Tag: Evolution

Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette

Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg thinks some people are too dumb to vote:

   Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher, not lower.  I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest.

   (…)

   It is a simple fact of science, that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity than youth.

In some cases he may be right except that he wouldn’t agree. 46% of Americans believe the creationist view of human existence:

The prevalence of this creationist view of the origin of humans is essentially unchanged from 30 years ago, when Gallup first asked the question. About a third of Americans believe that humans evolved, but with God’s guidance; 15% say humans evolved, but that God had no part in the process.

Click On image to enlarge

Hmmm, why would that be? Could it be a failure of our schools? Scarecrow at FDL says:

assume these numbers reflect the effects of private religious schooling and the growing trend of devising various schemes to use public dollars to subsidize private/religious schools, as reported in the New York Times.

Every time I hear Arne Duncan go on about NCLB or his Race to the Top and how we ought to be promoting clever ways to give parents more choices outside the public school system in how they teach their children, so as to improve their children’s math and engineering scores, I have to wonder why he just doesn’t make moving the numbers on this chart in a more enlightened direction as a measure of what “success means.” That chart shouts “failure” when I look at.

Or could it be more that our country’s “youths”, as Chris Mooney points out in his new book The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Realityyou’re too misinformed to vote if you get your news from Fox News:

In June of last year, Jon Stewart went on air with Fox News’ Chris Wallace and started a major media controversy over the channel’s misinforming of its viewers. “Who are the most consistently misinformed media viewers?” Stewart asked Wallace. “The most consistently misinformed? Fox, Fox viewers, consistently, every poll.”

Stewart’s statement was factually accurate, as we’ll see. The next day, however, the fact-checking site PolitiFact [weighed in http://www.politifact.com/trut… and rated it “false.” In claiming to check Stewart’s “facts,” PolitiFact ironically committed a serious error and later, doubly ironically, failed to correct it. How’s that for the power of fact checking?

There probably is a small group of media consumers out there somewhere in the world who are more misinformed, overall, than Fox News viewers. But if you only consider mainstream U.S. television news outlets with major audiences (e.g., numbering in the millions), it really is true that Fox viewers are the most misled based on all the available evidence-especially in areas of political controversy. This will come as little surprise to liberals, perhaps, but the evidence for it-evidence in Stewart’s favor-is pretty overwhelming.

I am fairly certain Jonah wasn’t pointing his pudgy conservative finger at the religious right or Fox News but if the shoe fits

Lynn Margulis is best known for postulating in 1966 the theory of endosymbiosis, the theory that eukaryotic cells (having nuclear DNA and nucleically differentiated organelles) resulted from the symbiotic fusion of smaller and more primitive prokaryotic cells.  Both mitochondria and chloroplasts, critical metabolic organelles in animal and plant eukaryotic cells, for example, are thought to be descended from independent prokaryotic lineages.  While her hypothesis was roundly rejected the over the first 15 or so submissions, the theory of endosymbiosis is now one of the most important ideas advanced in evolutionary biology in the last century.  As Richard Dawkins put it:

I greatly admire Lynn Margulis’s sheer courage and stamina in sticking by the endosymbiosis theory, and carrying it through from being an unorthodoxy to an orthodoxy. I’m referring to the theory that the eukaryotic cell is a symbiotic union of primitive prokaryotic cells. This is one of the great achievements of twentieth-century evolutionary biology, and I greatly admire her for it.

While I cannot do justice to the topic, several things do stand out to even a blockhead like me.  

I beg you to watch this video.  Embed has been disabled as “inappropriate” material on You Tube.  It is theoretical physicist Michio Kaku discussing the nuclear disaster for Japan and the world.  I think the embed was prohibited by the nuclear power industry out of fear for what he says.

What he says is inspiring.  Interviewed by Eliot Spitzer, Kaku ends with an incredible statement of where humanity will be by 2100 when/if we get by the Faustian bargain within which we all currently live.  

I couldn’t agree with Michio more, he clearly elucidates where we can and must go to accomplish the evolutionary imperative of the nuclear age.

With the splitting of the atom, everything has changed save man’s way of thinking.  And thus we drift toward unimaginable peril.

Since the embed has been disallowed, I can only cite the link.  Please go.  Do yourselves a favor:

Michio Kaku and Eliot Spitzer

Be inspired!

Thanks!

VARIATIONS ON THE MYTH OF ZEUS AND SEMELE: POETRY FOR THE ATOMIC AGE END OF TIME

                             Part One

                            EMERALD SEA

Once, as in a dream, Zeus came to her

Quietly slumbering on her emerald isle

Thought form wholly

Holy without form

Asleep upon her emerald isle she played in dream

Invoking out of emptiness

Some image, sub-atomic, non-particulate

Evoking echo without sound

     …and to her watery bed she took

        mankind as her groom…

Just as in a dream, Zeus came to her

He too a shadow of his glimpse of her

Appearing conscious

Yet not wholly formed

Echoing the formlessness of his perfection

Awake above the teal blue sea

He sought the body for his litany

Shakti dreaming by the emerald sea

The dream in his emerald eye

     …and to his sky bound heart he took

        the maiden as his bride…

He, taking her hand in hand

Gave her hyacinths from the sun god’s land

To weave in her sea wound hair

Just as in a dream they moved

Dancing in tidepools

Gems for their eyes

They gathered anemonies from the tidal pools

     …pink, purple, lemon and orange…

With anemonies for her bridal bouquet

Eels grass for her gown

She led her sky god lover down

To the church at the bottom of the sea

          ~~~pls follow below~~~

In an attempt to make large-scale farming easier, and corner the seed markets, Monsanto inadvertently engineered “Round-Up-resistant weeds.”    

Roundup – originally made by Monsanto but now also sold by others under the generic name glyphosate – has been little short of a miracle chemical for farmers. It kills a broad spectrum of weeds, is easy and safe to work with, and breaks down quickly, reducing its environmental impact.

Sales took off in the late 1990s, after Monsanto created its brand of Roundup Ready crops that were genetically modified to tolerate the chemical, allowing farmers to spray their fields to kill the weeds while leaving the crop unharmed. Today, Roundup Ready crops account for about 90 percent of the soybeans and 70 percent of the corn and cotton grown in the United States.

But farmers sprayed so much Roundup that weeds quickly evolved to survive it. “What we’re talking about here is Darwinian evolution in fast-forward,” Mike Owen, a weed scientist at Iowa State University, said.

Sowing the seeds of one’s own destruction does not take that long.

In recent conversation with a friend, we discussed the means by which any organization or group might best enlighten those who cling to bigoted, ignorant, or otherwise offensive points of view.  It is a conversation no different from the very same ones we have in a multitude of related corners, spaces where abstract theorizing has to take the place of hard fact.  As an anthropologist, my friend is constantly aware of the intersection where intellect and biological construction meet and couches her views from that point.  As she puts it, evolution of any sort is a tediously slow process.  We have, for example, still not really advanced to the point that we have gotten the hang of this whole walking upright issue.  The human body’s propensity to arthritis is but only one of those most visible examples of this fact of reality.  If our skeletal construction are but unfinished business, it would stand to reason that many others are too.  

Crossposted from Daily Kos

On July 21, 1925, a court in Dayton, Tennessee found the defendant, John Scopes, guilty of teaching the theory of evolution in high school.  Writing in the Baltimore Evening Sun, journalist H.L. Mencken had some harsh words for anti-intellectuals opposing Scopes’ viewpoint

What its people ask for — many of them in plain terms — is suspended judgment, sympathy, Christian charity, and I believe that they deserve all these things… The civilized minority in the State is probably as large as in any other Southern State.  What ails it is simply the fact it has been, in the past, too cautious and politic — that it has been too reluctant to offend the Fundamentalist majority.  To that reluctance something else has been added: an uncritical and somewhat childish local patriotism. The Tennesseeans have tolerated their imbeciles for fear that attacking them would bring down the derision of the rest of the country.  

[F]undamentalism, after all, made men happy — that a Tennesseean gained something valuable by being an ignoramus — in other words, that a hog in a barnyard was to be envied by an Aristotle.