False Sense of Maturity

The Virgin Mary doesn’t have a monopoly on virgin births anymore, as a couple of sharks now share the feat:

Scientists have confirmed the second case of a “virgin birth” in a shark. In a study reported Friday in the Journal of Fish Biology, scientists said DNA testing proved that a pup carried by a female Atlantic blacktip shark in the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center contained no genetic material from a male.

The first documented case of asexual reproduction, or parthenogenesis, among sharks involved a pup born to a hammerhead at an Omaha, Neb., zoo.

Was it really asexual reproduction? To be good Christians, we should be open to the possibility that it was really a miracle, and there could now be two competing Jesus sharks out there.

Why do people laugh at creationists? (part 25)

Based on the book “The Demon Haunted World: Science as a candle in the dark”.

The following are suggested as tools for testing arguments and detecting fallacious or fraudulent arguments:
* Wherever possible there must be independent confirmation of the facts
* Encourage substantive debate on the evidence by knowledgeable proponents of all points of view.
* Arguments from authority carry little weight (in science there are no “authorities”).
* Spin more than one hypothesis - don’t simply run with the first idea that caught your fancy.
* Try not to get overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s yours.
* Quantify, wherever possible.
* If there is a chain of argument every link in the chain must work.
* “Occam’s razor” - if there are two hypothesis that explain the data equally well choose the simpler.
* Ask whether the hypothesis can, at least in principle, be falsified (shown to be false by some unambiguous test). In other words, is it testable? Can others duplicate the experiment and get the same result?

This is a great video series from tunderf00t on Youtube. I highly recommend watching this.

The only people so stupid as to not understand the answer are the creationists themselves.

ScienceDaily — “While jams and other consumer products are strictly regulated and are required to pass stringent tests before they can be sold, tobacco has no restrictions and manufacturers can, and do, add anything they want into the product.”

Despite the complexities of regulating cigarette manufacturing, the Tobacco Regulation Study Group, or TobReg, has proposed practical means to begin the progressive process of tobacco regulation. As a first step, it has suggested setting mandatory levels for some of the major carcinogens and toxicants in cigarettes. In addition, regular reviews must also be conducted as initial toxin levels are considered generous by industry standards for many countries.

Evaluating intelligent design creation science and their opposition to material science or methodological naturalism.

On The Huffington Post, psychology professor Gary Marcus points out an obvious criticism of intelligent design that is too often ignored, namely that humans are not designed very efficiently:

When you get right down to it, from an engineering perspective, the design of the human mind (and for the matter the human body) is a bit of mess.

Take, for instance, human memory, and the trouble we often have in remembering even the most basic facts — where did we put our keys? Where did we park our car? Because our brains so often blur our memories together. Human eyewitness testimony is often no match for even a low-rent surveillance camera, and memory can fail even in life-or-death circumstances. (6% of all skydiving fatalities, for instance, are from divers that forgot to pull their ripcords).

. . .

Imperfections riddle the body as well; the human spine supports 70% of our body weight with a single column, where four might have distributed the load better (greatly reducing the incidence of debilitating back pain), and the human retina is effectively installed backwards, with its array of outgoing neural fibers coming out of the front rather than the back, saddling us with an entirely needless blindspot.

If people were literally made in the image of God, then God wouldn’t be all that great.

From AronRa: a Geoscience major at the University of Texas, a student of Paleontology.

Exposing the lies of creationists trying to deny whether we’ve ever observed the evolution of new species.

Here’s the script.
http://darwinwasright.homestead.com/1…

Here is the Rest of the Series.