Remembering Neil Armstrong

 With one small step and one giant leap, 

Neil Armstrong fulfilled one of humanity's greatest dreams.

I'm sad to say that yet another hero is gone: Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon, has passed away.  We've lost a number of scientific heroes in the last few years, from "Mr. Wizard" Dan Herbert to renowned essayist Martin Gardner, but Armstrong may well have captured the world's imagination like no one else because of his role as the face of the Apollo 11 program.  An aeronautical engineer by training, Armstrong was a tried and true scientist and, like every other brave man and woman who has traveled into space, a very real hero.  His death is a loss to all of us, but his legacy as one of the pioneers of human space exploration will live on forever.

At 2:56 UTC on July 21, 1969 (which, I believe, would have been at 10:56 pm EST on July 20th where I live), Neil Armstrong lowered his left foot onto the surface of the moon and realized a dream that may be as old as humanity itself.  I can only imagine how it felt to be alive at that point in history - Nevermind how Armstrong himself must have felt standing on the moon; I can barely imagine the awe, wonderment, and pride in humanity that the people watching back on Earth felt watching it on television.  It gives me goosebumps just to think about it. 

My family has a story about the Apollo landing that my mom has told me a few times.  My oldest brother was a baby when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and our mom woke him up in the middle the night and held him in front of the TV so that, whether he would ever remember it or not, he could see that historic moment.  I'm honestly a little jealous.  Hell, I get chills just watching recordings of that moment.

We live in amazing times.  Armstrong's footprints on the moon have been joined by others.  The International Space Station provides humanity with a full-time outpost in space.  The Hubble Space Telescope, to be joined in 2018 by the Webb Space Telescope, is beaming back to the earth pictures of objects unimaginably distant from us in both time an space.  Curiosity, a truck-sized scientific robot, is exploring the surface of Mars.  Sometimes this sort of hits me all at once and makes me almost giddy at the wonder of it all.

I realized this morning when I was getting ready to type this post that there's probably someone alive today - a child in elementary school or even an infant bouncing in a high chair - who will, twenty or thirty years from now, take a deep breath, close their eyes, and carefully lower their foot onto the surface of Mars.  When that moment comes, I'm sure Neil Armstrong's famous words will be echoing through the mind of this new pioneer.  I could type them out, but I rather hear them from Neil.



Damn right it looks beautiful from here.

Curiosity Has Landed!

It's 1:37 in the morning and I just got done watching the stream of the Curiosity landing.  I don't have anything profound to say except that human ingenuity never ceases to amaze me.  A rover the size of a car has just flown 350 million miles through space and landed safely on the surface of freakin' Mars.  Phil Plait just tweeted that "humans are awesome when we reach" and nothing could be more true.  Bravo, NASA, bravo.

Perhaps more than any other branch of science, astronomy is the most humbling and awe-inspiring.  There's so much to learn out there, so much to reach for, and planetary landings capture the imagination like nothing else.  Hopefully the Curiosity can spark the public's interest in space exploration again and light a fire under both the government and private enterprise to get some more technology out there.  After all, there's sill so much more to know.

So, um, maybe let's start working on getting some boots on the ground up there, am I right?

The Patience of a Saint...

I've been reading Richard Dawkins' newest book The Greatest Show on Earth for the past few days and enjoying every page of it. Regardless of what The God Delusion may have done to advance the cause of atheism, Dawkins is at his best when he's writing about science. In much the same way that Sagan's works fill the reader with awe at the scope of the cosmos, Dawkin's writings about biology leave the reader dumbstruck by the sheer scope and majesty of life.¹

It's hard for me to envision any intellectually honest person who is doesn't want to explore the origins of the life (and indeed the cosmos itself), but experience has taught me that such people are lurking about everywhere. One such head-in-the-sander is Wendy Wright, one of the top brass of the conservative religious organization Concerned Women for America. On pages 198-202 of The Greatest Show, Richard Dawkins discusses a conversation that he had with Mrs. Wright while filming a documentary about Darwin. She is, to say the least, philosophically hostile to the idea of evolution and this distaste leads her to make rather vacuous claims about the supposed paucity of evidence showing evolution by natural selection.

Embedded below is first of seven videos which show the entire discussion between Dawkins and Wright. The full exchange lasts slightly more that an hour, during which time Mrs. Wright makes exactly two arguments: a.) Social Darwnism is bad (Which is true) and b.) "Nah-nah-nah, I can't hear you. If transitional fossils existed I'd accept evolution, but they don't."² She repeats variations of these two talking points for over an hour while Dawkins attempts to explain genetics, comparative anatomy, and the fossil record. He may as well be talking to a cat. Check it out.³



What superhuman patience on the part of Richard Dawkins! Seriously, that lady is irritating just to watch.⁴ How he stood there for an hour talking in circles with her without either having an aneurysm or turning into the Incredible Hulk is beyond me. Science is lucky to have such an eloquent spokesman as Dawkins. Meanwhile, Wright is precisely the caliber of spokeswoman that the anti-intellectual fundies deserve.


_______
1.) Indeed, I think all good science writing inspires such feelings of amazement and wonder.

2.) If I may be so bold as to say so, Mrs. Wright's got her internal reasoning reversed. She doesn't accept evolution, and ergo she refuses to accept that transitional fossils exist.

3.) I watched all 7 parts in a sitting. It was a test of endurance the likes of which I've not encountered in years.

4.) In addition to flatly denying the entire existence of human transitional fossils, Mrs. Wright utterly ignores Dawkins' mention of theistic evolutionists (Such as Francis Collins and Ken Miller) who believe in God while still accepting, and indeed celebrating, the complicated and wondrous processes through which modern species have come about.

Vampire Attack! (Sort of...)

I've been reading Dark Banquet- Blood and the Curious Lives of Blood-Feeding Creatures by Bill Schutt. In a lot of ways it's kind of a spiritual successor to Carl Zimmer's excellent Parasite Rex and it's certainly worth a look. I've only just completed the section on vampire bats and begun the section on blood itself, but the book has already been absolutely fascinating. For example, of the three species of vampire bats, desmodus rotundus (the common vampire) is especially well-equipped for locomoting on the ground*. Desmodus often hunts ground-based prey, unlike its cousins that do a lot of arboreal hunting, and as such it has evolved a stronger set of hind leg bones than most bats. Thus, rather than the normal shambling gait shared by the majority of bats, desmodus can tool around on the ground by way of a speedy ape-run.



Pretty cool, huh?

*Another type of vampire, diaemus youngi, can also move around on the ground fairly well too, but desmodus is better at it and can also effect tremendous (for its size) jumps. The third species of vampire, diphylla ecaudata, has wussy little hind leg bones that aren't useful for moving on the ground. Fortunately for diphylla, it has other adaptations that make it very good at climbing trees.

The Imaginary Asteroid

I'm going to go ahead and make the assumption that readers don't remember this post from last year. Basically, a pair of fellows made a claim based on their (and only their) interpretation of an ancient Sumerian disc that a heretofore unknown asteroid impact caused a huge landslide event at the Köfels site in the Austrian Alps that took place around 8,700 years ago. Well, the two fellows involved, Alan Bond and Mark Hempsell, have released a book about their findings that was reviewed in the new (vol. 14, no. 3) issue of Skeptic and their arguments appear to be pretty freakin' weak.

It's always troubling when someone's allegedly scientific conclusions are released not in a peer-reviewed journal but rather in a mass-market book. Readers may also recall that I found it odd that Bond and Hempsell's asteroid scenario required that the Köfels event take place about 3,500 years more recently than the conventional dating of the site indicates. This is because our two friends want to show that an Sumerian artifiact called the planisphere is actually a record of the event, but computer models of the ancient sky from around the accepted dating of the Köfels event don't synch up with the planisphere's depiction of the night sky, but you can get a close match from a computer model of the sky from June 29, 3123 B.C. Widely accepting dating methods be damned, according to Bond and Hempsell. If the planisphere looks kind of like the sky from 3123 B.C. and not like the sky from 6600 B.C., then by golly the Köfels landslide took place in 3123 B.C. and the geologists who've dated it otherwise are wrong.

That in and of itself should set off some warning bells, but Skeptic reviewers Jeff Medkeff and Martin Rundkvist have even more damning criticism of Bond and Hempsell's work. Briefly, Bond and Hempsell claim that the impact at Köfels threw a massive plume of debris backwards along the path of the impacting object, creating a huge plume of fire over much of the ancient mid-east that has since been incorporated into the mythology of the region. As Medkeff and Rundkvist note, all of this supposedly happened without leaving so much as a crater at the Köfels site. Bond and Hempsell's further claim that the impactor was broken up before it struck the Köfels site by glancing impacts against other nearby mountains is also unsupported by observations.

It looks very much like Bond and Hempsell simply came up with a "cool idea" about what the planisphere might represent and worked backwards to find some way to make it mean what they want it to mean. If that meant rejecting physics and geology to make the evidence fit their conclusions, then so be it.

Also, given that some of the early headlines about Bond and Hempsell's hypothesis read "Research Shows Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah"*, it may also be worth noting that some of the customer reviews on Amazon go a little something like this (Emphasis added):

I was first interested in the book to see if it confirmed any dates in the long, 13,000 year chronology of the Bible. (See bibletime dot com or Harold Camping's 13,000 year Bible Chronology.) This impact event does match. The impact date given in the book is just after Peleg's first year, (using the Bible Time version) at the time when the earth was "divided." This impact event provides a great explanation of that mysterious reference.

The always-hilarious website Conservapedia also has an excited entry on the "Köfels Impact" in which it claims that the non-existent impact provides literal evidence for the Biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah. Since it also incorrectly cites Mark Hempsell as a geologist (He's actually an aerospace engineering lecturer and England's Bristol University), that whole article can probably be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it looks like the imaginary "Köfels impact" is likely to quickly find its way into the lexicon of Biblical literalists.

In any event, check out an online version of the Skeptic review here.

*Headline is from FoxNews.com, 4-1-2008.
Also, I know it's not considered an asteroid it it hits the Earth, but I liked the alliteration...

Shameless Plug for Phil Plait...

If you haven't bought, begged, or borrowed a copy of Phil Plait's new book then you're really missing out. Death From the Skies! is a fascinating look at cosmic catastrophes for non-scientists, but unlike many other popular works on such things it isn't just a bunch of goofy prophecy mumbo-jumbo or sci-fi nonsense. The world will end one day, but it's not going to end with Jesus dropping the cosmic elbow on us or Cthulhu burbling up from long-lost R'lyeh.* Nope, one day the earth will be struck with a civilization-annihilating impactor, scorched clean of life by our sun's death throes, or utterly obliterated by a gamma ray burst. And Phil Plait wants to tell you all about it.

Honestly, I don't think there's anything better than a good astronomy book to provide a reader with a sense of slack-jawed, humbling, awe. Phil's also better than most about sneakily dropping knowledge on you while regaling you with pants-wettingly frightening doomsday scenarios, so this book isn't just for entertainment. Seriously, check it out.

*Speaking of R'yleh, its (wholly fictional) location is tagged on the current version of Google Earth for some reason...

Ray Comfort's Sick New Low...

Ray Comfort's obsession with the idea that science is somehow an evil enterprise reached a gruesome new low yesterday with this blog post. I don't think I need to say much about the implication there. Ray's done little more than demonstrate the malevolence of the god he imagines to exist (Or is it apathy? Would that make it more palatable?), to say nothing of his own utter callousness.

So what has science ever done for us?

It's cured deadly diseases.

It's helped to fight world hunger.

It's provided us with remarkable advancements in medical care.

Ray's real gripe with the Large Hadron Collider is that it could help explain the origins of the universe, pushing Rays own shrill claims of "Goddidit" further into obscurity.

I'm Not Expecting the World to End Tomorrow...

In fact, I have some Batman comics en route that won't delivered for several days - not the course of action I'd have taken if I expected the planet to spontaneously transform into a strange quark star at some point on Wednesday.

Why am I bringing this up? Because the Large Hadron Collider is coming online tomorrow, and a couple of concerned non-physicists have made their way to the internet and NPR begun decrying it as the likely cause of the end of the world, if not the universe. Nevermind that there are several particle accelerators in the world that have yet to destroy the planet and nevermind that the LHC won't be doing anything that doesn't occur in nature; the end of the world is just so sexy! Science be damned- if we can get on the air to talk about the imminent end of existence, so much the better.

Well, again, your old pal Skippy isn't banking on the end of mankind in the morning, but luckily a website has been set up that will allow us to monitor whether or not the LHC has annihilated the planet. If you happen wonder if the the Large Hadron Collider has destroyed the world yet, just mosey on over to HasTheLargeHadronColliderDestroyedTheWorldYet.com and check for yourself.

Hopefully this will help avoid any confusion.

Pterodactyl Attack!

Pterodactyls* are pretty cool, that much is certain. They're also extinct, and have been since the great extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. I'm pretty sure that much is also certain. But, of course, there are a few weirdos floating around out there who are foaming at the mouth to prove that pterodactyls are alive and well and coming to your hometown. Bizarre even by cryptozoologist standards, the two biggest mushrooms growing out of the steaming pseudoscientific turd that is living dinosaur theory are David Hatcher Childress and Philip O'Donnell. Better put some gloves on - this one's going to get messy.

Rodan, a modern super-pterosaur

Childress is an archaeologist in much the same way that I'm a professional wrestler - We've both seen real ones on TV and thought "Gee whiz, that'd be cool". The only difference is that I don't go around telling people I'm a pro wrestler, but Childress, who has (at most) a single complete year of college under his belt, tries to pass himself off as an archaeologist. This goon has found a home among paranormal TV shows like Sightings, where they rarely present the fact that he's basically just a guy off the street. He's big into Erich von Däniken-flavored alternative history, wherein aliens have been interfering with life on Earth since the beginning of time, Atlantis was the place to be before it sank into the ocean, and the ancient Egyptians hung out in the Grand Canyon.

He enjoys a lot of support among "esoterics", which is to say ding dongs who, to paraphrase Aristotle, cannot entertain a thought without accepting it. Any version of history that seems cooler than actual history appeals to them. They're also prone to making loud arguments from incredulity** that are dripping with implicit racism. "How else but through intervention by the spacemen," they collectively ask, "could all those primitive brown people have built pyramids and temples and worked out functional calendars?" Childress also owns his own publishing house, the Adventures Unlimited Press, which he uses to peddle his enormous horde of books. His literary output largely consists of tales about his various adventures uncovering, singlehandedly, ancient secrets of anthropology that have eluded, well, the entirety of the world's actual trained anthropologists and archaeologists.

Linked here is one of Childress' pterodactyl articles, in which he argues, among other things, that El Chupacabras is actually a live pterosaur. His other arguments consist of reminding us that folks in medieval times had legends about dragons and wyverns and whatnot, and thus (obviously) such things (or a kind-of-but-not-quite equivalent) must've existed at the time. Following that sort of logic would lead me to lock my doors at night to keep Jason Vorhees at bay while downing cup after cup of coffee stay awake so Freddy Krueger doesn't get me in my dreams.

Childress also appeals to a mysterious old photo of cowboys with a dead pterodactyl. This photo is extra amazing because no one has ever seen it. People just hear about it and then...remember it. Spooky. There is not, so far as anyone can tell, even a single actual copy of the thing in existence, and yet Childress paints it as powerful evidence. Childress cites John Keel (Yeah, the Mothman Prophecies guy.) as his source that vouches for the authenticity of the photo. The quest for the magic photo is complicated by a handful of fakes (showing Civil War guys instead of cowboys) that got floated around the internet a few years ago as part of a viral marketing campaign for a now-defunct TV show called "Freaky Links".***

Pterosaur photo from the Freaky Links viral website.

Philip O'Donnell is the author of Dinosaurs: Dead or Alive? He's also known online as "Living Dinosaur Man for Christ", which should give you a bit of a sense of foreboding. Oh, did I mention that when he wrote his book he was 14 year-old home-schooled kid? He makes a weird argument (Which, judging by the favorable reviews on Amazon, people are buying into.) that the existence of living dinosaurs today would disprove evolutionary theory (He never really says how.) and show that the earth is really only...wait for it...6,000 years old.

His basic premise is that (his non-existent understanding of) evolution predicts that dinosaurs cannot exist today, and thus the existence of a living dinosaur would disprove evolution. Keeping in mind that some well-adapted creatures, such as alligators, have experienced only minimal changes in body plans over the eons, there's no specific aspect of actual evolutionary theory that precludes the modern existence of dinosaurs. They were simply ill-equipped to deal with the situation created during the K-T extinction event (thought by many to have been precipitated by a large scale impact event) and were out-competed by proto-mammals and other creatures who were better adapted to the new environment. While evolutionary theory could be used to make basic predictions about what species might or might survive X change vs. Y change, it would not predict, ceteris paribus, that dinosaurs would go extinct and that mammals would thrive in a stable environment.

Pterosaur photo that appeared on the Freaky Links TV show.

O'Donnell, who also believes in the existence of dragons, lists as evidence on his website a pile of "Champ" lake monster photos, some pieces of art depicting dragons, an Ica Stone, and some photographs of skulls which he claims show anatomically modern humans in the Jurassic geological layer. Since he and his friends write the captions for their pictures themselves and offer no citation, it's not easy to track down where they even come from. He also has an "Answering the Skeptics" page that consists of, and I'm not kidding, a machine gun list of two sentence descriptions of dinosaur encounters with, as usual, no citation.

One of O'Donnell's most annoying habits is that of assuming his own conclusion. For example, the lack of dinosaur fossils after the late cretaceous means squat because the geological column is an evil evolutionist lie. How do we know? Because the earth is 6,000 years old and thus the geological column isn't real! How do we know? Because the old earth is an evil evolutionist lie! How do we know? We just do! Wait...what? He also likes to try and quote mine Alan Feduccia, the paleornithologist at UNC, as saying that there is no evidence that birds evolved from a prior form of creature.**** Feduccia is unusual among paleornithologists because he doesn't think that birds evolved from theropod dinosaurs, but that isn't because he doesn't think they evolved. He instead thinks that birds and theropods share a common ancestor further back in the timeline, but his arguments are unambiguously pro-evolution.

A common argument shared by both our friends is "Hey, coelacanths exist, and science thought they were extinct! Thus it is just as likely that pterodactyls still exist." Yep, there are two species of coelacanth prowling the oceans today, with the total number of individuals thought to be less than 500. They dwell at depths of up to 2,300 feet, and their eyes are so sensitive to light that they won't even rise to a catchable depth on nights when the moon is full. Yet they've still been captured, dozens of them. On the other hand, O'Donnell and Childress would have us believe that pterosaurs with wingspans of up to 45 feet are living in Texas and Mexico, attacking humans and animals alike, and have yet to be physically documented. They're shooting themselves in the foot by bringing up the coelacanth, because if a creature so elusive as that has been conclusively documented then there's no excuse for brazen, farm-raiding dinosaurs to remain unconfirmed.

As I've stated on here many times in the past, cryptozoologists are a strange lot, but even they tend to give loons like Childress and O'Donnell a wide berth. The idea of living dinosaurs in America pushes the conspiracy-mongering and wishful thinking that are endemic to cryptozoology to the point of self-satire.

*"Pterodactyl" is a generic term, and the creatures it is used to describe are more properly termed "pterosaurs". On the other hand, pterodactyl is a cooler sounding word. Pterosaurs, by the way, and not technically dinosaurs.
**Which, when you thinking about it, is pretty remarkable coming from folks who tout extraterrestrial visitors as the source of much of earth's technology.
*** FreakyLinks.com used to be the site for the show, so sometimes you'll see old forum posts that refer to it. Just keep in mind that the TV show ended in 2001, and FreakyLinks.com is now a porno site.
**** The section on his site in which this occurs is actually quoted wholesale (with credit given) from Creation Ministries International shill John Sarfati's book Refuting Evolution, so O'Donnell can be forgiven- it's unlikely that he's ever actually read a word of Feduccia's work that hasn't been through Sarfati's grinder. Sarfati, by the way, is a chemist, not a biologist.

It Was Childish Enough Before...

According to Answers in Genesis, Ken Ham's laughable but well-funded Young Earth Creationist organization, the Creation Museum that blights my home state of Kentucky will soon receive a small makeover in the form of numerous kiosks and additions to make it more kid-friendly. Considering the fact that the Museum peddles a bizarre history in which the universe was created 2,000 years after the invention of the battle axe* and Noah took dinosaurs on the ark,** I don't know exactly how the Creation Museum could get any more childish. Honestly, this is an organization that exists for the purpose of arguing for the historical accuracy of The Flintstones. Other than, I dunno, hiring on Barney the Dinosaur as a greeter, what could they possibly do to kiddify it even more? I guess it's important to drum this crazy message into children before they've had the chance to develop any critical thinking skills whatsoever.

On another note, I'm looking at the museum's rates I see that it costs a whopping $19.95 plus tax for an adult to get in. Meanwhile, the Louisville Zoo, where you might actually learn something that's true, costs a mere $11.95 for an adult admission, and the Louisville Science Center only charges $15 for admission to the center itself and an IMAX show. Hell, even a yearly family membership to the Zoo only costs $75 compared to the Creation Museum's whopping $125, and the Louisville Zoo boasts a world-beating gorilla enclosure whereas the Creation Museum has nothing but fiberglass dinosaurs and lies. Apparently the Young Earthers are as money-hungry as they are asinine.

* Archaeological evidence shows that the first axes with a handle (haft) were manufactured around 6,000 BC. The Creation Museum's brand of YEC is premised on a universe that began around 4,000 BC.

** Recall the Testing Poe's Law post in which a similar argument was found to be indistinguishable from parody.

Is a Space Pope next...?

Word from the Vatican is that it's cool to believe in aliens. Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, who's the director of the Vatican Observatory, recently noted that believe in his wacky sky deity is does not preclude the existence of life on other planets and that Catholics can believe in aliens without the threat of everlasting torment in hell. He said that aliens would all be "God's creatures" too. Funes said that ruling out the existence of aliens would be equivalent to "putting limits" on God.

And on the eight day, God created Spacemen.

Now, it's fair enough to say that their might be aliens out there. Heck, I'm no UFO True Believer™, but as far as some form of life existing somewhere in the universe, the statistics seem to favor it. That being said, it's just hilarious to me watching the Church flail around reaching for some sort of modern context for itself. I'm waiting for a papal pronouncement about Sasquatch next.

Confronting the Creationists With Science...

Alright, with the release of Expelled looming like on the horizon like some big ridiculous monster, I thought it'd be fun to post a video about the relationship of humans to our great ape cousins. For added emphasis, I'm referring readers not to an atheist biologist like Richard Dawkins, but instead to devout Catholic biologist Kenneth Miller, holder of a Ph.D. in biology and a professor at Brown University. This is a fascinating video taken from a much longer 2 hour talk available here. In this clip, Miller talks about the evidence of chromosome fusion in humans, explaining why humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes while great apes have 24. Were there no evidence of a fusing of chromosomes in human beings, the theory of common descent between humans and great apes would be disconfirmed. On the other hand, mapping of the human genome shows an anomalous placement of centromeres and telomeres in the human genetic code that provides powerful evidence of chromosome fusion and, therefore, of common descent. Enjoy.

Expelled by Design...

Well, Ben Stein's Intelligent Design screed Expelled is going to start showing up in theaters this Friday, though it's only running in two theaters in my city. I actually saw a commercial for it on TV for the first time this morning. I must admit that I have some morbid interest in seeing the film, though I've no interest whatsoever in supporting its creators by paying to do so. Expelled is little more than a collection of the same tired old creationist arguments mixed in with whining about about "scientific elitism" and weird accusations that Darwin caused the Holocaust.

There are two things that strike me as missing from all the pre-release material on Expelled, the first being the obvious question that, if somehow ID turned out to be true in the face of all on-going scientific research, why would that naturally lead us to the conclusion that the Judeo-Christian God was behind it? Why not Odin, Amaterasu, Ganesh, Marduk, or Cthulhu? What would it prove about any god? Mightn't it just prove that there are aliens and that they created humanity? Because ID is just a repainted version of fundamentalist Christian creationism, it makes an unspoken assumption that if nature were shown to be designed by an outside intellect, it must've been Yahweh that did it. But what leads them to that assumption? Why didn't Ben Stein interview this guy?

The reason is that Stein and his Expelled cronies aren't interested in non-Christian versions of ID is that they're specifically out to tout biblical creationism in the guise of science. Not that I'm claiming that the alien guy is doing any more science than the IDers (actually they're probably working on about the same level), but it's telling that the traditional IDers want nothing to do with these guys. They're all making about the same claims, but the ID crowd wants to make sure that its audience understands, without having to say so, that the operator behind all this meant to be Yahweh.

What's double fun here is that any time you bring up the whole "intelligent design by aliens" to a traditional IDer, you'll get a response along the lines of "Aliens complex enough to create human beings are also too complex to have arisen by chance*, so what designed them?" The reply, of course, is that an omnipotent deity must by definition be far, far more complex than either humans or aliens, so where did it come from? Was it designed by something else? Where did that come from? Did it, and only it, evolve? If a deity has existed for all eternity with no beginning or end, can't one ask, rhetorically, why a static universe in which the building blocks of life have always existed is not at least equally as plausible?** Most IDers have no answers to these questions because their are operating under the assumption that the ID "designer" is meant to be Yahweh.

Also conspicuous by their absence are any prominent Christian scientists who accept evolution. As usual, I'm going to trot out Human Genome Project head Francis Collins, who is an eminent geneticist and also a devout believer in evangelical Christianity. Collins is willing to go to the mat with Richard Dawkins about the existence of God (Collins is big into the anthropic argument.), but he is convinced of the reality of evolution by natural selection after having spent his entire professional life working exclusively in the field of genetics! Where is Collins in Expelled? What about Catholic biologist Ken Miller, author of Finding Darwin's God and outspoken foe of creationists of all stripes? Why isn't he in Expelled?

The answer here is easy - Expelled's producers felt that Christian evolutionary scientists would "confuse the audience". Something that the creators of Expelled want to sweep under the carpet is that the vast majority of Christians working in the biological sciences understand evolution by natural selection to be, for all intents and purposes, an established fact. By refusing to acknowledge that anyone can both be a Christian and accept evolution by natural selection, the Expelled crew is working hard to manipulate their Christian viewers into siding with them by fiat, essentially saying that "Christians aren't allowed to accept evolution".

So yeah, Expelled is coming to theaters on April 18th, but it might behoove moviegoers to think for a moment about some of the perspectives that have been expelled from Expelled.

* Note the use of the word "chance" in ID/creationist-speak, rather than anything more illustrative of the proper evolutionary view of "random mutations being acted upon by non-random selection pressures."

** Sure such a cosmological scheme doesn't jive with modern physics, but doesn't that make it all the more appealing? Stick it to Big Physics by asserting your right to believe in a static universe!

Plugging another book...

Reader JAK mentioned the book Elephants on Acid and Other Bizarre Science Experiments a few weeks ago while discussing my post about Illya Ivanov's ape-man experiments. I picked it up to have something to read while I was in PA last week and I have to give it my recommendation. Written by Alex Boese, author of the also awesome Museum of Hoaxes, it's a very fast read that is essentially a collection of abstracts of various peculiar and inobvious experiments from the 1800s to the present. Each experiment discussed is also tagged with a relevant journal article for further reading (and, I suspect, to prove that he's not making it up).

This is a fairly lightweight book and is presented, according to the author, in a style appropriate for "bathroom readers", so there's not an enormous amount of technical detail here, but it's a fun read and serves as a good mental palate-cleansing in between more serious works. Check it out.

Oh, and Boese also has a website here.

Speaking of the Catastrophists...

Fox News is running an article about a pair of researchers out of the University of Bristol and their interpretation of a nearly 3,000 year-old cuneiform tablet. Astronautics lecturer Mark Hempsell and a fellow named Alan Bond whose area of expertise is less clear (though he does work at a high level in a company called Reactions Engines Ltd., so I assume he has some sort of physical sciences training) believe that the tablet, called the Planisphere, may be from the night diary of an astronomer from 3123 BC that records the approach of an oncoming asteroid. This is not the reading of, as far as I know, any of the others that have worked with the tablet, but now that interpretation will get its day, I suppose.

Most interestingly, they believe that the asteroid may be responsible from one of history's largest landslides - the gigantic slide, or series of slides, that took place at Köfels in the Austrian Alps. The idea that the Köfels event was caused by an asteroid was popular for a while some decades ago, though today the primarily interpretation is that it was caused by earthly geological forces (though not everyone is in agreement on this point). Most notably, there's no impact crater, though Hempsell claims that the trajectory indicated by the Planisphere would account for that by flinging the asteroid into the atmosphere at a very shallow angle, allowing it to be broken up along the way by striking other terrain features.

Fascinating if true.

The weird thing is that the Köfels slide is dated at approx. 8,700 years ago, not around 5,200 years ago as Hempsell posits. (The 3123 B.C. date comes from using a computer to compare the Planisphere with various projections of what the night sky looked like in the past. The best match was June 29, 3123 B.C.) I'm curious to see what actual geologists and astronomers make of this - the Köfels site is one of the best studied landslide events in the world, so I'm sure they'll be no paucity of opinion. I also note that Hempsell and Bond are publishing their research not as a refereed journal article, but as a popular book.

Anyway, I don't know how this will turn out, but we get to see some science at work here. A couple of fellows have a made a claim that is somewhat at odds with the current interpretation and, as other analyze and try to replicate their work, we'll see if it holds up to the test of scrutiny or if it falls by the wayside.

One thing that is absolutely wild to me, however, is that the Fox headline is "Research Shows Asteroid Destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah". (Note that the British coverage omits such hyperbole.) Hempsell does mention Sodom and Gomorrah, but he does so as an example of myths that may be attributable to ancient observations of asteroid impacts. He also mentions the Greek myth of Phaeton, son of the Sun God Helios, crashing the "sun chariot" into the earth. Hell, using that standard, the headline could just as easily have said "Research Shows Ancient Greek Sun God Caused Alps Landslide". To be fair, I've not read the book, so maybe Hempsell is all over Sodom and Gomorrah like salmonella on old chicken, but thus far I'm not quite compelled to lump him in with Velikovksy just yet. To all appearances, Fox News is ignoring the actual point of this work - a new attempt to explain the Köfels event - in favor of concocting an attention-generating healdine that means squat when it comes to the actual story.

It should be noted that Sodom and Gomorrah were almost certainly mythical cities and never actually existed. In attention to the abject lack of real archaeological evidence, "Sodom" even comes from a root word that means "scorched" - hardly the name that you'd give to a city before it was immolated.

The stupidity is just pristine...

I don't mean to steal topics from PZ Myers, but his discussion today about the retroactive intercessory prayer study out of the Rabin Medical Center in Israel really got me thinking, and not just about how patently laughable that is. My question is this: How in the hell does someone work up the nerve to ask for funding for that sort of thing? I have trouble convincing myself to ask for petty cash at work to buy food for the cooking class, so it is beyond me how anyone could prepare themselves to go before a grant committee to pitch an expensive study on the retrocausal effects of petitions to Yahweh.

The methodology went a little something like this - They pulled a bunch of 6-10 year-old patient files out of the hospital records room, shuffled them up, divided them into piles, and prayed over one pile for a beneficial outcome to something that already happened 10 years ago. I would expect something like this out of a 5th grader or, I dunno, a crazy guy, but not a doctor. Surprise, surprise, the results were "inconclusive". Mortality rates were identical, but the prayer pile apparently had slightly shorter average hospital stays.

Amazingly, the Dr. Leibovici who ran the study had the cast iron sack to state in its conclusion that retrocausal prayer (he glosses this over by using the term "remote" to imply a spatial rather than temporal distance) "should be considered for use in clinical practice."

Simply. Freaking. Amazing.

Here's a great explanatory model...

Well, ol' Ray has outdone himself again with this stunning illustration of how cows process plant material into substances more easy for humans to digest. Check it out. Read his text too, just so you know that I'm not misrepresenting him. It's wild that he's trying to turn an extremely well-understood biological process into a magical mystery.

By the way Ray, humans are awesome at turning biological inputs into milk. We're mammals. :-D