jlynch | August 9, 2006
This MSNBC article highlights research which has used synchroton-radiation X-ray tomographic microscopy to study the three-dimensional structure of embryos from the mid-Cambrian annelid, Markuelia. The research is being lead by Phil Donoghue at the University of Bristol, whose website also includes an impressive video. Donoghue provided the title for this post.
The paper is Donoghue, P. C. J., Bengtson, S., Dong, X., Gostling, N. J., Huldtgren, T. M., Cunningham, J. E., Yin, C., Yue, Z., Peng, F. and Stampanoni, M. 2006. "Synchrotron X-ray tomographic microscopy of fossil embryos" and has…
jlynch | August 8, 2006I like Bill Maher. On Saturday he's playing here in Phoenix, and we'll be there. Here he is on Leno doing some good stuff on Mel Gibson etc.
jlynch | August 8, 2006Ed has written a little about Dembski's claim that Barbara Forrest (of Creationism's Trojan Horse fame) owes her career to him. I am reminded of last year when Dembski accused Jeff Shallit and Wes Elsberry of "making a name for themselves by parasitizing my work." At that time, June 2005, I wrote the following:
Dembski has made a very strange statement regarding the mathematician Jeffrey Shallit. In a letter he claims that he doesn’t take Shallitt seriously as a critic as he sees Shallitt’s behavior as un-ethical and his criticisms as being trivial. I shall leave others to answer those…
jlynch | August 8, 2006A few weeks ago I noted the fact that some Christians appear to detect design and divine control in the beauty of nature. For example, witnessing lightning and a rainbow simultaneously, one observer was driven to comment: "It reminded me that God is really in control." Now, it appears, Dembski is thinking the same way. He notes a photo (reproduced below) "captured this week on the Idaho/Washington border" that shows a "fire rainbow"*.
Below the fold, I comment.
Dembski comments:
It's the gratuitousness of such beaty [sic] that leads me to rebel against materialism
The email that accompanies…
jlynch | August 6, 2006Reader #100,000 since my move to ScienceBlogs passed through at 16:17:49 MST. The reader was at Hamline University in St Paul MN, and I think I know who it is (Hi Ed! Comment if it was you).
I guess I'll just take the opportunity to thank all my readers over the past seven months.
jlynch | August 6, 2006In April 2005, I posted a piece (reproduced below the cut) that discussed Evolutionary Monographs as the putative outlet for Paul Nelson's 1998 Ph.D. thesis, a thesis that argues against common descent. In comments over at the Panda's Thumb, Nelson noted that:
Bill Dembski and I have been working on a shorter article, with some of the monograph's main points, which we plan to submit to the best peer-reviewed biology journal we can find. (Comment of May 2nd 2005)
We're still waiting, and considering Dembski's proclivity for posting papers online to get comments from detractors, this is all…
jlynch | August 6, 2006David Byrne on the documentary Jesus Camp:
Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim -- the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an "army" to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the…
jlynch | August 5, 2006August 6, 2001, is the day that George W. Bush received the Presidential Daily Brief headlined, "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S." The PDB stated that Al Qaeda maintained a support structure in the U.S. that could aid attacks, that one idea was to hijack U.S. airplanes, and that the FBI had detected "suspicious activity," including surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The memo also noted that the U.S. Embassy in the United Arab Emirates had received a warning that Al Qaeda was preparing an attack in the U.S. with explosives.
On August 6, 2001, Bush was at his ranch in the…
jlynch | August 5, 2006Seen at Crooks & Liars:
In his new book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created A War Without End, [Former Ambassador to Croatia Peter ] Galbraith, the son of the late economist John Kenneth Galbraith, claims that American leadership knew very little about the nature of Iraqi society and the problems it would face after the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
A year after his "Axis of Evil" speech before the U.S. Congress, President Bush met with three Iraqi Americans, one of whom became postwar Iraq's first representative to the United States. The three described what they thought…
jlynch | August 4, 2006Earlier this week Bill ("Vise, Vise, Baby") Dembski claimed research by ID supporters was slight because of "threats" to "families and livelihoods" by the "Darwinian fascists" (a phrase he later quietly redacted to "Darwinian enforcers"). Needless to say, he didn't provide any evidence of threats to "families and livelihoods".
Now Paul ("The Fableist") Nelson tells us that the Discovery Institute "actually funds a great deal of primary research -- go ahead, snicker -- but those receiving the support and their specific projects have become a very quiet business indeed, and that need for…
jlynch | August 4, 2006It's Friday and I feel like a poem. Many readers may know Malcolm Lowry from his 1947 work Under The Volcano which was rated one of the 100 greatest novels of the twentieth century. Lowry was also a poet and authored one of my favorite poems "We Sit Unhackled, Drunk and Mad to Edit" which I dedicate to Abel Pharmboy and his Friday Fermentable.
We Sit Unhackled, Drunk and Mad to Edit
Notions of freedom are tied up with drink.
Our ideal life contains a tavern
Where man may sit and talk or just think
All without fear of the nighted wyvern;
Or yet another tavern where it appears
There are no No…
jlynch | August 4, 2006Here we go again:
Italy ::
Honk ::
Shades ::
Tool ::
Modern ::
Tension ::
Conservative ::
Weight ::
Insurance ::
Political ::
Thoughts below the fold.
Italy :: Football
Honk :: Tonk
Shades :: Cool
Tool :: Use
Modern :: Times
Tension :: Relief
Conservative :: Corrupt
Weight :: Loss
Insurance :: Policy
Political :: Action
(usual source)
jlynch | August 3, 2006On his radio show, Neal Boortz asked
[H]ow incompetent, how ignorant, how worthless is an adult that can't earn more than the minimum wage?... You have to really, really, really be a pretty pathetic human being to not be able to earn more than [the minimum wage.]
No comment.
(source)
jlynch | August 2, 2006Dembski predicts:
This war will not be decided by courts, legislators, or school boards, but by young people as they wake up to the fact that dogmatic Darwinists have been systematically indoctrinating and disenfranchising them. Just as the counterculture of the 60s overturned the status quo, so a new counterculture, with high school, college, and university students taking the lead, will overturn the Darwinian status quo. [Uncoomon Descent, "Why student activism is the key to winning this war", August 2, 2006]
Whatever happened to the "war" being decided in peer-reviewed science journals? Oh…
jlynch | August 2, 2006I just have to share this comment from this thread:
Actually, it is atheism that is the problem...more specifically, the attempt to make man (or at least some men through the power of the state) God.
Then, when the idea of experimentation on humans, made acceptable by beginning with human embryos defined as not being human at all, is more and more accepted, cloning, combination of human and animal DNA and other perversions can be utilized on a grand scale to create a race of slaves governed by eugenically superior Supermen.
Nietzsche's syphillitic atheistic ramblings made real by the power of…
jlynch | August 2, 2006Dembski posted an anonymous email he received accusing a "prominent anti-ID proponent" of supressing an "ID-friendly" experiment (actually a computer model) that was developed by an undergraduate student.
What's interesting here is that, despite not being able to confirm anything in the e-mail, Dembski posts it, albeit with the name of the university and professor removed. While he cant prove anything specific, Dembski obviously feels that hints of bad actions by "scientific materialists" are useful for the cause. On the other hand, if the e-mail is a fake and a setup to get Dembski in…
jlynch | August 2, 2006We have a new SciBling, David Dobbs over at Smooth Pebbles. Wander over and say hi!
jlynch | August 2, 2006The ID reaction to Kansas is beginning to trickle in. Paul Nelson gives us a little fable claiming that the science standards don't matter anyway, and John West said the outcome would not stop people from learning about the "growing controversy" over evolution."
Let's face it guys -- up until last night, you saw the standards as being important Hell, you funded a media campaign with lecture tours and websites just to make that point.
And here's the rub, in conservative Kansas, in Republican primaries (surely members of your "natural constituency") you lost. That must hurt.
jlynch | August 1, 2006News from Kansas seems to be that Bacon & Willard won their primaries and Morris & Patzer lost, being replaced by pro-science Republicans. As Nick notes, "[t]he likelihood is therefore that the new Board of Education will switch from being a 6-4 pro-creationism majority to at least a 6-4 pro-science majority (depending on the November general election). This probably means the pro-ID/creationism science standards are history." Things are looking good for Kansas at last.