Tell Your Representative to Stand Up For Fact-Based Education

I Fucking Knew It

Scientists have discovered that uttering swear words can help to lessen the feeling of physical pain.

The study by researchers at Keele University found that volunteers were able to withstand pain for longer when they swore compared to when they used words which were not offensive.

So the next time you stub your toe, let out with that expletive. It'll fucking help!

LMFAO - I Thought Holy Water Could Cure?

Holy water can pass on more than just a priest’s blessing—it can also transmit the swine flu virus, a British bishop says. That’s because churchgoers dip their fingers into one container of liquid, then touch their nose or eyes, thereby giving the virus a free ticket into their body.

For this reason, the bishop is urging priests in Essex, UK, to remove holy water from their churches to prevent cases of the flu.

According to BBC, the Right Reverend John Gladwin said: “The water in stoups [which hold holy water] can easily become a source of infection and a means of rapidly spreading the virus.” Still, he added: “It is not our intention at this stage to cause panic.”

So religious folks are admitted now that holy water can spread diseases? I remember when they used to claim that it could cure them! I guess this is progress... but it'd be better if they just got rid of stupid shit like holy water altogether.

President Obama Announces Members of Science and Technology Advisory Council

Today, during remarks at the National Academy of Sciences, President Barack Obama announced the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST)...PCAST is an advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers who will advise the President and Vice President and formulate policy in the many areas where understanding of science, technology, and innovation is key to strengthening our economy and forming policy that works for the American people.

President Barack Obama said, "This council represents leaders from many scientific disciplines who will bring a diversity of experience and views. I will charge PCAST with advising me about national strategies to nurture and sustain a culture of scientific innovation."

This is the type of thing that a reasonable man like President Obama will not only institute, but listen to. The list of folks participating in this advisory group is indeed impressive. It will be a great 4 years (hopefully 8) if the president listens to these scientists and implements policies and projects to enact their advice on issues like global climate change and alternative energy.

Stem Cells Research Ban Lifted... Hooray!!!

Scientists on Monday cheered President Obama's lifting of restrictions on the use of federal money for human embryonic stem cell research, while social conservatives and abortion opponents criticized the move.

"The limitations on stem cell research have not allowed scientists to do meaningful experiments for improving human lives," said John Pollock, associate professor of biological sciences at Duquesne University. "There will be greater latitude to explore meaningful options for new therapies."

Kudos to President Obama for lifting this stupid ban and hopefully for leading the USA back along the path to science and reason.

Is Texas' Science Education Evolving?

The State Board of Education moved a step closer to dropping a 20-year-old science curriculum requirement that critics say is used to undermine the theory of evolution.

After two days of heated debate, the board made a key vote Friday in favor of dropping a mandate that teachers address both "strengths and weaknesses" of scientific theory.

A panel of science teachers had recommended that the language be dropped, suggesting instead that students be required to analyze and evaluate scientific explanations.

The new standards the board ultimately approves — a final vote on the curriculum proposal is not expected until March — will be in place for the next decade. They also will dictate how publishers handle the topic of evolution in textbooks.

This is good news because the creationists have been using the previous language as a ploy to introduce their religious teaching into science classes in Texas.

Additionally, it is good to know that the Center for Inquiry - Austin and the Clergy Letter Project have teamed up to produce a website called Teach Them Science to promote the proper teaching of evolution in Texas classrooms.

Obama: "We will restore science to its rightful place..."

From President Obama's inaugural address:

We will restore science to its rightful place and wield technology's wonders to raise healthcare's quality and lower its cost. We will harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories. And we will transform our schools and colleges and universities to meet the demands of a new age. All this we can do. And all this we will do.

Milky Way not snack-sized anymore

For decades, astronomers thought when it came to the major galaxies in Earth's cosmic neighborhood, our Milky Way was a weak sister to the larger Andromeda. Not anymore.

The Milky Way is considerably larger, bulkier and spinning faster than astronomers once thought, Andromeda's equal.

Scientists mapped the Milky Way in a more detailed, three-dimensional way and found that it's 15 percent larger in breadth. More important, it's denser, with 50 percent more mass, which is like weight. The new findings were presented Monday at the American Astronomical Society's convention in Long Beach, Calif.

...

"Previously we thought Andromeda was dominant, and that we were the little sister of Andromeda," Reid said. "But now it's more like we're fraternal twins."

That's not necessarily good news. A bigger Milky Way means that it could be crashing violently into the neighboring Andromeda galaxy sooner than predicted — though still billions of years from now.

I thought it was time to interrupt our regular programming and blog some science news here.

Huge Amounts of Water on Mars

NASA scientists have discovered enormous underground reservoirs of frozen water on Mars, away from its polar caps, in the latest sign that life might be sustainable on the Red planet.

Ground-penetrating radar used by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveals numerous huge glaciers up to one half-mile thick buried beneath layers of rock and debris. Researchers said one glacier is three time the size of Los Angeles in area.

"All together, these glaciers almost certainly represent the largest reservoir of water ice on Mars that's not in the polar caps," said John Holt, a geophysicist at the University of Texas at Austin and lead author of a report about the discovery, which appears in the November 21 issue of the journal Science.

"In addition to their scientific value, they could be a source of water to support future exploration of Mars," said Holt.

World Science Festival

Brian Greene, a Columbia physics professor and author of The Elegant Universe, and his wife, Tracy Day, an Emmy-winning documentary producer, gathered up the city’s Nobel laureates (and Alan Alda!) and had them put together the coolest presentations they could devise. Thus the World Science Festival was born. The festival kicks off May 28 and runs for five days. It is being held in New York City.

I wish I was able to attend this, it sounds like fun.

I Am Evolution by Holly Dunsworth

From NPR:

I believe evolution. It's easy. It's my life. I'm a paleoanthropologist. I study fossils of humans, apes and monkeys, and I teach college students about their place in nature.

Of course I believe evolution.

But that is different from believing in evolution.

To believe in something takes faith, trust, effort, strength. I need none of these things to believe evolution. It just is. My health is better because of medical research based on evolution. My genetic code is practically the same as a chimpanzee's. My bipedal feet walk on an earth full of fossil missing links. And when my feet tire, those fossils fuel my car.

To believe in something also implies hope. Hope of happiness, reward, forgiveness, eternal life. There is no hope wrapped up in my belief. Unless you count the hope that one day I'll discover the most beautifully complete fossil human skeleton ever found, with a label attached saying exactly what species it belonged to, what food it ate, how much it hunted, if it could speak, if it could laugh, if it could love and if it could throw a curveball. But this fantasy is not why I believe evolution — as if evolution is something I hope comes true.

After all the backyard bone collecting I did as a child, I managed to carve out a career where I get to ask the ultimate question on a daily basis: "Where did I come from and how?"

If our beliefs are important enough, we live our lives in service to them. That's how I feel about evolution. My role as a female Homo sapiens is to return each summer to Kenya, dig up fossils, and piece together our evolutionary history. Scanning the ground for weeks, hoping to find a single molar, or gouging out the side of a hill, one bucket of dirt at a time, I'm always in search of answers to questions shared by the whole human species. The experience deepens my understanding not just about what drives my life, but all our lives, where we came from. And the deeper I go, the more I understand that everything is connected. A bullfrog to a gorilla, a hummingbird to me, to you.

My belief is not immutable. It is constantly evolving with accumulating evidence, new knowledge and breakthrough discoveries. For example, within my lifetime, our history has expanded from being rooted 3 million years ago with the famous Lucy skeleton, to actually beginning over 6 million years ago with a cranium from Chad. The metamorphic nature of my belief is not at all like a traditional religious one; it's more like seeing is believing.

So I believe evolution.

I feel it. I breathe it. I listen to evolution, I observe it and I do evolution. I write, study, analyze, scrutinize and collect evolution. I am evolution.

Sometimes, like now, additional comments are unnecessary.

Rave On, Albert!

A newly published letter reveals that Albert Einstein viewed religion and religious works as "childish," and "primitive works."

In the letter, dated January 3 1954, he wrote: "The word god is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honourable, but still primitive legends which are nevertheless pretty childish."

"No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this..."

"For me the Jewish religion like all others is an incarnation of the most childish superstitions. And the Jewish people to whom I gladly belong and with whose mentality I have a deep affinity have no different quality for me than all other people."

ID vs. Science

How Evolution REALLY Works

On Evolution, Part 1 - It Is a Theory

I'm going to start another regular series of posts (like the series titled Biblical Wisdom), but this series will be devoted to clearing up the confusion and refuting the tired old criticisms... so in the future I can just say, see Part x.

First up, let's tackle the tired old "Evolution is only a theory" type of statement.

This is the "argument" that some creationists try to use to deflect the mountain of scientific evidence that backs up the theory of evolution. Oftentimes the offending person will add something like "It isn't truth, only a theory" or "Evolution is a theory not a fact." The reason that this lame "attack" sometimes works is that the vast majority of the public does not understand what a scientific theory actually is. Some of us "remember" learning back in school that a theory is not a certainty--it is more than a hypothesis but below a law.

Scientists do not use the terms that way. According to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), a scientific theory is "a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses." There is no "magical" point at which a theory becomes a law. In point of fact, the term "law" is simply a descriptive generalization about nature.

Again, turning to the NAS, a fact is defined as "an observation that has been repeatedly confirmed and for all practical purposes is accepted as 'true.'" The fossil record and abundant other evidence testify that organisms have evolved through time. Although no one observed those transformations, the indirect evidence is clear, unambiguous and compelling. All sciences frequently rely on indirect evidence. Physicists cannot see subatomic particles directly, for instance, so they verify their existence by watching for telltale tracks that the particles leave in cloud chambers. The absence of direct observation does not make physicists' conclusions less certain.

When scientists talk about the theory of evolution (or the atomic theory, the theory of gravity, or the theory of relativity) they are not expressing reservations about its truth. Just the opposite.

Furthermore, it is necessary to define the word "evolution." From the archives of TalkOrigins.Org: Like so many other words, it (evolution) has more than one meaning. Its strict biological definition is "a change in allele frequencies over time." By that definition, evolution is an indisputable fact. Most people seem to associate the word "evolution" mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. Many people believe that there is enough evidence to call this a fact, too. However, common descent is still not the theory of evolution, but just a fraction of it (and a part of several quite different theories as well). The theory of evolution not only says that life evolved, it also includes mechanisms, like mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift, which go a long way towards explaining how life evolved.

Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)

Lack of proof isn't a weakness, either. On the contrary, claiming infallibility for one's conclusions is a sign of hubris. Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be. Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you're operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. The more and better evidence we have for something, the more certainty we assign to it; when there is enough evidence, we label the something a fact, even though it still isn't 100% certain.

What evolution has is what any good scientific claim has--evidence, and lots of it. Evolution is supported by a wide range of observations throughout the fields of genetics, anatomy, ecology, animal behavior, paleontology, and others. If you wish to challenge the theory of evolution, you must address that evidence. You must show that the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant or that it fits another theory better. Of course, to do this, you must know both the theory and the evidence.

So the next time somebody says that evolution is just a theory you can smile and know that they are not well informed.