Daily archives: January 19, 2011

links for 2011-01-19

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  • Caligula's tomb found after police arrest man trying to smuggle statue | World news | The Guardian
    The lost tomb of Caligula has been found, according to Italian police, after the arrest of a man trying to smuggle abroad a statue of the notorious Roman emperor recovered from the site.
    (tags: caligula archaeology)
  • The Science Hall of Fame | Science/AAAS
    To be able to compare scientists to one another, it is helpful to have a standard unit of fame. I proposed one that would make this kind of fame easy to comprehend: the Darwin. It is defined as the average annual frequency that "Charles Darwin" appears in English-language books from the year when he was 30 years old (1839) until 2000. Because it is such a big unit of fame, it has proved more convenient to use one-thousandth of that frequency: the milli-Darwin, abbreviated as mD.

    This should not be confused with the "Darwin," a unit of evolutionary change. That unit—abbreviated with a small 'd'—was introduced by J.B.S. Haldane in 1949. But this duality serves only to illustrate the very nature of the measurement: Charles Darwin is so famous that he is the only scientist to have more than one unit named after him.

    (tags: science Darwin)

There’s science in Creationism? Really?

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A creationist writes, without any indication that he recognises the irony–

Too many people still believe in the “science” put out for political reasons. People argue with me about Creation vs evolution science. Most concentrate on issues like why am I a Creationist rather than whether the actual science backs one or the other. I think, though, that people are waking up to the fact that we are being fed incredible lies to fool us into becoming even more controlled.

The only “science” put out for political reasons in the debate between creationism and reality (sorry, evolution) is that made up by the creationists. The word science always has implicit quote marks around it when used by creationists to describe what they think is evidence for their beliefs. Creationists are the ones who want people to remain uninformed and unquestioning- just keep believing the lines they’re fed so their would be leaders can keep taking advantage of them.

Also, there’s no need to “believe” in evolution. Believing is what the creationists have to fall back on because they don’t have any evidence or a coherent theory. You understand evolution rather than believe in it. It’s been coherently explained by a large number of people. Understanding evolution is harder for some than believing in Creationism, because they can’t accept the freedom of no longer being told what to do. Which is a shame, because they then go on to tie themselves in knots as they try to explain all the logical inconsistencies thrown up by saying “God made it!”

I’ve participated in online debates with creationists, and read through others, and it’s always the creationists who don’t want to talk about whether the science backs their beliefs. Faced with evidence that just keeps piling up, they’re the ones who will steer the conversation to why people “believe” in evolution, as they desperately try to run away from the realisation that they’re wrong.

There’s no science behind creationism, just a desire to manipulate people, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.