The Pagan Science Monitor

We saw this really cool living example of a really ancient species

...so we caught it, so we could film it in captivity,
which was really cool until it died a little while later.
We were bummed, but we cheered ourselves up by claiming that it was already kinda sick when we caught it.
T.P.S.M. ain't makin' any of this up.

So funny you're mad you didn't think of it

New element discovered: Governmentium.
According to an email going around today, a major research institution recently announced the discovery of the heaviest element yet known to science: Governmentium.

The billionaire party platform

by Harris Tocracy
What will 2007 mean to the Americans that count? American billionaires took notice of the November 2006 elections. We were dismayed that our investment in Diebold Election Systems' voting booths didn't pay off with the results we expected. The Democrats took charge of Congress!
Well, we've been giving them money, too.

Basic science literacy: Sunday's fave blog

...is by Valerie Tarico, Ph.D., at Ex-Christian, and breaks it down for us laypeople how the scientific method of inquiry is fundamentally different from spiritual knowledge.

Tags: Science, policy, critical thinking, skepticism

Critical thinking & basic science literacy: fave blog of the day

...is here.
The blogger at The Primary Contradiction critiques the conflation of correlation and causation in a new scholarly theory of Neanderthal extinction, in which the putative lack of gender roles caused the extinction.

Tags: Science, policy, critical thinking, skepticism.

Quotation du jour

There is a widespread misunderstanding about the rule of law. All the O'Reillys and Schlaflys and Robertsons and Coulters work to create an impression that judges should operate personally, that they should make ad hoc or personal rulings, or, worst yet, respond to public will. The truth is that Article Three of the Constitution is a bulwark against the public will. This is one of the reasons I keep insisting that I'm not an activist judge. If I had come to a different conclusion and ruled that it was acceptable to teach religious material in school -- thrown one for the team -- then I would have been an activist judge. Activist judges are not desirable.

-- John E. Jones, Judge, U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania,
who this time last year not only ruled against teaching creationism in public school, but verbally spanked the reactionaries on the school board (who had already been thrown out by Dover, PA, voters).

Judge Jones is a Republican, a self-described churchgoing Christian, and a George W. Bush appointee.

Calling all skeptics!

Dunkleosteus got me thinking about Occam's razor and "intelligent design."
Four-hundred million years ago, there was a fish with, instead of teeth, a "broad, razor-like rim of bone" -- an adaptation that could have given it an evolutionary advantage during the Late Devonian Period, when much of its prey was covered in bony armor.
So how does such an advantageous adaptation arise? Better question: How to you explain natural selection in a way that satisfies the doubters' doubts?
I'm not talking about the ideological creationists, who are unreachable. I mean our critically-thinking, spiritual friends and loved ones who are going to look at the fossil of a placoderm with, possibly, the strongest jaws in the history of life, perfectly adapted for munching equally-bony prey, and say,

Tell me that thing evolved totally by accident!

The thing is, positing a creator, any creator (a lot of folks believe in one, even if not in "YHWH"), seems more plausible to many folks i know. I mean, how could sequences of purely random coding errors in genetic replication taking place over eons produce anything more than goo?

So, how about it, skeptics? What's the sound-bitey answer for the layperson?

Defending the teaching of science as a matter of public policy demands making basic concepts of science cognizable by the law public.

So let's hear it!

Tags: Dunkleosteus, fossil, paleontology, science, education, pedagogy, evolution, natural selection, creationism, intelligent design, religious right, pagan science, skepticism.