A Good Video About Evolution

If you check Digg frequently you may have run across this already.

I love videos like this, because they're a great clearly laid out idea of what Evolution is all about that's accessible to most people. Quoting Richard Dawkins off of the top of my head, I believe he said something in The Blind Watchmaker to the effect of "everybody thinks they understand evolution", emphasis mine. This is one in a number of videos I've found that are great to recommend someone watch if they want to learn more about Evolution or science, or if they are basing their opinions off of misconceptions.

I think one of the most important and overlooked aspects of skepticism is the need to show your average non-skeptics why your view makes sense. Oftentimes we choose the comfort of talking with people who already share our beliefs. It's important to enlighten people who simply don't have all of the facts, and make decisions based on propaganda rather than evidence. Whenever I encounter someone that I wind up in a scientific, skeptical or evolutionary debate with, which happens fairly frequently now that I think about it, I always make sure to keep things focused on evidence and talk about why science regards it so highly. If there is one thing that watching hours of bad logic applied in a pseudo-scientific way it's patience in dealing with the misconceptions people have. After I lay out the myriad of transitional forms there are, how the theory has been borne out by so many disciplines in the last century, and a wealth of genetic information all confirming predictions about Evolution and Natural Selection, I can usually at least see a person thinking more then they were before. That's the best that any of us can hope for. Not changing a person's mind to coincide with your own point of view, but having that person think critically about why they believe what they believe and why you believe what you believe. 

-Lyell

Don't Go To That Light At The End Of The Hawking Hole, Stephen!

The living scientist I admire most, Stephen Hawking, is in a hospital for observation, he appears to be improving from what I can find out and I hope for a quick recovery. Quick finch fact, Wallace is the finch most into the biological and evolutionary aspects of science. While I do enjoy those aspects of science, astronomy and physics were always my science jams and Stephen Hawking is the living embodiment of physics for our generation. One of the reasons I want him to get better, is that when the Large Hadron Collider goes live later this year it could mean a Nobel Prize for him if it bears out some of his various theories and I think it would be a great boon to science to have Stephen up there to give a speech accepting. He's been on more television shows then Tony Danza at this point and so is the closest thing we have to a scientific television star. Get better Professor Hawking!

Sighing and Head Shaking

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