piece of shep

Here is a great article article from Scientific American. It’s a shame when people throw away logic for fairy tales, myths, and fables. I have to wonder where this country is going. Seems each year a foaming at the mouth religious nut is attacking science and scientific facts. People really are clueless when religion gets thrown into the mix. How else do you explain how stupid people are for believing that dinosaurs and man walked side by side? I’m sick of it. There is a reason the time period where religion flourished and logic and reason subsided was called The Dark Ages. Then came the Enlightenment, an age of reason. Is America heading towards another Dark Age? If you’re religious, fine, that is your right, but don’t come preaching to me and don’t put it in the science class.

Sen. David Vitter, R-La., earmarked $100,000 in a spending bill for a Louisiana Christian group that has challenged the teaching of Darwinian evolution in the public school system and to which he has political ties.

The earmark appears to be the latest salvo in a decades-long battle over science education in Louisiana, in which some Christian groups have opposed the teaching of evolution and, more recently, have pushed to have it prominently labeled as a theory with other alternatives presented. Educators and others have decried the movement as a backdoor effort to inject religious teachings into the classroom. Source

This is so sad. First off, the Constitution says that the government shall not favor any religion, and by allowing the teaching of Creationist Theory, they are doing exactly that. They should also label Intelligent Design as a theory based on faith and not a theory in scientific terms. It has no scientific backing, whereas evolution is something that is seen all throughout nature over and over with data to back it up. Secondly, if they want to show other theories, then they must include all, including the theory of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, Scientology, and others. Not everyone has the same creationist theory that Christians have and by including their’s and not that of other religions they are stepping on the Constitution, something that is already being done by giving your tax money to religious groups to promote their religion to begin with. It seems the Constitution no longer matters. *sigh*

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at this comic. Laugh because it’s funny, cry because it’s true.

Seen on Slashdot:

“Scientists from NYU and UCLA report in Nature Neuroscience that the brains of Democrats and Republicans process information differently. This new study finds that the differences are apparent even when the brain processes common information, not just political topics. From the study, liberals were more likely to be accurate and showed more brain activity in the region associated with analyzing conflicts. A researcher not affiliated with the study stated, liberals ‘could be expected to more readily accept new social, scientific or religious ideas.’ Moreover, ‘the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry… as a flip-flopper.’”

Very interesting. I think we all knew some of this though. That’s why Conservatives are unable to accept things such as gay marriage, religious tolerance (didn’t Jesus preach love for everyone?), the planet being more than 6000 years old, etc.

Just found a really interesting article.

New research published in the journal Nature (19 July) has proved the single origin of humans theory by combining studies of global genetic variations in humans with skull measurements across the world. The research, at the University of Cambridge and funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC), represents a final blow for supporters of a multiple origins of humans theory.

Watch out Creationists. Your beliefs are crumbling under the weight of scientific proof by the second.

Competing theories on the origins of anatomically modern humans claim that either humans originated from a single point in Africa and migrated across the world, or different populations independently evolved from homo erectus to home sapiens in different areas.

The Cambridge researchers studied genetic diversity of human populations around the world and measurements of over 6,000 skulls from across the globe in academic collections. Their research knocks down one of the last arguments in favour of multiple origins. The new findings show that a loss in genetic diversity the further a population is from Africa is mirrored by a loss in variation in physical attributes. Read more