Posted by Steve on June 30, 2005 | Comments (58) | TrackBack (0)

Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug has a funny (and only slightly exaggerated) cartoon out in today’s Salon.com here.  Salon is a subscription site, but you can watch a short ad to get a day pass.  Enjoy!

Posted by Jim Foley on June 23, 2005 | Comments (69) | TrackBack (1)

Posted by Reed on May 23, 2005 | Comments (30) | TrackBack (0)

Bobby Henderson, a concerned citizen, has written an open letter to the Kansas school board about the attempts to put “intelligent design” creationism into the science curriculium.  In the letter, he advocates for his view of creation to be included as well:

Let us remember that there are multiple theories of Intelligent Design. I and many others around the world are of the strong belief that the universe was created by a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It was He who created all that we see and all that we feel. We feel strongly that the overwhelming scientific evidence pointing towards evolutionary processes is nothing but a coincidence, put in place by Him.

Continue reading  “An Open Letter to Kansas School Board”

Posted by Nick Matzke on May 23, 2005 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

BBC News is reporting that scientists have discovered the irony centers of the brain.  The only reason this study is surprising is that PT posters and readers were not the primary research subjects.  Most of us had our irony neurons burned out long ago (I bet you would see some nice dark spots on brain scans, right next to our hypertrophied pun centers).  This is why we have to compensate with irony meters, which, sadly, have been taking quite a beating lately.

Continue reading  “Discovery of 'irony' brain areas”

Posted by Jim Foley on May 15, 2005 | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Posted by Tara Smith on May 04, 2005 | Comments (33) | TrackBack (0)

If you’re like me, that question has led to countless sleepless nights.

Continue reading  “Where in the world is Ken Ham?”

Posted by Nick Matzke on April 13, 2005 | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Everyone remembers the widely-blogged Scientific American April Fool’s editorial, “OK, We give up: We feel so ashamed.”  The editorial claimed that Scientific American had given up on reporting on real science and agreed to let intelligent design and other forms of ideological pseudoscience into its pages. 

Apparently, the article acquired a mutation early in its trip around the blogosphere, the addition of someone named “Matt Collins” as author.  Like an old-fashioned chain-letter (ironically enough, Scientific American did a story on the evolution of chain-letters a few years back), the Matt Collins attribution was dutifully copied, and soon people were sending hate mail and fan mail to the magazine addressed to Matt Collins, and Matt Collins was even listed as author when the article was reprinted in The Guardian.  However, SciAm editor John Rennie says that no such person works at the magazine.  The identity of Matt Collins is a mystery to him — he suggests it somehow got added while being scanned and blogged.

I have a hypothesis.

Continue reading  “Who is Matt Collins?”

Posted by Steve on April 08, 2005 | Comments (186) | TrackBack (2)

That may sound strange to rational people, but if you visit a diner in Dunlap, Tennessee, you’ll find out that it’s perfectly plausible.  It appears that Kent Hovind, aka Dr. Dino, isn’t content with poisoning the minds of children down in Pensacola, Florida.  He’s now wormed his way north to the land of Scopes.  Joe Meert, a geologist and long-time follower of creationism, had this discovery to share on the IIDB forum:

I took a group of students on a field trip to Tennessee, NC and Virginia. We stopped at a small diner in Tennessee for breakfast. My 7 year old son was with me on the trip and as the waitress was setting our table, she put down a ‘childrens activity’ place mat. I did not think much of it until my son said, “Dad, did you know that T-rex could breathe fire?”. I said where did you hear that? He said, look at my placemat. I did and there were many other ‘fun-filled’ dino facts from one “Dr Dino”!!

He’s done us favor of scanning the placemats:

Front.

Back.

There’s not much more that needs saying.  The kiddie script is just so appropriate.

Posted by Jim Foley on April 01, 2005 | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 31, 2005 | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

A new article in Nature announces, “Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion.”  Yes, that’s right, the bacteria left behind from the Apollo moon landings are slowly eating into the moon and breaking it up.

Pictures captured by an orbiting spacecraft have revealed that the Moon is being heavily eroded. Images of the lunar surface reveal deep cracks and holes that are slowly but surely releasing gas and dust into space.

“This is serious,” says Brad Kawalkowizc, an astrogeologist from the Sprodj Atomic Research Centre in Belgium, who has analysed the pictures. “There really is less Moon up there than there used to be.” If the process continues, he adds, the Moon could eventually crumble away to nothing.

(Michael Hopkin & Mark Peplow, Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion." Nature, Published online: 1 April 2005)

It looks like a disaster is in the works.  How did scientists discover this?

Continue reading  “Nature: Apollo bacteria spur lunar erosion”

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on March 28, 2005 | TrackBack (1)

[Comments]

I get email. Today, I got a piece of email that I’ve been waiting on over a year. I received a debate challenge from Karl Priest. My reply has been sitting in my files since last April.

Continue reading  “A Debate Challenge”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 27, 2005 | Comments (29) | TrackBack (2)

As previously mentioned on PT, the editors of Scientific American, the august popular science magazine that is over 100 years old, recently caved to creationist/IDist arguments.  The editors report in next month’s issue: “Okay, We Give Up.”  They are opening their pages to creationism/intelligent design and numerous other attempts to substitute wishful thinking for scientific facts.

Continue reading  “Scientific American gives up”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 25, 2005 | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

A nice write-up on Project Steve appeared today in HERO, also known as Higher Education & Research Opportunities.  The piece, “Steve-olution,” consists of an interview with NCSE’s always-erudite assistant director Glenn Branch.  If you’ve been living under a rock and haven’t heard of Project Steve, check out previous Panda’s Thumb posts and the NCSE Project Steve website.

The Steve-o-meter currently sits at 553, in case you were wondering.  The Steve-o-meter on the much-vaunted Discovery Institute list of scientists (well, some of them aren’t scientists, but who is counting?) kinda-sorta-vaguely doubting certain parts of “neo-darwinism” reads, at last count, four.

Even if you have heard of Project Steve, you might not have heard the Steve Song yet.  Sort of like the Monty Python spam song, but slightly different.

Posted by RBH on March 20, 2005 | Comments (73) | TrackBack (2)

Scientific American, that venerable purveyor of mainstream science to the literate, has decided to change its dogmatic ways.  From the April 2005 issue, just out:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies.
…

Moreover, we shamefully mistreated the Intelligent Design (ID) theorists by lumping them in with creationists.  Creationists believe that God designed all life, and that’s a somewhat religious idea.  But ID theorists think that at unspecified times some unnamed superpowerful entity designed life, or maybe just some species, or maybe just some of the stuff in cells.  That’s what makes ID a superior scientific theory: it doesn’t get bogged down in details.
…

Get ready for a new Scientific American.  …  This magazine will be dedicated purely to science, fair and balanced science, not just the science that scientists say is science.  (All italics original)

Continue reading  “Scientific American Throws in the Towel”

Posted by Steve on March 17, 2005 | Comments (136) | TrackBack (2)

We’ve all seen ID advocates bristle at the suggestion that ID is no different than astrology, Holocaust denial, UFOlogy, or any other pseudoscience.  Why declare ID wrong before it even gets out of the gate?  How dare we tar them with that brush!

In my mind, the biggest danger that ID poses to the world is the threat of making satire redundant.  Check these guys out:

http://www.BenevolentDesign.com/…

It’s an ID site run by people called the Christian Guardians Fellowship.  It begins with the header, “EVOLUTION THEORY IS A MONUMENTAL HOAX.”  At first glance, you’d think it’s just more of the same old stupidity, but there’s a neat twist.  They have a new and superior method for proving Intelligent Design.  And that method is… wait for it…  astrology.

Continue reading  “When the Moon is in the 7th House...”

Posted by Nick Matzke on March 16, 2005 | Comments (47) | TrackBack (0)

I occasionally run PubMed searches on “intelligent design” — not to see if any IDists have published any new research supporting ID, that never seems to happen — but to see if any new editorials about or critiques of ID have appeared lately.

Actually, most of what you get on these searches are references to engineering-related publications describing new inventions and the like.  Sometimes you get publications about biomimetics, the process of using biological “designs” to inspire human invention.

Today, this was the top hit on my “intelligent design” search. It has to be seen to be believed:

Zuo J, Yan G, Gao Z. (2005). “A micro creeping robot for colonoscopy based on the earthworm.” Journal of Medical Engineering Technology Jan-Feb;29(1):1-7. OpenURL Link

If ever there was a shoe-in for an IgNobel Prize, this is it.  The obvious question is, should the Prize be awarded in Biology, Engineering, or Medicine?

Posted by Steve on February 15, 2005 | Comments (11) | TrackBack (0)

Someone stole my idea. 

In celebration of Darwin Day, someone has set the Origin of Species to Dub, a kind of music related to Reggae.  No, really. 

This new artistic endeavor is the creation of the Genomic Dub Collective, a group which aims to “create a new musical genre… that celebrates recent successes in the field of genomics and evolutionary biology.”  Why someone didn’t think of this before, I’ll never know.  The group draws talent from a Microbial Genomicist and a Jamaican scientist of some sort. 

Each track is named after or takes inspiration from a chapter of the Origin, and you get two bonus tracks, the Dobzhansky Dance Trance and Ras Darwin.  (For all you Sheriff John Browns, Ras refers to Erasmus Darwin, Chuck’s grandfather.)

You can listen to some samples here, or you can order the entire thing for £3.99 (about the price of a dime bag).  These chaps are just trying to recoup their costs, so don’t kill the seed before it grows.

Posted by Pim van Meurs on February 03, 2005 | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

FAQ: Why isn’t intelligent design found published in peer-reviewed science journals?

Before reading further, we recommend that if you are interested in seeing the scientific underpinnings of intelligent design, that you read our article, “The Science Behind Intelligent Design to become familiar with the scientific basis for intelligent design.

Link

Continue reading  “Truth in advertising: IDEAcenter”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on January 08, 2005 | Comments (11) | TrackBack (1)

In a stunning development the Discovery Institute’s Center for the renewal of Science and Culture blogging website has been censoring user comments made to their site.

Read more Here

Posted by Ian Musgrave on December 23, 2004 | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

In the spirit of the season, Tom Lehrer, Weird Al Yankovic and overwhelming evidence,  the Panda’s Thumb Offensive Morris Dancing Troop and Precision Yodelling Team bring you …
The Twelve days of DISCO

Continue reading  “TheTwelve Days of Disco”

Posted by Nick Matzke on December 11, 2004 | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

The Annals of Improbable Research and the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) have just announced the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) Men and Women of the Year.  The first member of LFHCfS was, naturally enough, Harvard evolutionary biologist Stephen Pinker (who also happens to be a Project Steve Steve — he gets around).

I move that we find out if any PT posters belong in LFHCfS.  The best nomination I could think of was Ian Musgrave.

Continue reading  “LFHCfS Awards”

Posted by Nick Matzke on September 08, 2004 | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Everyone has heard of the Blogosphere.  It appears that a new -sphere, the Steve-o-sphere, is being born.

The Improbable Blog, the blog of the journal Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), has blogged the recent AIR paper “The Morphology of Steve.”  Here is a link to the online PDF with lower-res graphics; go buy the issue for the full resolution version, plus other ground-breaking research, such as “The Importance of the Hyphen to Naked Astronomers”.  The Steves post has gotten a half-dozen trackbacks already, and this post adds another one for good measure.  See also the previous PT post on the paper, and the post previous to that on Project Steve.  More evidence of the beginnings of a Steve-o-sphere is found in the fact that “The Morphology of Steve” has been added with pride to the online CVs and blogs of Steves such as Stephen J. Taylor (CV, full ref), Stephen Thorsett (blog), and Steve Renals (homepage).

Continue reading  “The Steve-o-sphere”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on August 20, 2004 | Comments (15) | TrackBack (2)

New Group Hopes To Break Monopoly On Gravity Theory

A Georgia group calling itself Teachers for Equal Time has asked that stickers be placed in all new physics textbooks which note that mutual attraction and relativity are not the only theories available to explain gravity and should not be taken as fact.

Teachers for Equal Time hopes that the addition of the warning stickers will pave the way for the teaching of its alternative theory, Intelligent Grappling, the theory that certain intelligent and conscious agents “push” things together.

Dr Elf M. Sternberg, the originator of the theory of Intelligent Grappling, or “IG” as some call it, and president of Teachers for Equal Time, announced the group’s plans to seek legislation requiring the stickers at a Cobb County school board meeting.

“Mutual attraction has had a monopoly on the truth for too long,” said Dr. Sternberg, “it is time we let children see all of the theories.”

IG FAQ

Posted by perakh on August 16, 2004 | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

The reason for writing this essay is the appearance of a paper by William Dembski wherein he introduces a measure of information he has dubbed “variational information” (the initial version of that paper has disappeared from the web but is available from those who received Dembski’s initial mailing, including me; modified version is at http://www.iscid.org/boards/ubb-get_topic-f-10-t-000086.html).
Dembski emailed the initial version of that paper to a number of both his critics and supporters (I was one of the critics who received that email).

In a remark accompanying the text of the paper, Dembski, among other things, wrote that he would appreciate critical comments, in particular because he would not like to “reinvent the wheel.”

Continue reading  “Reinventing the wheel - a personal report”

Posted by Pim van Meurs on August 12, 2004 | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

UDN, Inc. and GNIJS of Ohio are united in our cause to open up Ohio state science curriculum to fair, even-handed and objective discussion of all sides of the issue of the origins of life.

Although we believe the Ohio Board of Education has improved its track record with the recent debate between proponents of teaching evolution and those in favor of intelligent design, we are aghast that the State failed to notify our group of the debate, invite one or two of our speakers, or show the slightest recognition of our position on the issue at all.

Read more at  Unintelligent Design Network, Inc.

Posted by Wesley R. Elsberry on August 02, 2004 | Comments (18) | TrackBack (0)

The National Center for Science Education’s Project Steve now has a published paper appearing in the estimable journal, “The Annals of Improbable Research” (AIR).

http://www.improbable.com/airchives/paperair/volume10/v10i4/…

(Photo: Dr. Steve Carr, Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Eugenie Scott, Nick Matzke, Glenn Branch, and some 430 odd Steves comprise the author list as Project Steve T-shirt order information is bent, folded, stapled, and otherwise mutilated to obtain such findings as “island dwarfism in Steves” and the infamous “mid-continental Steve deficit”.

I play an unacknowledged role in the paper as the model in the “experimental Steveometry apparatus”.

Check it out…

Posted by Reed on July 17, 2004 | Comments (13) | TrackBack (0)

It’s and oldie, but a goodie.

Mo Rocca interviews Carl Baugh for the Daily Show

Clip Description: “There is no conflict between true science and the Bible.”

I won’t say more, or I will spoil it for you.

(Thanks to Nightshade on IIDB for the link.)

Posted by Reed on July 15, 2004 | Comments (21) | TrackBack (3)

The Get Fuzzy for July 15th.

If your paper doesn’t have Get Fuzzy, you can get it delivered to you via email by signing up to Comics Basic at Comics.com.

Posted by perakh on July 02, 2004 | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Bembi Babelmandebski’s view from 2014 —
The 450th anniversary of Galileo’s birth

By Amiel Rossow

————————————————————————————————————————

Foreword by the editors of Whorls magazine

We are happy to present an article by I. D. “Bembi” Babelmandebski, Ph.D, Senior Fellow, Interplanetary Society of Informational Sages (ISIS)[1]

Besides having published, by the latest count, 765 books, Dr. Babelmandebski (Bembi for his friends and colleagues) holds a world record in the number of his degrees, both earned and bestowed honoris causa, in areas ranging from stamp collection to mosquitology and from the geography (perhaps more properly named the moonography) of Jupiter’s moons, to complicated specificity of the fairy tales of his nanny. Unfortunately, the editors of that infamous outlet of the Darwinist-Galileanist orthodoxy, the Guinness Book of World Records, refused to register Dr. Babelmandebski’s record thus confirming the well known fact of the vicious conspiracy of materialists to keep hidden from public the supernatural origin of Dr. Babelmandebski’s degrees. Fortunately, today, in 2014, the complete and final victory of information over matter, so convincingly demonstrated by Dr. Babelmandebski’s article, has made explicit those despicable maneuvers by materialistic “scientists,” so that Dr. Babelmandebski now lawfully takes his long deserved place in the roster of greatest scientists and philosophers of all times, above Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel…

Dr. Babelmandebksi, who makes his home between the towns of Taco and Wiesel, is also famous for his barbecue which he sells to everybody including unbelievers and materialists, both methodological and ontological, for the same low price as to his colleagues in the ID movement (in a way similar to that described by another barbecue master at http://www.brazosbarbecue.com/…).

Dr. Babelmandebski’s formidable intellect (officially confirmed by his Australian colleagues of the bioceramics fame) is of such a caliber that our editors could not come up with proper epithets which would do justice to this titan of all sciences and all branches of mathematics, philosophy, theology, and culinary art. We are confident our readers will enjoy this masterpiece of logic, mathematical rigor, and poetical beauty typical of Dr. Babelmandebski’s groundbreaking work, not any less than they could enjoy the incomparable taste of his affordable barbecued food.

Continue reading  “A guest contribution - a parody of an article in World magazine”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on April 26, 2004 | Comments (38) | TrackBack (0)

Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates. I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist. Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble. I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH

Logic and Sweet Reason

“There is proof in math and logic… ok. I’ll give you proof.  You go first. “

Continue reading  “Creationists Explain Things: Logic and Sweet Reason”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on April 25, 2004 | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates. I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist. Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble. I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH

Dating Fossils

“Although personally, evolution is a load of crock. I think the fossil records speak for themselves in that area. As does logic.  If you truly beleive that all species are evolving, and changing and that the earth is a billions of years old, explain to me why all of the species alive today can be found in the fossil record from millions of years ago. Fossils are just creatures that died in the flood and were buried. All the sediment deposits and massive lava flows and oil deposits are the remnants of a tremendous global cataclysm.  It’s that simple and that’s all you need to explain it. It isn’t complicated.”

Continue reading  “Creationists Explain Things: "Fossil Dating"”

Posted by Gary S. Hurd on April 25, 2004 | Comments (10) | TrackBack (0)

Please note that these are all direct quotes from creationists taken from the many public domain creation/evolution debates.  I have collected these for years, and many of the debate sites no longer exist.  Even so, I wager that I could replace them today without too much trouble.  I have arranged them some, but I have not altered original spelling or grammar. GH

“Creation has just as much evidence as evolution does. That is a known fact. Besides it is just a theory.  If you really look at the evidence for evolution, and the evidence for creation, you will see that science supports a young-earth.  Evolution has NEVER been observed. That is a FACT. “

Continue reading  “Creationists Explain Things: Human Evolution”