fsck a creationist

Dear Bill,
What can I put on my trunk that will guarantee I’d be yanked from my car and beaten to death by angry mobs in the Bible Belt?

The creationist epidemic

[ via Utne Online ] While the Darwinian model is standard, accepted science, the public still thinks it’s only a ‘theory.’

The future of intelligence

[ via Backup Brain ] Saturday, April 1, at Stanford, Ray Kurzweil, Bill Joy and others will give a panel moderated by Douglas Hofstadter. The topic is the future of machine and human intelligence. How soon will bots replace us? Will we become bots?

We will need 10 million years to recover from extinctions

A pair of UC Berkeley biologists have worked out the mean time it takes the planet to recover from a mass-extinction (rock from space, climate change, Pacific Lumber…,) and the news is depressing. It takes around ten million years for evolutionary processes to fill in all the niches exposed in a mass-extinction event. The takeaway [...]

More evangelical reproduction madness

Instead of spending $100,000 just to get your hands on an egg, why don’t you adopt?

A Conversation with Steven Jay Gould

From the New York Times, a conversation with Steven Jay Gould, one of my favorite polymaths, on creationism, writing, living in New York, and Y2K.

eFloys: evolving, flocking Alife

Ariel Dolan from the XSL list has a site full of pointers to Java and Web-based Alife toys. The Floys are one of his creations. In this variant, the Floys (derrived from Boids) are territorial and each one has their own traits. The Floys breed using a GA scheme allowing the system to evolve. With [...]

Frontline on Fat

You can be fat and happy. PBS’s Frontline did a show on weight. The main take-away message: eat well, exercise, and the rest takes care of itself. Or as one billboard shown in the episode said: There are 3 bilion women, and only eight supermodels.

Dump the big bang, bring on the blue ox

My friend and fellow WebLogger Vicki Rosenzweig had her wicked funny essay on Kansas and Evolution published in Salon.

Katha Pollitt on Kansas

Katha Pollitt has a scathing essay in the current Nation that starts in primoridal Kansas. She goes on from there to point out how conservatives are perfectly happy to use scientific methodology to defend their interests, but turn around and condemn it when it alienates their core consituents.

Evolution Decision may backfire on Kansas’ Evangelicals

Pat Buchanan’s “Culture War” speech, widely credited with losing Bush the 1992 election, continues to sow terror within the ‘cloth coat’ wing of the GOP. Salon reports that the recent successes by Kansas Evangelical Republicans, including the notorious Evolution rule, have inspired the pro-Business wing of the Republican party to organize themselves and oust the [...]

Look Ma! I’m a Creationist Moron

[via PeterMe] I have no tolerance for Creationists. Most everything biology has learned about viruses and immunity doesn’t make sense without natural selection. But to claim OOP is somehow evidence of Creation… I just wonder what the writer was dosed with at the time. If there was a prize for moronic Web site of the [...]

The Sacred Depths of Nature: Buy this book at Amazon.

I heard an interview with the author of a book on evolution, Ursula Goodenough, on KPFA this morning. It’s intended to introduce lay people with a religous background to the modern Darwinian model of evolution. It’s not an exercise in appologetics, but neither does it have the “if you don’t accept the model, you must [...]

The Genetics of Sex [ Real Audio ]

If you’ve read Raphael Carter’s story “Congential Agenesis of Gender Ideation,” you’ll appreciate this All Things Considered story on our latest understanding about what determines sex. It’s not just a matter of XX or YY. There are genes on the X and Y chromosomes that can subvert the expected outcomes. There’s a gene on the [...]

How evolution and selection affects how and why we become ill

Link