A little bit of musical paleo fun (hat tip to Mr. Weitzenhoffer):
For those unfamiliar the video for the original “Party Rock Anthem” by LMFAO can be found here.
Tag Archives: Humor
SMBC does it again
Julia Sweeney explaining the birds and the bees
Actress & comedian Julia Sweeney gives a very funny account of when her eight year old daughter asked her about the facts of sexual reproduction.
Zebras: Nature’s Ultimate Prey
leetle devil frog!
From the comic strip Pearls Before Swine:
[Hat tip to Mom (she clips anything evolution related out of the paper for me).]
My Weekend at the O.C. Freethought Alliance Conference
Here are a few of the new people:
Dave Silverman, president of the American Atheists who was famously challenged by Bill O’Reilly to explain how every day the tides go in and go out with “never a miscommunication”.
Aron Ra, a very popular YouTube anti-creationist and veteran of the talk.origins newsgroup. I had three people think I was him, before he arrived, though I’m not sure why. Considering how many things we share in common, it is somewhat surprising it took this long for us to run into each other.
And last but actually First the Lord Himself…
Mr. Deity, AKA “El“, AKA the very funny Brian Keith Dalton. If you don’t know who Mr. Deity is, go right now to his YouTube channel and start with episode one. See also the official Mr. Deity website.
The end of the conference came late Sunday afternoon just as a partial solar eclipse started and the organizers had two telescopes set up with special filters to allow us to safely view it. One of the scopes just showed the sun as a white disk with the moon cutting into it but the other actually allowed you to just make out the filaments of the many loops, flares and prominences in the corona of the sun. I have seen many pictures and films of these phenomena before but this was the first time I actually saw them with my own eyes. Incredible.
A NASA photograph showing solar prominences etc.
Once again I have a really great time and all the people I talked to, especially those at our table were a lot of fun. Thanks to Aaron for organizing our contingent and to the other members of our group for being such good company! My only regret is I got a bit distracted and got out of there kind of quickly at the end and didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye to them or to my friend and colleague Barbara Forrest (who was one of the speakers). Hopefully I’ll get to see them all again soon.
If you’re interested you can watch a streaming video or buy a DVD of the event from the O. C. Freethought Alliance (look for the guy in a black t-shirt with the long hair near the front) and if you live in the area consider attending the 4th Annual O. C. Freethought Alliance Conference in 2013. You just might see me there in person.
Something creationists wish existed
[Hat tip to Larry Moran at Sandwalk.]
A funny, from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
[Hat tip to James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix.]
If humans descended from apes, why are there still apes?
Asks the most recent Jesus and Mo:
And then they flew off to their respective flocks to claim victory…
[Hat tip to Wonderful Life.]
Does being the “fittest” mean eliminating the less fit?
Creationists often portray natural selection —usually citing Herbert Spencer’s expression, “survival of the fittest”— as being a matter of the strong subjugating or eliminating the weak, usually tying it to eugenics, racism and ultimately (of course) to Adolf Hitler.
Here is a fun cartoon by Jay Hosler (author of Drawing Flies) that amusingly illustrates that this is at best an extreme oversimplification of the how natural selection actually works (click on the image for a larger version).
So if you really want to ‘win’ the evolutionary race, the way to do it is to “make love, not war”.
Of course it does sometimes happen in nature that organisms attempt to directly eliminate competition for resources—lions killing hyenas (between species), older larger bird chicks pushing younger siblings out of the nest (within a species)— but it is usually through the more indirect method of simply leaving more offspring and thus eventually dominating the environment. That way the competition fizzles out and goes extinct on its own rather than being directly attacked in any way.
Also such “might makes right” caricatures of natural selection ignore the fact that cooperative behavior within species can also lead to increased “fitness” as is seen in social species like ourselves as well as between different species as is the case with mutualistic relationships; the Yucca plant and some species of Yucca Moths for example.
Then there is the problem that creationists are trying to project the is-ought fallacy onto evolution. The idea being that though the process of natural selection sometimes leads to behavior that we would normally consider cruel or immoral, since it is natural, it is therefore good and we should encourage it.
However the mere fact that we observe something to happen in nature in one context does not mean that it is something upon which we would want to model our own behavior. In fact our success as a species in largely due to the fact that we don’t model our behavior on what we see in nature, or allowing nature to take its course.
See:
Index to Creationist Claims – Claim CA002 and Claim CA002.1
Evolution and Philosophy – Does evolution make might right? by John S. Wilkins
[Hat tip to NCSE on Facebook for the cartoon]
Playing Chess with Pigeons 