Outside My Window

Outside my window I can see a lot of beautiful green trees, mountains, houses, roads, cars, and a few office buildings. These things are amazing to me. What’s more, I don’t need a creator for them to be amazing. I understand these things and they stand on their own two feet without some cosmic force to lend them awe.

Trees are fascinating to me. For starters, it always blows my top to think that we are, however distantly, related to them. All things began with the same primordial ooze in whatever form and function that took. The trees that I can see may all be green, but they are a myriad of shades of green, each tree having it’s own diversity of colors and textures. Trees evolved to handle different requirements.

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One Small Step For Man

Wow. Texas sometimes surprises me. After all the talk of changing curriculum to incorporate (among other things) the teaching of Creationism alongside evolution in the science class, the board voted unanimously to reject all of the changes put forward by Creationists and keep their core content focused on actual science. This is huge, although I do hold the same concerns that PZ Myers shares.

This is a big deal for those who are not familiar with the story because of the sheer size of Texas. There are so many Texan students that any proposed changes to their text books become changes to the standard. Publishing companies are not going to write different texts for each state depending upon their ideological lean. Thus, if Texas was to approve changes that would introduce Creationism into the curriculum in a formal way, as opposed to the current slight-of-hand way, it would be in textbooks (whether taught or not) in far more than just the hands of Texas teenagers.

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Evolution Explained For Kids – DNA And Traits

[I regularly notice that one of the top search hits to this site is some variation on the theme of "evolution for kids". It just makes sense that I take a few moments and write a post or two on the topic and hopefully help out those parents who are searching for this information. My intended audience in this case isn't actually kids, it is parents trying to find ways to communicate with their kids. Hope it comes in handy! To see other entries, go here.]

Your body is made up of cells. They are really small, and each one contains a lot of stuff. One of the things they contain is called DNA, and that’s a really important thing. DNA is like an instruction manual for building you, and it gets put together when your mom and dad made you.

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On Watching Nova’s Ape Genius

Last night (in utter contradiction to the previous night’s nerdy TV endeavor) I watched a science program that made me really interested and thoughtful on the topic. Ape Genius is a Nova program (you can watch it free on PBS’s web site) about the intelligence of some of our primate cousins. Most notably, it talked about the chimpanzees of Fongoli, Senegal who have taken to handcrafting spears for hunting bush babies. There was a lot more to the show and I highly recommend watching it.

What I loved most was where my mind went. The researchers kept essentially asking at what point do we consider culture to exist. These chimpanzees not only are using creative intelligence, but are sharing those discoveries and learning from one another. They are, to the best of our knowledge, the only chimpanzees utilizing spears and the only non-human animals in the world that have designed weapons for the purposes of hunting.

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Let The Children Decide For Themselves

Timmy hears voices. At a young age, unbeknownst to Timmy, his parents had him evaluated and he has been diagnosed as a classic, textbook example of schizophrenia. Timmy, however, believes that the chemical reactions in his brain that trigger these hallucinations are the voice of God and the voice of Satan at eternal war inside him. Obviously, the two come with completely different treatment options. Schizophrenia requires long term use of very dangerous chemicals, where an argument between God and Satan has no cure at all, because deities are notorious in most circles for not shutting up when asked. Should Timmy be taught both sides of the story, confirming his incorrect opinion and presenting it as equally valid to the scientific explanation?

Sally comes from a family who believe that the only medicine one needs is prayer. Through an astonishing set of circumstances, Sally enters school age without having had to have any significant medical interventions. This is also true of her classmates, all of whom believe in the healing power of prayer, and that medical doctors are liars who wish to lead you from prayer and righteousness. The parents raise the argument that their class should be taught about health in its proper context, as just one theory in balance with the other accepted theory of their local area, that God heals through prayer and prayer alone. Does their publicly funded school let the children decide for themselves?

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Why Babies Are Dumb (And Why That’s Cool)

Babies are dumb. Maybe not as dumb as people who buy wigs for their dogs, but still, they’re pretty damned dumb. If you ask a baby to solve for x, the odds are the baby won’t even come close to getting it right. Take for example this recent conversation that I just made up:

Jim: Hey baby, if 2x + 17 is 38, solve for x.
Baby: That would mean that 2x = 21, so therefore x=10.

That’s right. Babies wrongly round down. Dumb baby.

I’m being silly, of course, but it actually is fascinating stuff. Most if not all other species (I’m no expert here) pop out of their moms and are essentially ready to roll. They may take some time to get the wobble out of their legs, but that’s hardly the same thing. So why are people so dumb at birth?

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Actual Cellular Evolution Witnessed (Possibly)

A few days ago, I posted my simplistic explanation of evolution here. Today, I saw something that does hand in hand with that, and I figured I would share it with you. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities took a bunch of yeast, which as we all know is a single-celled organism, and let it live in conditions that lend themselves to not wanting to be alone. In a fairly short span of time, they witnessed multi-cellular yeast.

That’s right. They took something that lived entirely with one cell and made it have a bunch of cells. Oh my sweet ass, that’s some cool science.

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Evolution Explained

I am not going to explain evolution in terms that a professor of evolutionary biology would find perfect. Instead, I am going to try once again to clear the air with regards to the people in my world who aren’t so sure about evolution being real. In other words, this isn’t going to be a tough bit of technical jargon, but it will get across the points that I regularly hear people say to me.

1. I just don’t see how we could have come from monkeys..
Well good, cuz the answer is that we didn’t. An evolutionary specialist would explain to you that we have a common ancestor with primates. We are most closely related to chimpanzees and bonobos, but we are more closely related to monkeys and great apes and orangutans than we are with horses, and we are more closely related to horses than we are to canaries.

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Sasquatches!

Let me begin by saying that there is no such thing as Sasquatch. This should be reasonably obvious to any thinking person, and yet I continue to see articles and Discovery Channel programming about how maybe just maybe there really is a Sasquatch. What concerns me is the fact that they are once again trying to promote this silly idea with supposedly legitimate science.

What if, the lunatics say, a real Sasquatch was actually a species of ape we haven’t encountered yet? Or mightn’t it be a member of a species such as Neandertal man that we thought was eradicated but still lives on? Or what if it was just a regular human who in some way was born genetically discombobulated, and lives like a wild man in the wilderness? Or maybe it’s a regular person who is becoming a shaman in the wild?

Well, then we would all be truly stunned.

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Rape

I have many friends who have been raped. I wish this was not the case. The people I have been lucky enough to surround myself with are among the best on the planet, truly wonderful people who deserve nothing but success and happiness all the days of their lives. Life, however, is not about what we deserve, it’s about the random happenstances surrounding us and impacting us, and that makes me infinitely sad.

I actually remember my first brush with the notion of rape. I was just a kid, too young to really understand what sex was, and there was a serial rapist stalking the streets of My Home Town. I seem to remember the name was Harvey Andres, but that may not be the case and a quick googling did not bring anything to light. At any rate, I heard on the radio a mention that a man was wanted in connection with a string of rapes. I asked my mom what that meant, and she told me that it was the most awful thing you could do to a woman. I didn’t understand the rest as intercourse was about a million miles from my Super Friends addled brain, but I got the gist of it. Rape was something a man did to a woman, it was terrible, and it meant the man was bad. I was terrified for the safety of my sister and mother. To me, the city was small and everyone seemed to know my parents, so that meant that my mom and my sister were probably targets. I didn’t realize that my small city had at the time something like half a million people and that my parents were not known by the huge majority of those people. My world was small, what can I say?

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