‘O Oysters, come and walk with us!

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Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research, just can’t seem to stop himself from saying ignorant things. And saying them about things for which there is no reason to be ignorant about even for a young earth creationist.

In the October issue of Acts & Facts, in yet another of a seemingly endless  parade of snarks about the Cambrian radiation (Morris 2008a) he throws out this little nugget about the famous mid-Cambrian Burgess Shale fossil locality:

Morris: In 1940, fossils of amazing clarity and diversity were found in Canada’s Burgess Shale. The extremely fine-grained shale preserved intricate details of previously unknown invertebrates.

The problem is the Burgess Shale was discovered by Charles Walcott in 1909 and quarried for fossils for decades before 1940. And as far as I know nothing significant regarding the Burgess Shale happened in 1940 either. But why get this wrong? Never mind bothering to crack a book on the subject, if Morris had bothered to Google the Burgess Shale the very first thing to pop up would have been the Wikipedia entry on the fossil locality which in a matter of seconds would have given him the correct date for its discovery.

It’s like he’s not even pretending to care about getting even the most basic and noncontroversial facts straight.

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Horse (non)sense

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Creationist Arthur Biele whose claims about the fossil record of horses I dissected a while back, has left a couple of lengthy comments in response. I will get around to dissecting these as well but not till I get some other things done first.

Feel free to beat me to the punch.

Tiktaalik (Your Inner Fish)

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Because there are not enough songs about fossil organisms…

And you have to love the name of the band as well…

Copernicus found

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The remains of 16th century astronomer and priest Nicholas Copernicus have apparently been found by archeologists in Poland. Way cool. The picture (right) is a reconstruction.

Via Evolving Thoughts.

Olbermann on the passage of California’s Prop 8

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What he said…

Another successful Halloween haunt

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hallow09

Haunting my front yard (click on picture for larger view, photo by Don Frack).

We had a few friends over and the number of trick-or-treaters we had was at least as good as last year (which isn’t as much as I’d like). It’s a lot of work but the screams and laughter of the kids is worth it.

hallow10

More haunting. The Reaper is yours truly (click on picture for larger view, photo by Don Frack).

New science blog in town

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One of my colleages from the Talk Origins Archive, Chris Nedin, has started himself a new blog: Ediacaran: past imperfect. Do have a look.

More scientific ignorance from Dr. John Morris

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Dr. John Morris, president of the Institute for Creation Research is at it again. Apparently not content with advertising his abject ignorance of zoology as he did a few months ago when he listed tunicates (phylum chordata) along with sea stars as members of the phylum echinodermata, he is now letting everyone know that he is equally incompetent to comment intelligently on the subject of paleontology (I know, I am as shocked as you are).

More specifically he has come out attacking the classic fossil evidence for the evolution of the horse in the September (2008) issue of ICR’s Acts & Facts.

Morris: Horse evolution prominently appears in textbooks as a supreme example of the evolution of one body style into another. All students remember the “horse series” sketches, tracing the development of a small browser named Hyracotherium (formerly known as Eohippus) with four toes on the front feet and three on the rear, into the large one-toed horse of today. Intermediate steps included the three-toed Mesohippus, a modified horse with one toe touching the ground… [Emphasis mine]

Mesohippus_toes_arrows

Wrong right off the bat. The fact is that with Mesohippus all three toes touch the ground as can be seen in the above photo of a mounted fossil at the Chicago Field Museum. This is especially true when it is taken into account that Mesohippus probably would have had pads on its feet similar to those found in tapirs.

Tapir hooves

Tapir hooves

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A tiny intruder

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My wife (Kathy) woke me up this morning telling me there was a “baby in the bathroom”. Naturally enough I asked “baby what?”. “A lizard” she said.

Now we generally have only two types of lizards around where I live (in Southern California), the Southern Alligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata) and the Western Fence Lizard (Sceloporus occidentalis). Usually when I find a lizard in the house it’s an alligator lizard. They’re nasty little buggers who bite (the larger ones can draw blood), wipe feces on you and drop their tails if you breath on them too hard.

Elgaria multicarinata

So I asked my wife which kind it was. She said, rather insistently, that she didn’t know and that I should get out of bed and look for myself. Here is what I found in all its cuteness:

baby_liz

After briefly toying with the idea of keeping it (because it was so damn adorable) we decided to let it go in an area beside the house where we frequently see its relatives. We wished it best of luck and sent our tiny intruder on its way.

“Should Evolutionists Be Allowed to Roam Free in the Land?”

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Creationist nut-job Tom Willis (Creation Science Association for Mid-America), apparently without a sense of irony, accuses evolutionists of being Nazis/communists (or at least fellow travelers of the Nazis and communists) and concludes from this that it might be a good idea to (amongst other possibilities) round up evolutionists and put them in forced labor camps.

Other options include torturing recantations out of evolutionists, forcing them to wear identifying signs or plaques, or perhaps forced relocations to Antarctica (or Mars).

Poe’s Law is in full effect here, it seems like it should be a parody but it’s not.

Found via Pharyngula.