I’ve heard back from my correspondent on evolution. While I suspect we’re talking at cross-purposes & will probably continue to do so, it’s worth continuing to address his arguments.
Continue readingTag: creationism
i get more mail – belief in evolution allows me to ignore my sins
I’ve had another e-mail – with the fastest invocation of Godwin’s Law that I can remember seeing in a while: I am horrified to find that neo-Darwinists have hijacked the New Zealand Science Syllabus and are now using it to propogate their religion. As a Christian minister, I’m alarmed that the Atheists, Bioethicists and Nazi […]
Continue readingwhat science has given us
Had a not-the-best ending to a platelets donation today (syncope = fainting; very strange for platelets since you get all the red stuff back…) & I’m still feeling somewhat under the weather & don’t feel like writing a ‘serious’ post. So… what follows is something I’ve had tucked away for a while, wondering when to […]
Continue readingtheorists of the lost ark
From today’s Royal Society compendium of science-related headlines comes this newsflash: Evangelists claim Noah’s Ark discovery on Turkish mountain: Archaeologists have recovered 4,800-year-old pieces of wood from a structure 4,000 metres up Mount Ararat. Well. Claims like this crop up fairly regularly, & then disappear without trace. And I have to say, I’m rather underwhelmed by this one, as […]
Continue readinghow biology teachers can respond to intelligent design
Creationism is a recurring issue for teachers of biology. It can come in many forms (eg young-Earth creationism, old-Earth creationism, & so on) but – despite what many ‘IDers’ would say – its most recent incarnation is as intelligent Design ‘theory’, or IDT. (I use the quote marks advisedly; Intelligent Design doesn’t offer any evidence […]
Continue readingowlcat. definitely not coming to a place near you, any time soon
Owlcat: Makes me chuckle when I think about it. Not just because Lolcats make me LOL (they do), but also because the idea of an owlcat epitomises a standard creationist argument. It goes something like this: if evolution is true, how come there aren’t any crocoducks/owlcats/<insert laughable hybrid here>?
Continue readingmolecular evolution & possible gene therapy
From time to time I’ve heard it said (by those in the creationist camp) that evolution has no relevance to modern medicine. Um… hello? antibiotic resistance in bacteria, anyone? And an understanding of evolution can also be put to good use in examining possibilities for new treatments, as ERV describes in her latest post.
Continue readingnature is neither kind nor unkind
– it’s the result of an intricate web of evolutionary relationships. Why’d I pick this topic? Because I came across Chet Raymo’s musings on Sacculina, a barnacle that over time has become an internal parasite on crabs. Female Sacculina larvae settle on a crab’s exoskeleton & injects a mass of cells that move to the crab’s abdomen, […]
Continue readinghow to read between the lines
Recently the journalist Amanda Gefter wrote an article for New Scientist on how to recognise ‘science’ books with a hidden (anti-evolutionary) agenda. While that’s still available in the print version, the journal has now removed the on-line version – apparently, due to a complaint or complaints from readers. This strikes me as more than a […]
Continue readingi get mail…
… well, at least, the newspaper does. Last week, on the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birthday, our local paper’s Science & Technology page ran a story about Darwin & about evolution. (It was written by David Riddell, one our excellent local free-lance science journalists, & was based on an interview with yours truly (blush). I’d link […]
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