Marginal Utility

by Ken Houghton

Not what I promised (that will be post midterm), but instead a quick idea.

There is much discussion (most of the best at Pharyngula) about Expelled, the Creation Science Intelligent Design Biblically-Inaccurate film about the origins of life or somesuch.

And Wisconsin is at the center of it (h/t this comment at Pharyngula).

I have an easy solution.

1. Go to where the film is playing.
   
2. Take photographs of everyone who buys a ticket.
   
3. Post same on the Internet.

Now, this is no law-breaking: if the people really believe they are doing nothing wrong, they should have no problem having their photos taken and posted. (Indeed, they should mention it proudly to their friends, keeping bloggers from having to do things such as this.*)

And if they have a problem, well, shame is a tactic that has been tried in similar circumstances before.


*Fewer cat pictures on the Internet would be A Good Thing. Are you listening, Scott on Fridays?

Labels: Creationism, movies, Science

by Anonymous

Proof that Baldrick=God, from a reputable news source:

"They need to know that God is watching over them always, and that he has a plan for each and every one of them—a nonlinear, probabilistic plan he set in motion more than three billion years ago with single-celled organisms, ended with a group of small, lizard-like herbivores, infused with a bunch of miracles, and then restarted."

Read the whole thing. It's classic, and appropos given yesterday's grand opening of Ken Ham's Creation Theme Park Museum.

Labels: Creationism, humor, Wingnuttia

by Tom Bozzo

As an addition to this blog's ongoing coverage of the evolution "debate," let's consider for a moment John McCain's reaction to being asked whether he believes in evolution, and the subsequent responses of other Republican presidential contenders. Go see it here in the media format of your choice (as long as your choice is QuickTime or Windows Media) then c'mon back.

Much as I might like to let this speak for itself, the nature of the medium puts us 'twixt Onan and Narcissus (*) — so here are a few words whether in order or not.

McCain's response seemed to follow a longer pause in the first viewing this morning than in the second this afternoon. Still, hard as it is to read minds, an interior monologue seems to play across McCain's face in the moment between the question and his response. I believe that must have gone something like:

Oh, shit, I want to evade this. But if I do, there goes what's left of the Straight Talk Express into Crazy Base World and so I might as well take my medicine and say Yes.

In case you hadn't gone and looked, the moderator asked for hands in disagreement with McCain, and got 'em from Brownback, Tancredo, and Huckabee. (**) Brownback's disbelief in evolution is notable as Brownback's credentials in the anti-abortion movement stem from his archconservative Catholicism. As such, Brownback's stance is not terribly principled, theologically, in light of the Catholic church's development, since the mid-20th century, of a fairly sensible view that (once you plow through lots of tedious Papalese) the behavior of the material world is what it is. Discoveries regarding the material world's dynamics don't have any theological consequences of note as drawing such would be effing the ineffable "purposeful divine providence" or something like that.

As the National Catholic Reporter article (previous link) mentioned, that's not enough for the likes of Michael Behe (Catholic embarrassment to his department), who is linked via the Discovery [sic] Institute to the publication of a notorious ID-friendly NYT op-ed by Cardinal Christoph Schönborn, Archbishop of Vienna (**). While Brownback could be an archconservative Catholic of the sort who believes that the Church let Galileo off easy back in 1633, is "building a bridge to the 16th century" much of a 21st century campaign slogan?

Similar thoughts from my intermittently-blogging friend and actual scientist Dr. Corndog, who offers additional discussions regarding evolution, our possible neo-pre-enlightenment future, and pie.

Cross-posted to Total Drek.


(*) If only I had come up with that.

(**) Though given the attitudes regarding evolution in Crazy Base World, having only three out of ten raise their hands might be a positive sign. On the other hand, audiences for a debate this early in the cycle are likely to lean towards elite opinion makers who might not be keen on overtly anti-science candidates.

(***) Where I'll be flying later this month to talk some sense into him, should he for some reason attend the Conference on Postal and Delivery Economics.

Labels: Creationism, Religion, Republicans

by Tom Bozzo

Someone left last month's Wired at the gym, in which a variety of scientists and science journalists took on Big Unanswered Questions. Then there was Gregg Easterbrook, assigned to the question, "Where did life come from?" His review of the classic abiogenesis experiments starts off almost as if he doesn't have an ax to grind:

Famously, in 1952 Harold Urey and Stanley Miller mixed the elements thought to exist in Earth’s primordial atmosphere, exposed them to electricity to simulate lightning, and found that amino acids self-assembled in the researchers’ test tubes. Amino acids are essential to life. [Link in original.]

You might think, hey, that's pretty cool! And pretty neutral so far, even if he doesn't mention that followers-on have managed to synthesize all the protein-forming amino acids in the lab. But pretty soon, Easterbrook is reminding us what those smarty-pants scientists didn't do, as if he were writing a Conservapedia entry with slightly above-average balance:

[Easterbrook, continuing directly:] But the ones in the 1952 experiment did not come to life. Building-block compounds have been shown to result from many natural processes; they even float in huge clouds in space. But no test has given any indication of how they begin to live - or how, in early tentative forms, they could have resisted being frozen or fried by Earth’s harsh prehistoric conditions.

The thing Easterbrook might have noted, in a universe where he wasn't a hack, is that the "natural experiment" on Earth played out on a vastly greater scale. I'm too lazy to look up how much primordial soup Urey, Miller, and other researchers in the area sought to make (*), but let's assume for a realistic figure something on the order of a cubic meter (perhaps a lot less — that's a thousand liters, after all), allowed to stew for a relatively short time — on the order of weeks or years at most. Earth's oceans, meanwhile, have a volume on the order of a billion (10^9) cubic kilometers, or about 10^18 cubic meters. So imagine a quintillion versions of these experiments running simultaneously and interacting with each other. Moreover, nature ran its "experiment" for hundreds of millions of years.

So, while it's technically conjecture to say so, if you can get some building blocks of life to self-assemble in a relatively limited experiment, it doesn't seem like a huge stretch of the imagination to think that scaling up the experiment by 20 or more orders of magnitude would get results that might actually impress an Easterbrook. Easterbrook, instead, chooses to preach to the Intelligent Design (sic) choir (**):

Did God or some other higher being create life? Did it begin on another world, to be transported later to ours? Until such time as a wholly natural origin of life is found, these questions have power. We’re improbable, we’re here, and we have no idea why. Or how.

The question of the nature of our origin is interesting, no doubt, but how does appeal to a designer help answer them? If you're going to push the 'why' question back beyond the ability of essential chemicals to form themselves, why shouldn't the action of the designer be subject to question?

Moreover, if Easterbrook and/or the ID'ers were in some ways correct, one might imagine they might be disappointed to discover that we're The Sims 25 running on a really big computer.

------------------------------------

More (3/26/07): PZ Myers picks up on the Poor Man Institute's take and links a useful review post from last year of a book that covers the actual science!

Ginger Yellow notes in the comments that it's "boneheaded" for Easterbrook to scratch his head over how early life can survive the harsh conditions of the primordial Earth one sentence after you've said that building-block compounds float around in space. Perhaps needless to say (though Easterbrook didn't say it), there are many critters adapted to environments that would be decidedly hazardous to human health, as well as polymers such as prions that are resistant to heat and/or radiation damage.

(*) Interested readers may consult the intertubes for additional information.

(**) Unusually abundant in the Wired readership?!

(Cross-posted at Total Drek.)

Labels: Conservapedia, Creationism, Journamalism, Science