I have to figure out which shirt to wear at the next family gathering with my holy-roller fundamentalist father-in-law there... this t-shirt, or my scarlet letter one... ? Maybe I can sneak off and change halfway through and really piss him off! :)

Thanks, PZ and ElfPirateMonarch! Either way, it's a great shirt.

I was just watching Countdown with Keith Olbermann and I learned that former Justice Department counselor Monica Goodling routinely asked applicants for non-political jobs at DoJ: "What is it About George W. Bush that Makes you Want to Serve Him?"

Would people get it if you just put that sentence on a T-shirt? --> "What is it About George W. Bush that Makes you Want to Serve Him?"

The white house was a fracking cult!

I'm getting one of those shirts!

OT- I'm going to start blogging again, anyone interested in dashing my hopes? Feel free to comment the first article I've posted since 2006.

OT2- PZ, you didn't happen to notice an email with "alt.atheism" as the Subject, did you? Or should I resend it?

I wear this one all the time.

I have that shirt, too, but I honestly cannot tell you where it's from, it was a birthday gift...

"What is it About George W. Bush that Makes you Want to Serve Him?"

To provide a decent meal for some of the poor and impoverished? I have a recipe for Texas Chili that calls for "one tall Texan".

another place to get similar t-shirts is http://www.pegasuspublishing.com/

I think "Knowledge is Power..." is only available as a bumper sticker there, though.

Because I used to be a submariner, I often wear this t-shirt.

but I barely recognise you without the standard blue button up shirt on PZ!

"What is it About George W. Bush that Makes you Want to Serve Him?"

Apologies to Damon Knight, but is there - or should there be - a cookbook titled "To Serve Bush"?

(For those who don't get the literary allusion, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Serve_Man )

Wow, thanks for the publicity boost! Instant Attitudes is the originator of that shirt, and Pegasus Publishing is one of our distributors. We were wondering why the sudden spike in orders over the weekend. :-)

Feel free to browse the rest of our T-shirts and our bumper stickers as well. We've got a lot of stuff which will probably appeal to the readers here.

"Over 2300 comments on this subject in 20 hours is quite enough." --P.Z. Myers
I just couldn't resist overcoming your confidence that you could just end the conversation about your desecration of the Eucharist.
I know you think I'm a fool, but I wanted to be counted among the many who do actually believe that the host becomes the body and blood of Christ.
Have a good day.

Don't feed it. Please!

Well, just like always, these don't come in my size. How come they go up to 5X widthwise, but never 2X lengthwise. This would be a midriff shirt on me (and that would NOT be pretty!)

No need. Its keeper feeds it weekly.

Hi PZ,
Got myself a biology degree later in life from Sonoma State(Granola U) just to find out what we know about life. My instructors could never answer what came first- the chicken or the egg? or what came first-the DNA or the cell wall that enclosed the DNA? Nor could Darwin explain it, and there's the rub. Not just the evolution of earthly life, but existence itself is illogical and unexplainable by natural causes. To a learned person, particularly a scientist, existence defies all known physical laws of the universe. Which leads an open mind to consider the supernatural, i.e. intelligent design.
TC

You can get the original shirt at
http://www.pegasuspublishing.com/Knowledge-is-Power...-Be-Evil-Shirt-p-…
or the remake that Russ did (which is the one pictured) at
http://www.pegasuspublishing.com/Knowledge-is-Power-Shirt-p-28580.html
Also a wide variety of mad scientist goggles, shirts and lab coats.

My instructors could never answer what came first- the chicken or the egg?

You lie. All biology profs know that the egg came first. Reptiles were laying eggs long before they evolved into chickens.

The problem is that you lying bastards change the question after it's asked and answered. Then you say you meant to ask, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" Then of course it is the chicken that came first.

or what came first-the DNA or the cell wall...

That depends on what you mean by a "cell wall."

Nor could Darwin explain it,

Darwin didn't even know there was such a thing as DNA you creationist twit. You have no biology education. You think you do because you read creationist web pages. Well, they've been lying to you big time.

As one of Russ and Lee's many happy fashion models... Welcome to the club!

I hate to argue, but the egg ALWAYS has to come first.

Whatever laid the first chicken egg was a pre-chicken or proto chicken or something Not a chicken. Then it laid a mutant EGG which hatched and was the FIRST CHICKEN.

I'm only a lowly English lit major but I don't think it's that difficult to figure out the logic.

I like this variation on the Study Hard Be Evil shirt. Wait...what's that on the book cover? Can it be...? ;-)

http://t-shirts.cafepress.com/item/shbe-black-tshirt/42387240

Whatever laid the first chicken egg was a pre-chicken or proto chicken or something Not a chicken.

No, all chicken eggs were layed by chickens. But "chicken" and "chicken egg" are not precisely defined; google "Sorites Paradox".

P.S. It might help to think of your own lineage. Do you suppose that one of your human ancestors was the child of a non-human -- a "pre-human" or "proto-human"? If your logic tells you that, your logic is wrong. Rather, as you go back in time you would find that your ancestors are less and less unambiguously human, but there's no dividing line where everyone before it isn't human and everyone after it is. (It's too bad that many biologists struggle with the definition of "species" without any awareness of the applicability of the literature on the Sorites Paradox.)

Then you say you meant to ask, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" Then of course it is the chicken that came first.

So what did that chicken hatch from? Sorry, Norm, but you're quite wrong. The correct answer goes deeper, and attacks the fundie/Platonic notion of "types".

So what did that chicken hatch from?

The pre-chicken's egg.

Egg's belong to the ones that laid them, not to the ones inside them.

I wrote:

Egg's belong to the ones that laid them, not to the ones inside them.

I meant, "Eggs belong to the ones that laid them, not to the ones inside them."

The first thing you're willing to call a chicken did not come from a chicken's egg. It came from a pre-chicken.

It's a matter of semantics, not necessarily types. But types is another way to go.

Woo-hoo! Thanks for finding the shirt.

Oh, and the egg came first.

Wow, a threat with only one mention of the cracker that has evolved from talking about a shirt into talking about chickens and chicken eggs!

Personally, my favorite shirt was a gift from a librarian. It said: Free the Bound Periodicals!

Hey PZ, your shirt is the same as the bumper sticker on my car!

Egg's belong to the ones that laid them, not to the ones inside them.

This is a silly unsupportable arbitrary claim. And what if the egg from which your first chicken was hatched is structurally identical to the eggs that chicken lays -- which is very likely? The fact is that, as a matter of biological science, of the modern understanding of evolution, you are quite wrong.

It's a matter of semantics

Yes ... a subject about which you seem quite uninformed .. certainly when it comes to the semantics of "chicken" and "chicken egg".

The first thing you're willing to call a chicken did not come from a chicken's egg. It came from a pre-chicken.

Since the first thing you would be willing to call a chicken, whatever that is, would indistinguishable from its parent, there is no such first thing -- if you don't understand that, you don't understand the nature of biological evolution. The fallacy is in the idea of there being such a dividing line between things we're willing to call chickens and things we aren't -- this is the Sorites Paradox, which you really would do well to learn about, so you stop making this well-established mistake. There's large range of organisms in the chicken line that we could call chickens by some criteria and not others; it's simply a mistake to categorize these organisms into "chicken" and "not-chicken", rather than "chicken-like to various degrees".

Bizarrely, while I'm typing this I'm listening to Nova's "Car of the Future", and someone just referred to "this chicken and the egg problem", and said "it can't be solved; the car and gasoline evolved together".

truth machine wrote:

It's a matter of semantics

Yes ... a subject about which you seem quite uninformed .. certainly when it comes to the semantics of "chicken" and "chicken egg".

Is that how you win arguments, by lying about what your opponent said?

Go to my original post, #33. I never said "chicken egg."

I said chicken's egg.

There's a difference when you add that apostrophe "s," for it makes the word chicken into a possessives of noun.

Pay attention and stop lying about what I said because this is way too silly a subject to be arguing about.

Is that how you win arguments, by lying about what your opponent said?

I'm not interested in winning arguments and didn't view you as an "opponent". If I misquoted what you wrote, it's because I didn't realize that your argument rested on such trivial distinctions -- you were paraphrasing the creationist's argument, so your insistence now as to where an apostrophe goes is grossly intellectually dishonest. If you're determined to misunderstand evolution and how the Sorites Paradox applies to the chicken-and-the-egg problem, and that it's not really so "unimportant", it's your loss.

Sorry, I wrote "unimportant" from faulty memory; I meant to quote your "silly a subject". It's not a silly subject, it actually goes to the heart of the process of evolution, the concept of species, and many confusions and misunderstandings about them.

Just to put home the point of how pathetically intellectually dishonest you are, Norm, let's quote you accurately:

The problem is that you lying bastards change the question after it's asked and answered. Then you say you meant to ask, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" Then of course it is the chicken that came first.

But that's a strawman; neither the "lying bastards" nor anyone else who explores this question inserts that oh-so-convenient-to-you quotemark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken-and-egg_problem which repeatedly uses the phrase "chicken egg", not your "chicken's egg".

So fuck off, you dishonest and willfully pig-ignorant ass.

truth machine wrote:

But that's a strawman; neither the "lying bastards" nor anyone else who explores this question inserts that oh-so-convenient-to-you quotemark. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken-and-egg_problem which repeatedly uses the phrase "chicken egg", not your "chicken's egg".

The egg always came first unless you use the term "chicken's egg" and not "chicken egg." A chicken's egg is an egg laid by the chicken. It's a possessive of noun.

The whole bit about "you'll lie and say you meant chicken's egg" was a joke about the argumentative style of creationists and ID proponents. I had no idea it applied to you guys too.

And your claim about the Sorites Paradox doesn't always apply to evolution. For example on the website you linked says that recently discovered genetic evidence suggests that the modern domestic chicken is a hybrid descendant of both the red junglefowl and the grey junglefowl. In which case there is not necessarily a Sorites Paradox involved.

Assuming the evidence bears out, a hybrid is a compelling scenario that the egg came before the chicken, but that still wouldn't be a "chicken's egg" even though it is a "chicken egg" because a chicken's egg was necessarily laid by something you're willing to call a chicken.

In the end it is semantics and when you're willing to apply a name.

truth machine wrote:

I'm listening to Nova's "Car of the Future", and someone just referred to "this chicken and the egg problem", and said "it can't be solved; the car and gasoline evolved together".

Not exactly true. The first thing that might be called "a car" was steam-powered in 1884. Henry Ford's first car ran on alcohol and Rudolph Diesel's namesake engine ran on peanut oil. Gasoline as we know it today didn't quite exist.

Gasoline, however, was not necessarily invented, it can be thought of as a natural by-product of the petroleum industry or as always being in the crude oil. Kerosene was the principal product and kerosene for lamps was in use before the first "car" was invented. In fact it was there in the crude all before man evolved and invented cars.

But gasoline can also be considered as produced by modern distillation, the separating of the volatile, more valuable fractions of crude petroleum. What was invented were the numerous processes and agents needed to improve the quality of gasoline making it a better commodity.

It thus depends on what you're willing to call gasoline. The natural product, or the refined, improved version.

Another way to look at it is when the words first came into use. The term "car" was probably used before the term "gasoline."

I'm the one who started all this back in comment #27. Then, my husband put in his 2 cents in comment #31.
I guess being new to this world of online comment sparring--or whatever you call this--I am amazed at the comments.
Norman, you are unbelievable!
Biology Major said "My instructors could never answer what came first- the chicken or the egg?"

You replied: "You lie. All biology profs know that the egg came first. Reptiles were laying eggs long before they evolved into chickens."

He was not lying. You need to look up the definition of the word. Webster: to make an untrue statement with intent to deceive. You weren't in his classes. How would you know what the instructors taught? And calling names? Isn't that an ad hominem attack?

You go on to say: "The problem is that you lying bastards change the question after it's asked and answered. Then you say you meant to ask, "which came first, the chicken or the chicken's egg?" Then of course it is the chicken that came first."

I'm surprised the whole debate really got off on the whole chicken and egg thing because his main point was that you need DNA to form the cell wall, but you can't have DNA without it's being within the cell's wall.

You continued: "or what came first-the DNA or the cell wall...
That depends on what you mean by a "cell wall.""

Come on! How many definitions of "cell wall" could there be? Are you "splitting hairs" to avoid the point?

You continued: "Nor could Darwin explain it,
Darwin didn't even know there was such a thing as DNA you creationist twit."

Of course Darwin didn't know about DNA. That was the whole point. If Darwin knew what we know now about the cell he would have had to change his theory. And there you go again...name calling. Tisk.

You continue: "You have no biology education."

Tell that to Sonoma State University where he got his bachelor's degree in biology with a concentration in zoology with mostly A's. Before that, when he got his degree as a registered nurse he tutored physiology and microbiology.

Finally you make the outrageous claim: "You think you do because you read creationist web pages. Well, they've been lying to you big time."

I just asked my husband if he ever looked at creationist web pages. He says he can't think of one. So, it seems you've made false assumptions about someone you've never met by saying that he has no biology education and reads creationist web pages. You probably also assumed that he is a fundamentalist evangelical Christian. You would be wrong again.
So, can you answer the question which his professors could not answer? Which came first: DNA or the cell wall?