Saturday, November 7, 2009 at 10:23AM Today would have been Carl Sagan's 75th birthday. He was to many an inspiration and a popularizer of modern science. Raise a glass and look up at the sky today! Also, if you live in Florida, they are having official Sagan Day activities. Oh and by the way, guess how many people loved and admired that wily astrophysicist...
BILLIONS!
Wednesday, March 25, 2009 at 08:03AM This one just astounded me with it's breathtaking inanity and illogic. Their basic understanding is true, matter + energy can sometimes create life. Any sense they try to make stops after that statement. Peanut butter is arbitrarily selected to represent all matter and shown as proof that evolution can not happen since new life is not being "created". To clearly state the two main problems with this: 1.) Peanut butter is not relatively close to the type of matter thought to have been in the "primordial soup", and 2.) Theoretically, what they're stating could be happening. New life could be in millions of jars of peanut butter right now, but it would be microscopic in size. Absolutely nothing you could see with the naked eye. The point where he reaches the zenith of the argument and opens the peanut butter to show "no new life", is like watching a seven year olds bad science experiment.
"And as we can see the cooties have now transferred from Jill the stinkyfacegirl, to Billy poopoohead, proving that cooties scientifically exist!"
What the fuck? Five minutes reading this on Wikipedia about the Miller-Urey experiment could have explained the problems with their argument. If you want an even better explanation of how it works, check out the second episode of Cosmos on Hulu. It starts at about 47:42 and does an excellent job of talking about what needs to happen for amino acids and dna to develop and doesn't involve peanut butter, jelly, nutella, any grocery stores, or bullshit.
Peanut butter video really managed to highlight what I hate about these people and their bullshit. I don't care what you want to believe. Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Xenu, Joseph Smith, whatever. Everyone has the right to believe whatever they want regardless of the evidence for or against it no matter what other people think of it. When you try to claim that your ideas are science and need to replace the peer reviewed and tested material, regardless of the fact that little to no evidence exists to support your claim, that's when I call bullshit. Using half assed notions of science, illogic, and rationalizations may help you to make your beliefs jive with contrary evidence that science has for evolution and the big bang, but don't ever go to a school board and try to tell people that kids shouldn't learn about Evolution because it's "just a theory" (it's a fact), and that all scientific theories should be given equal weight in the classroom. That could be true if "science" ever entered into their arguments, which it rarely if ever does.
Finally, I would like a tip of the hat to Bad Astronomy for mentioning on his blog that Cosmos was available for free on Hulu.
-Lyell
