inkbluesky

yellow gold industrial graphic art 1600×1200. much better then anything i ever doodled in school, but reminds me of those days when we drew lots of trucks, planes and helicopters.

Don’t Know Much biology

Now maybe evolutionary biology isn’t going to propel America into the forefront of world science, but creationism (and its gussied-up descendant “Intelligent Design”) is not just a campaign against evolution—it’s a campaign against science itself and the scientific method. By pretending that evolution is on shaky ground, and asserting that religion can contribute to our understanding of nature, creationists confuse people about the very form and character of scientific evidence. This confusion can only hurt our ability to make rational judgments about important social issues, like global warming, that involve science.

Senator Brownback showed this poisonous mixture of scientific ignorance and religious dogmatism in a May 31 op-ed piece in The New York Times (”What I Think About Evolution”), written to clarify why he raised his hand to dissent from Darwinism. The first thing that’s clear is that Brownback displays a fundamental misunderstanding of evolutionary biology. He claims that there is “no one single theory of evolution,” citing punctuated equilibrium as an alternative to Darwinism. (He’s apparently implying that there might be something dubious about evolution because there’s a multiplicity of theories).

Punctuated equilibrium was a hypothesis to explain sudden shifts in the number and kinds of creatures found in the fossil record. Sudden not in the sense of a few years, but it appeared to the late Dr. Gould that life would come to a crossroads over a mere few million years in which some kinds of animals flourished while others didn’t, what appeared to be some great transition. I’m a non-scientist and am probably not doing his ideas justice. For those that are interested Stephen J, Gould’s book Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History is a good read with some illustrations of some of the bizarre creatures that used to inhabit this planet. Not all of Gould’s ideas about the Shale have stood up, but that is exactly science’s strength. There is a constant review and reevaluation of findings. Compare that approach to human knowledge to other segments of human culture that have been known to hang on to useless and at times dangerous dogma despite new evidence.

Find out what seafood is healthy for you and the oceans! Get the Seafood MiniGuide. There is a small pdf you can download at the link. HT to The Sideshow. Skip the Cod and have the Alaska Salmon.