Also, robots.

Here’s Wikipedia on McLean v. Arkansas:

A lawsuit was filed in theUnited States District Court for the Eastern District of Arkansas by various parents, religious groups and organizations, biologists, and others who argued that the Arkansas state law known as the Balanced Treatment for Creation-Science and Evolution-Science Act (Act 590), which mandated the teaching of “creation science” in Arkansas public schools, was unconstitutional because it violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Judge William Overton handed down a decision on January 5, 1982, giving a clear, specific definition of science as a basis for ruling that creation science is religion and is simply not science. The ruling was not binding on schools outside the Eastern District of Arkansas but had considerable influence on subsequent rulings on the teaching of creationism.

This is what Ben says about it:

We often think of scientific ideas, such as Darwin’s theory of evolution, as fixed notions that are accepted as finished. In fact, Darwin’s On the Origin of Species evolved over the course of several editions he wrote, edited, and updated during his lifetime. The first English edition was approximately 150,000 words and the sixth is a much larger 190,000 words. In the changes are refinements and shifts in ideas — whether increasing the weight of a statement, adding details, or even a change in the idea itself.

The second edition, for instance, adds a notable “by the Creator” to the closing paragraph, giving greater attribution to a higher power. In another example, the phrase “survival of the fittest” — usually considered central to the theory and often attributed to Darwin — instead came from British philosopher Herbert Spencer, and didn’t appear until the fifth edition of the text. Using the six editions as a guide, we can see the unfolding and clarification of Darwin’s ideas as he sought to further develop his theory during his lifetime.

Check it out.

A variety of Australian skink – like snake but with four tiny legs – is slowly starting abandon egg laying and beginning to give birth to live offspring like a mammal does.

Skinks in the mountainous region of New South Wales have almost entirely moved to live birth. But the same species living in the lowlands along the coast are far more likely to lay eggs containing their young.

According to a 1999 study that looked at the transition that some lizards are known to make from egg-laying to live-birth, the evolutionary step only travels in one direction. Once a species begins giving live births, it never goes back to egg-laying.

If I could choose between live birth and egg laying, I’d be an egg layer. Just sayin’.

[...] the fact that Barack Obama’s father was a Muslim Kenyan, descended from a long line of Muslims, will remain true until the day he dies, and nothing he ever does in his life can change half of his genes that he inherited from his father. His genes are for keeps. The fact that he has attended Christian church for the past 20 years is not going to change that. Michael Jackson looked white much longer than Barack Obama sat in the pews of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s church. Obama is still as (half) Muslim as the day he was born.

Part of his argument makes sense. If a segment of the human population has interbred for a long time, they’re likely to have certain genetic markers in common which could be used to identify them. Call this a genetic fingerprint that would identify the a certain group.

Historically, I think it’s questionable whether or not Islamic Kenyans have maintained enough of a closed group to develop a fingerprint. Islam is a very diverse religion, and in many cases it seemed to live comfortably along side other religious groups for centuries. When Monophysite Christian and Muslim groups intermingled, what does that do to the group genetics?

But more to the point, what does defining a person’s religion by their genetic markers do for us? Is it a useful definition? Since what we’re looking for when we ask about someone’s religion is some understanding of their beliefs, I can’t see that it is. Unless Kanazawa is going to suggest that some people are genetically predisposed to accepting the Trinity while other are predisposed to a more straight-forward monotheism, I just don’t see the point.

Joachim Krueger, another blogger at Psychology Today, is even less impressed:

If religion is inherited through the Y-chromosome, he is fully Muslim; if it is inherited through the mitochondrial DNA, he is fully Christian; if the religious gene is located somewhere else, he has a 50-50 chance of being one or the other, and the premise of Satoshi’s post is moot. Now, Satoshi knows all this. I therefore conclude that his post is meant to entertain, enrage, and befuddle. That’s too bad because the primary purpose of these blogs is to help, advise, and educate. Am I wrong?

This is the argument that some behavioral scientists have begun to make: That a significant slice of morality can be explained by our innate feelings of disgust. A growing number of provocative and clever studies appear to show that disgust has the power to shape our moral judgments.

Research has shown that people who are more easily disgusted by bugs are more likely to see gay marriage and abortion as wrong. Putting people in a foul-smelling room makes them stricter judges of a controversial film or of a person who doesn’t return a lost wallet. Washing their hands makes people feel less guilty about their own moral transgressions, and hypnotically priming them to feel disgust reliably induces them to see wrongdoing in utterly innocuous stories.

Some of the article reminds me of the book SuperSense by Bruce Hood. There he talks about the Killer’s Cardigan experiment, where he asked people if they would be willing to wear a non-descript jacket for money. Many people raised their hands, but when he suggested that the jacket had previously been worn by a serial killer, those hands automatically went down.

Hood suggests that we have an instinctive feeling of contamination, even when we know – rationally – that there is no justification. I like this idea, since it might explain things like the “purity codes” found in religions. Of course, those feelings may be carried by instinct, but they are shaped by culture:

But to David Pizarro, the most interesting — and perhaps most important — question to answer is how flexible disgust is, how much it can change. Fifty years ago, many white Americans freely admitted to being disgusted by the thought of drinking from the same drinking fountain as a black person. Today far fewer do. How did that change? Did their sense of disgust ebb as they spent more time in integrated restaurants and workplaces and buses, or did they find ways to actively suppress their feelings? Pizarro isn’t sure, but he’d like to find out.

A Massachusetts man who was rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung came home with an unusual diagnosis: a pea plant was growing in his lung.

Ron Sveden had been battling emphysema for months when his condition deteriorated.

He was steeling himself for a cancer diagnosis when X-rays revealed the growth in his lung.

Doctors believe that Mr Sveden ate the pea at some point, but it “went down the wrong way” and sprouted. [...]

He is currently recovering at home with his wife Nancy, who joked that God must have a sense of humour.

Yeah Priapus sure has a quirky sense of humor…

DINOSAURS were shape-shifters. Their skulls underwent extreme changes throughout their lives, growing larger, sprouting horns then reabsorbing them, and changing shape so radically that different stages look to us like different species.

This discovery comes from a study of the iconic dinosaur triceratops and its close relative torosaurus. Their skulls are markedly different but are actually from the very same species, argue John Scannella and Jack Horner at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana.

Triceratops had three facial horns and a short, thick neck-frill with a saw-toothed edge. Torosaurus also had three horns, though at different angles, and a much longer, thinner, smooth-edged frill with two large holes in it. So it’s not surprising that Othniel Marsh, who discovered both in the late 1800s, considered them to be separate species.

Now Scannella and Horner say that triceratops is merely the juvenile form of torosaurus. As the animal aged, its horns changed shape and orientation and its frill became longer, thinner and less jagged. Finally it became fenestrated, producing the classic torosaurus form.

Yes, there are actually many people who think we never landed on the moon.

(via)

I really don’t want to be the one to rain on Custador’s “UK, F%@# Yeah!” parade, but … well, OK, yes I do.

Yesterday, Martin Robbins had an editorial on The Guardian, the title of which challenges the notion that the Brits are always more subtle than us yanks:

‘Choice’ fetish spawns mind-meltingly stupid homeopathy policy

The editorial is about the response by the Secretary of State for Health (pdf) to a report from the Science and Technology Committee that completely panned homeopathy and the government’s support of homeopaths.

The Secretary for Health defended the government’s position, and Robbins takes serious issue with the common refrain the the government is protecting consumer choice:

What I find so frustrating is this dedication to a form of “consumer choice” that is absolutely anything but. If I walk into a pharmacist looking for a packet of condoms, and I’m given the choice between a packet of Durex and a sock, it isn’t a choice, it’s just a pointless piece of confusion that’s going to lead to lots of people having really uncomfortable sex, and a localised population explosion.

I will give the government a half-point for one of their arguments, though it doesn’t seem to appeal to Robbins. The Secretary states that a ban on homeopathic medicine would “risk the introduction of unregulated, poor quality and potentially unsafe products on the market to satisfy consumer demand.”

Jokes about poor quality water aside, I think it’s wise to acknowledge that there will be loopholes in whatever anti-homeopathic legislation that comes down, and that homeopathic medicine will still be sold. This will probably mean that much of it will be produced in someone’s basement, and be based on whatever cockamamie theory is currently in vogue. (“Trace amounts of arsenic are good for you!”)

The Secretary is saying that it would be better to permit the sale of homeopathic medicine and regulate it for things like accurate labeling than to permit a grey market with unregulated products. But, as Robbins points out, this leaves the government in the schizophrenic position of accepting homeopathic medicine, while acknowledging that it doesn’t work. In fact, they go on to endorse an educational campaign that would inform the public that this officially accepted product does not, in fact, do anything. Let’s give Robbins the final say:

So the government is planning to launch a public information campaign against homeopathic treatments at the same time as it continues to fund those treatments through the NHS. In this glorious mess of a policy the government has come up with something so brain-meltingly stupid that even the satirical brain of Armando Iannucci (The Thick of It, In the Loop) would struggle to match it.

A Bosnian man insists he is being targeted by extra-terrestrials after his house was hit by meteorites six times in three years.

Radivoje Lajic, 50, who lives in the northern village of Gornji Lajici, believes aliens are responsible for the meteor strikes.

“I am obviously being targeted by extra-terrestrials,” he insists. “I don’t know what I have done to annoy them but there is no other explanation that makes sense. The chance of being hit by a meteorite is so small that getting hit six times has to be deliberate.”

I’m not entirely sure why he’s so pissed about this considering that the selling price of ONE of the meteorites was enough to steel-reinforce his roof!