Niobrara
What do you think of when someone mentions the word “Kansas”? Maybe what leaps to your mind is that it is a farming state that is flat as a pancake, or if you’ve been following current events, the recent kangaroo court/monkey trial, or perhaps it is the drab counterpart to marvelous Oz. It isn’t exactly first on the list of glamourous places. I admit that I tend to read different books than most people, so I have a somewhat skewed perspective on Kansas: the first thing I think of is a magic word.
Niobrara.
Late in the 19th century, there was a stampede to the American West to search for fossils of those spectacular beasts, the dinosaurs. Entrepreneurs everywhere were in on it—P.T. Barnum bought up old bones for his shows—and even scientists got caught up in the bone fever. Edward Drinker Cope of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale were famous rivals in the bone wars, sending teams of men to Wyoming and Utah and Colorado and other Rocky Mountain states to collect the bones of the extinct terrestrial behemoths of the Mesozoic. Kansas was also a target, most famously by the Sternberg family, but it had a different reputation: Kansas is the place to go to find sea monsters.
There is a geological formation in Kansas called the Niobrara Chalk. Actually, it’s not just in Kansas; it extends all the way up into Canada, but the Niobrara has been exposed by erosion over much of northwestern Kansas, making it easy to dig into. And this is where the Sternbergs and Cope and Marsh went hunting for sea monsters.
Chalk is interesting stuff. It’s made of a mineral calcium carbonate, that is formed into the shells of microscopic, one-celled golden brown algae. These Chrysophyceae are photosynthesizing organisms that float in large numbers at the surface of the sea, gather sunlight for energy and scavenging calcium dissolved in the water to build their protective shells. They occasionally shed the the minute calcium plates, and when the plants die, their skeletons drift slowly downward. The seas have a slow, soft, invisible rain of tiny flecks of calcium carbonate that very, very slowly builds up at the bottom.
The Niobrara Chalk formation is 600 feet thick.
It was building up for a long, long time, tens of millions of years. The exposed chalks of northwestern Kansas are also old, dating to between 87 and 82 million years ago, near the end of the Mesozoic era and deep in the Late Cretaceous (not up on your geological time scale? Here’s a simple chart of geological eras.)
The inescapable conclusion is that Kansas was under water during the age of the dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic, the world was warm and the oceans were at a high level, and the entire central part of North America was a great, shallow, inland sea, a warm soup rich in microorganisms that were busily living and dying and slowly accumulating into deep dense chalk beds on the bottom. The world looked a bit like this:
It wasn’t just coccolithophores living there, though. Shallow seas are fertile places for life, and there were vast shoals of fish and nautiloids, dense layers of bottom-dwelling molluscs and echinoderms, and amazing predators. Here’s a bulldog-jawed, snaggle-toothed Xiphactinus—over 20 feet long and 800 pounds of ferocious muscle.
Xiphactinus
There were also snaky-necked plesiosaurids feasting on the smaller fish. These are genuinely weird animals—we have nothing comparable to them today—yet they were diverse and successful and found in numbers in the Niobrara Chalk.
Elasmosaurus
The predatory king of the Niobraran Sea was this fellow, Tylosaurus, a mosasaurid that reached lengths of up to 50 feet. It’s a giant, air-breathing reptile, and is probably most comparable to a killer whale.
I’ve only briefly visited modern Kansas, but the Kansas of my imagination is a fiercely exotic ocean, a warm and savage sea richer than any place still extant. Try mentioning the magic word “Niobrara” to a paleontologist, or any enthusiast familiar with Mesozoic reptiles…their eyes will light up as it conjures visions of the world of 85 million years ago, a world well documented in the incredible fossil beds of Kansas. It’s a powerful, evocative word that links us to a wealth of evidence and a complex, fascinating history.
Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isn’t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Don’t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?
During the course of the hearings, the lawyer on the side of science, Pedro Irigonegaray, asked several of the witnesses for Intelligent Design creationism what they thought the age of the earth was. It’s a simple, straightforward question with a simple answer: about 4.5 billion years. The Intelligent Design creationists found it difficult. Some answers were ludicrous, such as Daniel Ely’s and John Sanford’s assertion that the earth was between 10 and 100 thousand years old. Others were evasive: Stephen Meyer and Angus Menuge refused to answer. Some of these “qualified witnesses” were embarrassingly ignorant: William Harris could only say, “I don’t know. I think it’s probably really old.”. All of this is in line with the intellectually flaccid position of the godfather of the Intelligent Design movement, Phillip Johnson, who has bravely announced that “I have consistently said that I take no position on the age of the earth”.
Mention “Niobrara” to these people and their eyes will not light up. At best you might get dull-eyed incomprehension, and more likely you will see shifty-eyed evasion. Yet these are the characters who want to dictate the scientific content of our children’s educations. I swear, if there were any truth to their metaphysical codswallop, the shades of Cope and Marsh and the Sternbergs would have manifested in that courtroom to denounce them, and the floor would have cracked open beneath their feet to allow a spectral tylosaur to rise up and gulp them down.
There are greater truths in the stones of Niobrara than in the dissembling and ill-educated brains of the fellows of the Discovery Institute. We need to teach the evidence, not this phony, ginned-up controversy from a gang of poseurs and theocrats.
(crossposted to Pharyngula)
May 15th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
Paleontology blogging! I love it!
Great piece. Ya gotta love those mosasaurs.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:26 pm
I’m giddy with learning.
May 15th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
It was the comic book Turok, Son of Stone that had a picture of a Tylosaurus on the front. This inspired me to do some research.
Did I grow up to be a scientist? No.
But I do have an abiding faith in a process that tests the reproducibility of results and seeks challenges to the very consensus it builds.
Here’s to the enlightenment. Now…, I’ve got to go light by candle.
May 15th, 2005 at 6:42 pm
What a GREAT post!
When I think of Kansas, I think of Nebraska.
May 15th, 2005 at 7:04 pm
I always wanted a pet Thalassomedon as a kid.
May 15th, 2005 at 7:35 pm
Great Post. I lived in KS for some years as a child. I was Not encouraged to think through the uniqueness of my geography in geolocial terms, though I certainly would have been open to it- Sea Monsters would have been infinitely more interesting than the local arcade where the only game had a loosened and often unresponsive joystick. We did, on the other hand, make several visits to a George Washington Carver memorial (his adult home I believe)-famous for inventing thousands of uses for peanuts without coming across peanut butter. Peanuts, you see, are rarely used to refute Yound Earth theories… so we visited several times.
May 15th, 2005 at 7:43 pm
Sadly, it’s most unlikely that the kids in Kansas are even made aware of the paleontological riches beneath their school rooms–which tends to make taking pride of them difficult. I know that we didn’t get much fossil stuff (or geology) when I was a kid growing up in Illinois. Fortunately for me, I was interested in the subjects from an early age, and I grew up in a university town where I could go read up in greater detail than the pathetic resources of either the school library or the marginally better ones of the public library (where I wore out library cards by the dozen). And that was in the days before NCLB and “teaching to the test” were even evil glints in the eyes of some Repugnacon think-tanker.
These days, I expect kids are lucky if they’re even told there are subjects in the world like chemistry, biology, physics, etc. (And don’t even get me started on things like languages other than English–hell, even including English–art, music, logic and critical reasoning, history, economics, political science beyond the basic “citizenship” course that seems to be universally required.) Because from everything I can see as a college science-department recruiter and graduate student in history, the average student arriving at college today is dumber than the twits I knew in the sixth grade. They can’t do basic math without a calculator, can’t place the American Civil War in the correct half-century, and couldn’t tell modus ponens from modus tollens if their lives depended on it. Paleontology, in that educational framework, is about as likely as a neonate being able to write Sanskrit.
May 15th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
FYI: Your excellent post is linked on the front page of dailykos.com. Get ready for an onslaught of hits.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:00 pm
A couple years ago my husband and I were on one of our yearly roadtrips through the Southwest and stopped to see the Petrified Forest in Arizona. While in the museum/visitor’s center, we saw the patriarch of a creationist family arguing heatedly with the ranger about the age and veracity of one of the fossils in a display case. The man was wearing a huge, ostentatious cross around his neck, and he was saying something along the lines of, “Well, as a scientist, I have to dispute that assumption.” Pompous, ignorant ass. I felt terrible for his children standing there. All these fabulous things around them, and they had to see the world through his eyes–such a dull, prosaic world, filled with dangerous and seductive illusions that were probably put there by the Devil himself to tempt them to skepticism and doubt.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:09 pm
Great job! I’m going to forward this to my crazy aunt in Lyons, KS; she stopped my gift subscription to National Geographic after that liberally biased evolution issue.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:15 pm
Having had a lifelong fascination with palaeontology, growing up and living in upstate NY with a wealth of Devonian and Silurian fossils at my fingertips, literally, when I walk out my door and to the beach of one of the Finger Lakes, I have always been in awe of the fantastic history of this planet. How anyone can believe this is not far more fantastically amazing than any “intelligent design” is beyond me.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:16 pm
Having returned to the USA to care for my mother, I have run into a buzzsaw of ignorance and bigotry. My blood family are all all Dittohead, Freeper, Fundy dolts. Not a one of them believe that all earth’s critters are descended from the original spark of life that was started on this planet.
I get, “You may think that you are descended from apes, but the bible tells me that Adam and Eve are where we started from, not Lucy”.
They say that the oceans that covered vast areas were Attributed to the time of Noah and his family and since they were the only people left on earth, then we are all descended from that line, including all the animals..
I cannot talk logically to them as they throw the bible at me telling me that every word in the book is God’s word and written only by him… I have learned not to talk to anyone about evolution around here as it only brings out the very worst in a very ignorant group of people…
May 15th, 2005 at 8:21 pm
A former coworker of mine, who happens to be really whacked out fundamentalist Christian nutjob, was “explaining” to me one day that the Bible talks about these sea creatures (called “leviathans”) and therefore we don’t really need science to try to understand them. When I asked a question about some other aspects of the fossil record, he shook his head and said he didn’t want to think about that stuff. These people perform death-defying feats of mental contortion to select facts that support their theories instead of developing theories to explain facts. Then they ignore anything that doesn’t back up their fantasy. How the heck is this “debate” possibly an issue in the 21st Century? If I get enough people together and say the Moon is made of green cheese, is the substance of the Moon now controversial? Nonsense. This is happening because there are WAY too many Republicans on America’s school boards. And it’s not just Kansas, they tried this here in Michigan, too.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:39 pm
Great piece. I grew up in western Kansas and had no idea about Niobrara.
May 15th, 2005 at 8:58 pm
This denial of science will only groiw worse. We could use your help.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:19 pm
Amen!! The dunderheads have run amok; their political paralysis is paramount!
May 15th, 2005 at 9:31 pm
Seems like…when folks bury their heads in the sand in Kansas, they should be seeing dinosaurs. Go figure.
Very nice piece. Cheers…
May 15th, 2005 at 9:33 pm
Great article. It really emphasizes the degree to which the (un)Christian (un)Right seeks to refute the vastness of God’s creation in both time and space and make themselves the authority instead. It seems ironic that these marginal symbol users are the best examples of our connection to our prehuman ancestors and they would confine us all to their small, dark, fear filled 6,000 year old flat world if we let them. Thank you PZ.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:39 pm
An instant best post nominee (in a new “Science” category) for this year’s Koufax awards. The amount and quality of science writing in bloggerdom has risen mightily during the past year; chalk that up as a welcome and unexpected result of the GW Bush led assault on science and reason. And with this post P Z Myers asserts his claim as the legitimate heir to the throne of Steven Jay Gould.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:43 pm
Thank you for the excellent post and for the education. I had no idea. I guess that those old, old maps that show the then unexplored oceans containing monsters were based in fact.
May 15th, 2005 at 9:58 pm
Excellent post,PZ. It brought to my mind a similar but less eloquently expressed sentiment by the great agnostic, Col. Robert G. Ingersoll.
“If the Bible is true, the science known as geology is false and every fossil
is a petrified perjurer.”
May 15th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
It is lamentable how far we can plummet, and how few it takes to push the rest of us off the precipice.
May 15th, 2005 at 10:16 pm
Great blog– you’re now bookmarked. You made dailykos.com here
May 15th, 2005 at 10:44 pm
Great entry!
I learn more from blogs than I do at University, it seems. Keep up the good work.
Though the theocrats might win the battles, progress is immutable and we will come out on top. History will judge them and absolve us.
It’s Evolution, Baby!
May 15th, 2005 at 11:23 pm
I’ve always believed that science, truth, and reality are much more fascinating than the strange, sad ficitions that religions come up with. The creationists just don’t seem to understand science; they think it’s just an adjunct to their belief system and has no intrinsic value in and of itself. They don’t seem to realize that the data is already out there just waiting for the right researchers with the right instruments to come along and uncover it, and the universe really doesn’t give a damn what we do with it –it’s simply ‘there”.
I frankly don’t give a damn about belief or how sincerely it’s held, my sole concern is what’s really out there. If the data is consistent and it contradicts religious scripture then so be it; better to know the truth than delude oneself. And if there were a god like the one described in the bible, it’d have a helluva a lot to answer for in MY book.
May 15th, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Excellent, excellent post. I’ll link to it on my blog tomorrow, when I have some spare time.
Sometimes, I think it would be more than just if all these Creationist idiots were to meet with one of those ancient sea monsters.
One of those monosaurs would make short work of those Creationist idiots.
May 16th, 2005 at 12:16 am
Thanks for a great and educational (now there’s a word not heard much in this whole Kansas nonsense!) post. Just came over from Kos to check it out. I have always found the the stories (and creatures) to be found in scientific evolution to be way more interesting than any apple-eating couple standing around in a field/garden.
May 16th, 2005 at 12:26 am
What a great scientific/political post. I feel like I just watched an odd mixture of the Discovery Channel and C-SPAN for a full twenty-four hours! It is sad though, that so many Kansans have their heads stuck in the sand when, if they were to dig a little deeper, they would come face to face with the chalk deposits that discredits their entire charade. Apparently, evolution of the human brain is far from complete.
As mentioned in a previous comment, your post is a featured link on dailykos.com. I migrated from that site. Glad I did.
May 16th, 2005 at 1:32 am
Yes this post is fabulous for its human and scientific value. But where are the “nutjob” comments? I guess they avoid blogs where reality is discussed!!
May 16th, 2005 at 2:52 am
Wonderful! Thank you so much!
May 16th, 2005 at 5:12 am
Fantastic piece! I myself live in Finland (where Evolution is a fact) and this whole debate over Creationism in America is just unbelievable. I just can’t believe that some people actually take that nonsense so seriously that they’re read to try their luck in courts.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:25 am
Fascinating info, thanks. I especially liked the comment from the reader in Finland. I wonder every day just HOW crazy and insane America must look to the rest of the world. I mean, come on. Religious fantasies, right-wing war-mongering, torture - what kind of country IS this?
Remember when we were a beacon of freedom, a light for the rest of the world? Well, the light has gone out. Thanks, George.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:43 am
I’ve never doubted the reality of evolution even though I grew up in Tennessee during a time when teachers were prohibited from discussing it in class. But I also very much believe in God. It seems to me that all these holier-than-science types have a view of God as a rather limited being who has to make things with his paternalistic anthropomorphic hands rather than creating the process that resulted in creatures who would be able to deny that a deity was capable of working through evolution - or, in the case of ID, setting up a system of evolution that could work without constant tinkering.
No matter. The problem with ID as science is that it’s completely untestable. Maybe God did tinker with evolution. Maybe God said, “That slimey thing with a notochord has a mutation that I don’t like. You, predator, here’s dinner.” There’s no experiment we can design to test that, and that’s why ID, no matter what its ultimate veracity, does’t belong in any science class.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:44 am
I suppose paleontologists only post about once every 50 million years. I literally can’t wait for the next one.
I will get a link to this in my blog.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:55 am
Great article! Keep up the good work. It is ironic isn’t it? That the Kansas “sea floor” would be so rich in diverse prehistoric marine life and that the locals haven’t a clue. It’s nice to see “logic” and “rationality” in a sea of propagandized media.
May 16th, 2005 at 6:19 am
Carol Ann hits it right on the head - proponents of Creationism and ID seem to be saying that evolution is just a little too complicated and difficult for God to handle, so ‘He’ just threw up ‘His’ hands in frustration, and zapped everything into existence all at once. They’re showing great disrespect for God, and that offends me.
May 16th, 2005 at 6:20 am
In response to the creationist clown show going on in Kansas, PZ Myers at The American Street has this passionate and absorbing post about the fossil treasure chest called the Niobrara Chalk formation. This mother lode, which runs from Kansas from Canada, makes it pretty clear that the home state of Bob Dole was once an abode of exotic, menacing prehistoric creatures. The more things change . . .
“Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isnā€™t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Donā€™t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?”
I guess we all know the answer to that question, and it’s a sad one. Yes.
http://www.theopinionmill.com/Seasofkansas.html
May 16th, 2005 at 6:39 am
Great job, PZ, very timely.
At Watts Bar Dam here, the smaller fish get through the filters and are churned up by the hydro-electric turbines. Catfish take advantage of this source of food and can grow quite large. But 20 feet long, 800 pounds? I donn’t think so. Yet the fishermen are told to stay back from the area. Do you suppose…?
May 16th, 2005 at 6:50 am
Carol Anne and Early Mike are right on the money. Creationism and ID stem from a basic premise: anything “complex” — itself a term not capable of objective definition — must have come from an intelligent being similar to us, through a process similar to our own creative process. This is, first, an incredible act of hubris (for which I am sure, if there is a God, she will smite the ID aficionados down in due time). But more importantly, as Carol Anne and Early Mike point out, it’s an incredibly impoverished conception of a supreme being for those who claim to believe in her.
May 16th, 2005 at 6:52 am
Oh, and I forgot to say: Awesome post, PZ. I never thought about the fact that the great plains would have been oceans in our distant past. Makes me almost want to go to Kansas. Almost.
May 16th, 2005 at 7:18 am
I migrated over from DailyKos and was thrilled to see some reality-based response to the idiocy happening in Kansas right now. There’s no sex, so it’s not getting reported on the SCMSM.
Thank you!
May 16th, 2005 at 7:44 am
I came over from dailykos and the trip was well worthwhile. For a number of years, my very accomplished wife taught the mysteries of earth science. I can speak to the reality of fossils because my back hurt from lugging her collection around.
One of my family medicine residents told me a story of a beloved internal medicine professor from his medical school days. As they were about to enter the room of a sick patient, the professor said to his students, “We know this woman’s disease is God’s will. What I want to know is what is the pathophysiology of God’s will.” I believe the yahoos in Kansas would deny there is the “pathophysiology of God’s will” even if it bit them in the butt. People of Philip Johnson’s ilk are crafty and bear close watching. Remember what what his intellectual ancestors did to Galileo.
Thanks for this post, PZ!!
May 16th, 2005 at 7:51 am
Interesting post..my evolutionary biology teacher in undergrad took students on a summer dig to the same places you talked about, he was eat up with this shit and yurned to let others feel the same way. I wonder if all this creationism hoopla is going to have a negative effect on the kids we’re tryin to educate..in other words who will be the evolutionary biologists of the future??
Wildlifer
May 16th, 2005 at 7:56 am
i came over from dkos as well - nice diary
May 16th, 2005 at 8:25 am
This is the best summary of the Kansas “debates” I’ve read. Very eloquent & factual.
Thanks for raising the standards of the debate.
Thanks for such a Kick ass GREAT ARTICLE!
May 16th, 2005 at 9:06 am
I believe pretty much as Carol Ann writes.
The complete Genesis is too long to fit in a single book, and too complex to be learned in a lifetime. And faith does not require that the universe be proof of God’s existance.
But from another perspective:
There is a view that Adam was created a full-grown man. A man without memories from childhood would know nothing - God must have given him a set of memories, a fictional childhood. Maybe Adam knew where that story ended and his real life began, maybe not.
If God created the world recently, He created it with fossilized memories. A fiction rather like Adam’s childhood. Paleontologists (whether they see it that way or not) read and honor God’s fabulous and elaborate work of fiction. In the story He wrote, creatures evolved. And we don’t know where (or even if) that story ended and this one began.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:18 am
As a scientist I accept the principals of evolution which I have been taught and continue to see in action every day.
But it seems to me the biggest problem for the ID creationists or otherwise anti-evolutionists to grasp is the intellectual concept of time. Which, of course, is the crux of all that is required for evolution to work through.
It is this that confounds the ID/creationist crowd resulting in their childish obstinance or evasiveness when asked the question “how old is the earth?”
I haven’t followed the details of the Kansas Kangaroo Court but have the methods used to date the earth (read radiometric dating) been discussed?
I remember reading somewhere that creationists believe it is flawed and inaccurate. All of their arguments hinge on it being dubious and, for the most part really, all of ours rely on its veracity.
If, to the layperson or creationist, it can be made painfully obvious that measuring the age of fossils or rocks or whatever with carbon dating or K/Ar dating or any other radiometric technique is a highly reproducible and accurate technique then the rest should be easy.
May 16th, 2005 at 9:47 am
I came to this blog via www.leftwingfootball.com to see the illustrations. I had fond memories of going with my son and grand daughters to see an exhibition of dinosaurs in Indianapolis a couple of years ago. Watching the faces of my grand daughters, as they saw for the first time, what once walked on this earth millions of years ago, was just as exciting to me as when I first viewed a dinosaur skeleton in the Field Museum in Chicago as a young boy. How anyone can ignore Evolution is beyond me. What the creationists always say is; Evolution is JUST a theory. My response to them is; if evolution is JUST a theory, what is god, a concept?
Thanks for posting this.
May 16th, 2005 at 10:31 am
The old bumper sticker is right after all;
Apes really did evolve from Creationists !! But the bumper sticker didn`t say they settled in Kansas.
If there really was an “Intelligent Desiger”( god) he/she was/is really into bloodbaths… which is why lions must rip the throats out of beautiful gazelles into order to live, and so forth. Maybe he/she was “the lowest bidder.”
Great post !!
May 16th, 2005 at 10:44 am
I agree with Carol Ann also. Some of us have created a mean-spirited and insecure G-d with a limited imagination. Perhaps G-d is so grand that He/She/All created a system that would have us scratching our heads for eternity. . . Or perhaps, this is all happening at once and it just seems to evolve. Why can’t we just enjoy the show?
May 16th, 2005 at 10:45 am
Evolution is the best theory we have to fit the facts, but Natural Selection has been proven (which was what Darwin’s research was all about) beyond doubt. There was an observation in England during the Industrial Revolution of a breed of white moths. Once their habitat (trees and buildings) began to become sooty, within a few short years the ENTIRE breed had turned a soot color.
May 16th, 2005 at 10:53 am
Hunter, radiocarbon dating can be cross-calibrated to tree ring data. This allows (for the recent past, out to of order 5000 years) a cross-check of a radioisotope ratio technique. Gases trapped in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica can be traced back hundreds of thousands of years (though I am unaware of any radioisotope technique being used on those samples). Of course, the multimillion-year old minerals in fossil beds rely on other, longer-lived isotopes for which there is no direct cross-check (other than the fact that we can measure half-lives in the laboratory, and make the obvious inference that a single fossil sample accumulated both isotopes at the same time). But the technique is directly traceable for carbon isotopes out to the creationists age of the earth. And you can count yearly-varying ice-core deposits out to well beyond the creationists earth formation time.
I like many came to this wonderful post via Daily Kos. I have already sent a hearty recommendation to the members of my Yahoo group to read it. We plan to write some Letters to the Editor on the Kansas nonsense to our local paper.
Cheers!
May 16th, 2005 at 11:20 am
As an European Scientist living in the United States, I was amazed to read so much creationist ideas, meet creationists and actually chat with very educated one. It made me realise that some people can have a very high education, a wide culture as the same time as keep narrow minds and erase logical thoughts from their brain. They can twist and bent rational in order to preserve their faith, or more exactly the view they got of their ideology. Almost schizophrenic.
But what I don’t understand is how they can stop science from proving them wrong. Gallileo, Copernicus and so many other precursors had to go back on their words. They were true but had to confess of the opposite. But it didn’t matter. The truth came back and was established. Darwin was fought harshly since the beggining. Later archeology, physics, genetics and molecular Biology individually gave more arguments going his way and now, Neodarwinism is more documented than ever. All the data going against it were soon explain by other discoveries like transposons and retro-virus, becoming new arguments for Neodarwinism.
These people can refute, deny and scream as loud as they want. They can’t change it.
May 16th, 2005 at 11:38 am
Great Post. Just a word for the seas still covering Kansas. In the middle of the state you will find the Quivira and Cheyenne Bottoms National Wildlife Refuges, one of the largest marsh complexes left in the plains (unless George has sold or drained them). No sea monsters but lots of least terns, snowy plovers and yellow headed blackbirds, and thousands of wading and marsh birds. Between that and pan fried chicken and KC Barbeque, Holocene Kansas can be a remarkably enjoyable place.
May 16th, 2005 at 12:23 pm
Nathan, you might want to look for a book titled Of Moths and Men, turns out maybe the classic moth example is a bit suspicious.
May 16th, 2005 at 1:06 pm
It’s such a shame children aren’t taught about the history in their own back yard. Here in England, my sister lives down in Dorset, which as you palaeontologists know is dinosaur country, and they’re very proud of it there.
My nieces’ school has a big ammonite fossil by the front gate (probably a reproduction, as a real ammonite that big would be in a museum), and they teach the children about Gideon Mantell and the Iguanodon tooth, and Mary Anning hunting fossils for a living with an expert’s eye (who inspired the tongue twister “she sells sea shells by the sea shore”).
May 16th, 2005 at 1:16 pm
Great post. It should be required reading for all students in Kansas and George W Bush, who has said that the “jury is still out” on evolution.
May 16th, 2005 at 1:17 pm
Ah, Lewis Black did a wonderful riff, though, on American political choices. He said if Darwin was right, how do you explain the crappier and crappier choices we get when we go to vote? If all you do is look at those ballot choices, you could prove Darwin wrong. Because we’re soon going to be voting for choices between PLANTS! Talk about reverse-logic! (WHAT A GREAT WAY TO POST COMMENTS! I LOVE THE PREVIEW BOX. THE WHOLE SETUP IS JUST WONDERFUL, TOO.)
May 16th, 2005 at 1:30 pm
Ray,
I think the “jury is still out” on George’s evolution of having an IQ greater than his obvious gentic gene pool, Neanderthal man.
As the saying goes, George is as dumb as a Box of Hair.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
The other day I saw an animated graphic thingy from USA Today where you could pick a state off a map of the continental U.S.A. (Hawaii and Alaska not included, oddly enough) and it would show you the distribution of religions among the citizens of that state, shown in a bar graphs. All the various sects on that graph are indicated in blue lines, except for the “No religion” bar, which for some reason is shown in orange. So I went clicky-clicking through all the various states, and quite to my surprise I see that, according to their poll, there is a larger percentage of atheists in Kansas (15%) than Florida, where I live (12%) or - surprise! - New York (13%). Obviously, then, not all Kansans are jackasses who believe the world (a flat disc resting atop the back of a giant turtle?) was created ab nihilo in the year 4004 BC.
So let’s not write off the Kansans, OK? While the rest of their distracted fellow citizens were busy with their personal business, a bunch of lunatic-fringe theocrats have drummed themselves into office there, but surely they don’t represent all the Kansans. And as noisy and idiotic as the rabid-Right act, and as embarrassing as it has to be for all the reasonable citizens there, I suspect it won’t be long now until the sensible majority of Kansans boots them out of office.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:09 pm
Where are all the slaves the Bible always talked about? Really, it is a very bad idea to just look into some old holy-book and then try to apply it thoughtlessly.
May 16th, 2005 at 2:50 pm
I came over from Kos’ also.
Someone said there’d be ice cream and cookies.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:01 pm
I’ve never understood the dating methods that could be so accurate of the earth being 4.5 billion years old. How do we know that? Is it a given? If God is able to create a mature man(Adam) is He not able to create a mature earth? If the earth is really that old, and the first man ‘evolved’ three million years ago, wouldn’t we have vastly more people on this earth than 6 billion? I think that Darwin was right in his assessment of micro-evolution, but as far as macro-evolution, where is the fossil record to prove this? Piltdown Man, Australopithicus, Ramapithicus and Nebraska Man have all proven to be false, yet they are all still taught in college textbooks today. Before you write off creation science as a lie, I would challenge you to actually investigate some of their claims and see if it holds water. And as far as the flat earth theory, I’ve never understood where Christians get the rap for that, the Bible talks about the earth being a sphere in Isaiah 40:22, which was written in 700 B.C. quite a few years before this was widely known.
Scott
May 16th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
As a Kansan, I am actually relieved to have Intelligent Design supported by members of the school board. With ID, I have a widely held theory that will allow me to refute statements that try and affirm that Kansans and Miseryuns (folks from Missouri - also referred to as a Missourian) evolved from the same source. Basically, I now realize that they are apes and I am special.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:32 pm
Well, I grew up in Kansas and I was taught a bit about my state’s natural history. I spent many an hour driving around the state with my 4H geology club fossil hunting. It was indescribably amazing to me that you could find so much evidence of ocean-dwelling life everywhere in this place so far from any large bodies of water. I was probably already a science geek before this experience, but it certainly helped to keep me on that path.
I don’t live in Kansas anymore, and the state has changed a lot since I left, but at least I thought you should know that some of us Kansans know of and appreciate our geological heritage.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:38 pm
Can we arrange for Mr. Johnson to wake up with a tylosaurus head in his bed?
May 16th, 2005 at 3:40 pm
Wonder what the rate of teen pregnancy is in Kansas? If these creationists are on the school board?, you know that the sex-ed in high schools is non-existent and/or skewed towards the
religionists vieewpoints. Another modality in which the children are forced to pay for the superstitions of the adults-in-charge who force them to wear their cast-off and tattered
clothing as a scarecrow in a field of braying crows.
On the way home from work, there was a rusting, wired-together old old pickup hogging the fast lane on the interstate. Clouds of its exhuast literally covered the assemblage of the twenty or so
cars struggling behind it. The pickup was probably doing 40mph in what was a 70 mph lane.
It was holding up the entire line. Somehow I managed to pass the pickup. I noticed the occupants inside the truck had a ‘victimish’ countenance to their features yet somehow managed to also convey an air of superiority due entirely to the basic physical mass of their truck in that others could not proceed.
This is how I have come to view religion, a stumbling block on the way to higher consiousness,
an impediment to progress. The self-satisfied smamry fools though did not get off scot-free. A patrolmen flashed down on them. I smirked in my rear-view mirror.
May 16th, 2005 at 3:42 pm
Hey, VIS, don’t go dissing Neanderthals! Remember: These guys may have looked a bit rough, but they were tough and clever. Hell, they thrived during an Ice Age, in an environment chock-full of big critters with very nasty dispositions.
On the other hand, Dear Leader’s life expectancy in the Pleistocene would probably be measured in micro-seconds.
IMO, though, what Bush really represents is not so much devolution as a branch in human evolution. After all — as tapeworms found out long ago — brains are completely unnecessary to a fully parasitic lifestyle.
May 16th, 2005 at 4:39 pm
grouchomarxist, I bow to your superior correlation between a Tape worm and our Fearless Leader. Your view is by far the best explanation of our unfortuante circumtances I’ve ever seen posed.
To Scott of “intelligent design” post; Did Adam have a bellybutton? I know you’re going to have to think long and hard on this one, but really give it some thought, will you? I’m assuming you know what a bellybutton is and what caused it.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
The greeks knew the earth was round, long before any such claims appeared in the Bible, but it was Christian rejection of these ideas during the dark ages (along with debates about how many angels could dance on the head of a pin) that to this day makes people think that the earth not being flat is a relatively modern idea that arose with Copernican thought.
The funny thing is that its going to happen again. The Bible is not incompatible with evolutionary thought, yet here we are. Now we have to believe in a deceptive God that modified the apparent ages of the rocks and planted fossils to test our faith. That sort of duplicity doesn’t strike me as divine.
May 16th, 2005 at 5:40 pm
and it wasn’t a general Christian consensus in the dark ages either, then as now it was only a vocal minority who decided to interpret scripture literally. (to be perfectly fair)
May 16th, 2005 at 6:05 pm
Scott:
The age of the Earth is 4.55 billion years, plus or minus about 1%. We know the age of the Earth through a number of methods, primarily through radioisotope dating of meteorites formed around the same time as the Earth. We use meteorites to date the Earth (and the solar system generally) because rocks on the Earth’s surface are destroyed through erosion and crustal recycling (i.e., plate tectonics), processes that do not generally affect meteorites. The oldest rocks found on the Earth thus far date to around 3.8-4.1 billion years old. For more, see the Age of the Earth FAQs, especially The Age of the Earth and Isochron Dating Methods. You might also check out G. Brent Dalrymple’s book, The Age of the Earth.
Radioisotope dating is based on the radioactive decay of certain elemental isotopes (for instance, uranium-235) into other isotopes (lead-207). We observe these decay processes today on the Earth. We also know that they took place in the past because we can see them happening by looking through telescopes at distant objects. And, these decay processes are based upon the same principles of quantum mechanics that govern chemistry, electronics, nuclear power, and other marvels of the modern age. If you want to throw out the age of the Earth, you’re going to have to throw out much of geology and physics with it.
As for the rest of your comments:
1. God could create a mature Earth. God could also have created the universe last Thursday and implanted memories in each of us to make us think it’s older than that. There’s nothing to logically justify rejecting Last Thursdayism as your religion. Belief in a Deceiver God is not just shoddy science, it’s shoddy theology as well.
2. People die, from war, famine, and disease. There’s no reason, mathematical or otherwise, to think that the world should be covered in people. Think about it: bacteria multiply much, much more quickly than people. Why isn’t the Earth covered in bacteria?
3. Macroevolution - evolution above the level of species - is well-supported by multiple, independent lines of evidence. See the 29+ Evidences of Macroevolution FAQ. Also, we’ve observed speciation, both in the lab and in the wild. See Observed Instances of Speciation and Some More Observed Speciation Events.
4. Piltdown Man was a hoax that was discovered by scientists and that has been discredited for more than 50 years. Nebraska Man was based on a misidentified tooth from a peccary (an animal related to pigs), a mistake that was cleared up in 1927. I seriously doubt either of these is taught today except for the historical lessons they provide. Ramapithecus was thought to be a hominid based on incomplete fossils; more complete fossils showed the genus to be more closely related to modern-day orangutans. I don’t know what you think is “false” about the genus Australopithecus; the seven Australopithecine species are recognized as hominids. You probably should read more on the subject.
5. A better interpretation of the word used in the verse in question is “disk” or “circle,” which fits with our knowledge of what the Hebrew cosmology at the time was. In any case, there most certainly are Christian creationists who interpret the Bible as requiring a flat Earth. For an example, see The International Flat Earth Society.
One final note: I’ve Dr. Myers’s work for many years now, and I guarantee that he knows more about creationist claims than you do.
May 16th, 2005 at 6:11 pm
Great post. Just visiting from Kos. As a born and reared Kansan I am pained about what is going on in my former homeland. I grew up on the prairie and know all too well about the chalk layer. I spent my youth chiseling fossilized mussel shells out of limestone blocks. I have a fifty pound block of fossilized mussels sitting on my floor. It is a great conversation piece. Looks just like the beach here in SE Alaska at low tide, only solidified.
May 16th, 2005 at 8:08 pm
Dear Scott:
obviously you don’t know much about biology and it is fine, I don’t know much about many things either. But because you don’t understand how earth was dated doesn’t mean it is inaccurate or arbitrary. Also the human didn’t evolve 3 million years ago. And even though, there was some ice age, enough wars, disease etc.. to limit human population at what it is.
Now Darwin didn’t write down the laws of radioactivithy degradation half-life, the genetic drift, th heredity laws and decide that mitochondria would have their own DNA. But all that and more added more data to strengten Darwin’s theory. Darwin migh be the father of Evolution but Neodarwinism is far more than some birds lost in the galapagos.
Just the fact that a virus, a bacteria, a bird, a three, an insect, a fish, a human and a flower share the same genetic code should tell you something.
May 16th, 2005 at 10:58 pm
It pains me to no end to see my home state of Kansas reduced to a laughing stock by a bunch of close minded idiots like those on the state school board. Being 42 and educated from kindergarten to a college degree in Kansas, I was fortunate to be raised during a time when the local crypto-Christian fascists kept their medeval theories to the churches and homes of the believers. I should know, I was raised in an evangelical and fundamentalist Christian home in Kansas. I was taught true science in school and was educated about the state’s riches in Niobrara chalks and the various limestones that form a geologic foundation to Kansas. The progressive forces in our state are still fighting the good fight against these morons; don’t give up on Kansas, please.
May 17th, 2005 at 1:34 am
Thanks Greg. I know about radiometric dating methods as well as comparative methods like stratigraphy. I was meaning is there discussion about geological dating techniques at the Kansas evolution trial (Scopes part II)? I haven’t followed the particulars (though I should - keep your enemies closer).
Scott, there are lots of problems with your post. First of all to my knowledge there is not a single current textbook, college or otherwise, teaching Piltdown man as a legitimate hominid ancestor. I just checked my first college Anthropology textbook “Introduction to Physical Anthropology” by Jurmain and Nelson. Piltdown is given three pages on why it was a hoax. I took the class (UNM) in 1993, - twelve years ago. And Australopithecus proven false? What the heck are you talking about?
Just because you, or any anti-evolutionist, can’t understand the methods doesn’t mean they’re not accurate.
We know the data is accurate because those in the scientific community that study the radiological dating methods and their applications have spent tens of thousands of (work) years dedicated to its understanding, sophistication, and accuracy. Unlike the anti-evolutionists who are comfortable with incomplete knowledge of the subject which results, ultimately with the commonplace regurgiation of red-herrings such as Piltdown man. How’s the saying: a lie travels the world twice before the truth has time to put on its shows. And a scientific discovery isn’t real until it’s been repeated, by someone else. The age of the earth or a dinosaur bone or a Australopithecine are confimred many times over.
And, no, it’s not a given - it’s empiracly determined, as are all thing’s science reveals.
The only given appears to be those who weren’t schooled well enough in science class discrediting science that they don’t, can’t, or refuse to understand.
You’ll never understand if you keep looking to the Discovery Institute/creationist crowd for answers.
May 17th, 2005 at 6:19 am
Scott, I already answered your question about the idea of the Earth being created mature:
If God created a mature Earth, paleontologists read and honor Godā€™s fabulous and elaborate work of fiction. In the story He wrote, creatures evolved.
God may be a storyteller. He is not a liar.
May 17th, 2005 at 10:33 am
I understand how unintelligent people would believe in ID or even religion at all for that matter (no offense Carol Ann and others) - but how can a logical, educated and intelligent person believe in any of this crap??? How insecure must someone be to completely turn away from common sense and praise a belief system that is illogical, unfounded and essentially stupid? I have absolutely no problem at all with the fact that I don’t know if there is other intelligent life in the universe, or how far the universe extends or what exactly is out there past our scientific bounds - in fact I’m glad I don’t know - I think it’s exciting! And even if for some reason the Big Bang or Evolution isn’t enough for you (which is pathetic) - why is it necessary to come up with some BS answer that you’ll never be able to prove right or wrong? It points directly to feelings of insecurity: these people are too scared to imagine and to explore, so they’d rather stick to some antiquated belief system to explain what they see. I think it’s sad to settle for a crappy explanation like God or Creationism for the wonders of our universe. Isn’t the idea of never knowing the truth scarier than simply not knowing it for the time being?
May 17th, 2005 at 11:05 am
As a native and lifelong Kansan, we grew up hunting fossils and marvelling at their abundance and variety. We never doubted Kansas was the home of dinosaurs, even before school and the concept of evolution. Please don’t confuse the religious dogmatists forcing the intellectual claptrap of “intelligent design” with the majority of Kansans who know better.
May 17th, 2005 at 11:20 am
If you look at the fossil record and the number of species that have been on the face of the earth (only the ones we can count, how many haven’t left fossils or haven’t been discovered) and compare that number to the species that are now alive, over 99% of the species that this Intelligent Designer created are extinct. That is one pitiful designer, far from intelligent.
It is sad that all of the ID’s bs stems from, and when prodded, collapses to the bible. An analysis of the facts leads to theories and conclusions. It is a true pinhead that starts with the conclusion as a given and throws out any facts that don’t fit.
These people are pathetic. Sorry for the lack of civility, but they are pushing the pendulum back towards ignorance and superstition. Like Nick, I understand that there are holes in my understanding of the universe but don’t have the need to fill the holes with guano.
May 17th, 2005 at 12:51 pm
To answer Nick Jacobs, I chat from time to time with a reborn christian, hardcore creationist, former marines, now informatic geek. This guy is brilliant, got a wide culture and deep knowledge of the Bible. He can accomodate his sharp mind and his blind faith. Every word of the Bible is carved in stone. Ask him how Adam lived hundreds of years and he will come up with some explanations. Ask him how Noah and his family gave birth to the entire actual population (black, chinese, caucasians etc) without having inbread genetic problems and he got the answer. Anything you wonder about the Holy book, he have something to explain. And if you corner him somewhere, he throw you that God is all powerfull and can do anything. He is the archetype of conservatism. He is for the death penalty (he will quote you the old testament on that), against gun control (american constitution), against abortion, thinks that gays are perverts that can be cure and that Ann Coulter is brilliant, not irrational, full of spirit, not full of hate and recommand all of her books even if she sometime use bad words. And to have discuss with him on many subjects, I can tell that dispite his stupids opinions, he is a nice guy, generous and likeable. Even if I want to punch my keybord sometimes.
That is where I found out that
1) when come to religion, no rational can beat true faith.
2) even very smart people can be norrow minded (and without realising it!) even blind…
May 17th, 2005 at 2:44 pm
A late friend of mine dubbed the creationist idea that dinosaurs and man shared the Earth at the same time, “The Flinstonian Theorem”
May 18th, 2005 at 6:04 am
You can’t reason someone out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into.
May 18th, 2005 at 12:13 pm
The Flintstonian Theorem….Hahahahahaha Yaba Daba Doooooooooo
May 21st, 2005 at 8:17 pm
Just got to this from someone else’s blog while doing a bit of a random walk/search; it is disturbing what people will believe in to the exclusion of all sense. My favourite quote on the subject:
May 23rd, 2005 at 6:48 pm
It is clear from the commentary that the deeply religious mind is immune to facts that clash with belief, either by ignoring them or by employing tortured speculations to avoid their impact.
This type of faith penetrates to a pre-rational core, where it pulls the plug on logical processes and innoculates the believer against challange. Thus education and intelligence alone do not guarantee a rational outlook where the prevailing culture is deeply religious. Which may be why ours is the only country of the modern, industrial democracies — the category of nations of which we count ourselves the leader — where evolution creates this level of resistance. This suggests an imbalance between our power and our maturity, a tension that may sunder us from our allies and eventually from each other.
May 24th, 2005 at 5:03 am
helloo
May 24th, 2005 at 5:12 am
Good blog
May 25th, 2005 at 5:28 am
neither side can be proven. That’s why they’re called “Faith” and “theory”, respectively. If Evolution was provable, it’d be called a “law”.
The primordial soup theory is chalk full of holes that can always be cited to dissuade belief in evolution. Radioactive dating results can easily be misleading if a molecules half-life resultant is already present from another source at the time of testing. Sedimentary aging can easily be discredited by simply filling a jar with 5 layers of soil, filling it with water, then shaking it. Unless you specifically layer them the right way, they won’t settle in the order they were layed down.
Carbon dating only goes back 50000 years. It also has the same pit falls as radioactive dating.
Did adam have a bellybutton? who knows. Nobody alive today was there to look.
My point being: there is no way to know how the earth was createdneither side can be proven. That’s why they’re called “Faith” and “theory”. If Evolution was provable, it’d be called a “law”
The primordial soup theory is chalk full of holes that can always be cited to dissuade belief in evolution. Radioactive dating results can easily be misleading if a molecules half-life resultant is already present from another source at the time of testing. Sedimentary aging can easily be discredited by simply filling a jar with 5 layers of soil, filling it with water, then shaking it. Unless you specifically layer them the right way, they won’t settle in the order they were layed down.
Carbon dating only goes back 50000 years. It also has the same pit falls as radioactive dating.
Did adam have a bellybutton? who knows. Nobody alive today was there to look.
My point being: there is no way to know how the earth was created neither side can be proven. That’s why they’re called “Faith” and “theory”. If Evolution was provable, it’d be called a “law”
The primordial soup theory is chalk full of holes that can always be cited to dissuade belief in evolution. Radioactive dating results can easily be misleading if a molecules half-life resultant is already present from another source at the time of testing. Sedimentary aging can easily be discredited by simply filling a jar with 5 layers of soil, filling it with water, then shaking it. Unless you specifically layer them the right way, they won’t settle in the order they were layed down.
Carbon dating only goes back 50000 years. It also has the same pit falls as radioactive dating.
Did adam have a bellybutton? who knows. Nobody alive today was there to look.
My point being: there is no way to know how the earth was created, so just as evolutions expect that their children shouldn’t be forced to believe in creationism, creationist should be extended the same courtesy and not have their children forced to believe in evolution-creation. I say evolution-creation, because evolution theory has some intrinsic points which hold some validity and should not be discarded.
I put it out like this one time:
Maybe God created this world and every thing and function on it. Then he created a language through which we could understand it. That language is science.
June 3rd, 2005 at 1:29 pm
The above mush illustrates a main problem in this issue : ignorance of basic fact.
1. A “theory”, as a scientic term, does not mean speculation, supposition or guesswork. It differs from a “law” in that a theory explains a series of related observations, whereas a “law” explains a single phenomenon. BOTH are proveable and have been accepted by the scientific community. “Faith”, i.e. creationism, is a religious ideology accepted at face value, untestable, and is impervious to challange. Accordingly, it is valueless as a means of inquiry.
2. The age of the earth is demonstrated by the convergence of a number of different radiometric methods which unmistakably date the essential elements to billions of years. (See for example Uranium 238 or Potassium/Argon dating).
And at a range up to 50,000 years, Carbon 14 dating establishes human activity at dates far earlier than would be possible with the creationists’ notions of a young earth.
3. The comments on sediment layers are clearly absurd - the earth is not a jar filled with water and could not be shaken up and down in order to obscure the layering of sediment. And it wouldn’t apply to layers in ice cores in any case.
Teaching evolution does not “force” a belief any more than teaching that the Earth revolves around the Sun does. Both are science, and only science belongs in a science class.
November 25th, 2006 at 8:24 am
[…] robespierrette (robespierrette) wrote,@ 2005-05-15 20:13:00 Current mood: congested Current music:The Incredibles Colds, Costumes and Comment on Kansas Nora and I both have the ongoing cold-ick thing. James had it too, but now he’s taken it off to Florida with him. Hopefully, he won’t give it to the great-grandparents. . .I’ve finished Nora’s 18th C. gown, and though she’s all excited to wear a pretty dress to “see the Pirates”, she’s suddenly decided the dress should be red. It is, oh yes, light green! I’ve started on James’ shirt, and I’ve made adjustments to the pattern for his pants. I’m finding that, although the patterns I bought are a great help, none of them is quite the size advertised - I had to add about 2″ in circumference to Nora’s bodice, which was supposed to be a size 4/5 (she wears a 3), and the cutting instructions for a men’s shirt, chest size 42/44, had about a 16″ neck (that was not gonna work!)And here’s a link to a refreshing piece on why people in Kansas should be the last people sitting around trying to refute the Theory of Evolution. It’s got cool pictures of Mesozoic sea-monsters, too!(Post a new comment)colds kajafoglio 2005-05-16 05:50 pm UTC (link) Gah. We’re all sick over here, too. Phil won’t even get out of bed, and that’s pretty odd for him. I hope you feel better soon.(Reply to this) […]
December 29th, 2006 at 1:34 am
[…] Me Please God, Make Me a Stone - LinksDaily KosMade of PlasticInternet Movie DatabaseJohn WesleyPorcupine TreeTelevision Without Pity December 2006 12 3456789 10111213141516 17181920212223 24252627282930 31 Make them stop. They’re everywhere.Every city, every house, every room, they’re all inside me. I can hear them all, and they’re saying nothing! Please God, make me a stone! Previous | Memories | Next cereselle 16 May 2005 @ 04:00 pm I’m not even that interested in paleontology, but hanging out with maureenlycaon has made me notice stuff more. Plus, the intelligent design theorists are making me twitch. Not that I don’t believe in a Creator. I do. But it’s belief, not verified fact. I also believe that science is the study of verifiable facts. Of which evolution is one. So, yeah. No teaching beliefs in classes that are supposed to be limited to fact.Anyway, this blog post has a lyrical take on the ID trial going on in Kansas right now. 3 comments | Leave a comment ( Post a new comment ) muse_neko on May 16th, 2005 01:53 pm (UTC) Fangirl with me sometime about paleontology. I may scare you though. Just so you’re warned. ^____~ (Reply) (Thread) (Link) maureenlycaon on May 16th, 2005 07:37 pm (UTC) Fangirl me, too? I post about this stuff way too often.
(Reply) (Parent) (Link) maureenlycaon on May 16th, 2005 07:36 pm (UTC) I live to corrupt others. 
Seriously, I’m delighted my passion for this stuff has aroused your interest instead of turning you off. I’ve had my disagreements with PZ Myers, but he does write some truly wonderful, moving essays. (Reply) (Link) […]
November 14th, 2007 at 9:39 am
[…] This is how Guido has performed in 6685 battles: (#242) # Won: 4474 (67%) # Lost: 1696 (25%) # Drawn: 515 (8%) Palentology, chalk, earth’s age, and dinosaur bones. Niobrara - nice lead from Mike Cohen I’m still waiting for some questions and answers from my interview questions. Hong Kong’s Bun-Snatching Contest Revived […]