Colbert Report - Yahweh or No Way - The Blues Brothers & Glenn Beck

Stephen Colbert jokes about how the Vatican newspaper endorses "The Blues Brothers".

When Jake and Elwood Blues, the protagonists in John Landis' cult classic "The Blues Brothers," claimed they were on a mission from God, the Catholic Church apparently took them at their word.

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Selective creationists

Some interesting, if terrifying statistics from the Why Evolution Is True website.


This flashy graph has already been posted on Pharyngula, but I thought I’d echo P. Z.’s sentiments. This graph comes from a survey of high school biology teachers published in PLoS Biology in 2008 (download is free). The teachers were asked about their personal beliefs about human origins (click to enlarge):


Only a tad more than one in four teachers really accepts evolution as scientists conceive of it: a naturalistic process undirected by divine beings. Nearly one in two teachers thinks that humans evolved but that God guided the process.

Can we count those 48% of “guided-by-Godders” 0n our side? I agree with P. Z.: the answer is NO. Yes, they do accept that our species changed genetically over time, but they see God as having pulled the strings. That’s not the way evolution works. The graph labels these 48% as believers in intelligent design, and that’s exactly what they are, for they see God as nudging human evolution toward some preconceived goal. We’re designed. These people are creationists: selective creationists.

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Chew on this: thank cooking for your big brain

THE French have elevated it to an art form, and even the British have got better at it - but chimps can't cook at all. According to one controversial evolutionary theory, early humans developed a taste for cooked food around 2 million years ago, and this set in motion a series of changes that made us utterly different from any other animal.

Now the proponents of the cooked-food hypothesis are presenting fresh evidence in support of the idea - and it all comes down to how you chew.

The theory, championed by Richard Wrangham at Harvard University, has divided palaeoanthropologists. In an attempt to convince the doubters, Wrangham and his colleagues have been amassing empirical evidence, including evolutionary adaptations consistent with a diet of heated food, such as the small size of our guts.

At the Evolution 2010 conference in Portland, Oregon, at the end of June, Christopher Organ of Harvard and Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, presented what he and Wrangham say is the best evidence yet that we are adapted to eating cooked food, and that this is the result of events that occurred early on in human evolution.

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The Age of Stupid: War on Resources

Sent onto me by my brothers girlfriend, these are some interesting little clips from a doco called The Age of Stupid.

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TED: Carl Safina - The oil spill's unseen culprits, victims

The Gulf oil spill dwarfs comprehension, but we know this much: it's bad. Carl Safina scrapes out the facts in this blood-boiling cross-examination, arguing that the consequences will stretch far beyond the Gulf -- and many so-called solutions are making the situation worse.

Carl Safina
Carl Safina's writing explores the scientific, moral and social dimensions of our relationship with nature.

Was our universe born inside a black hole in another universe?

The current explanation of the universe's origins relies on clumsy assumptions and can't explain most subatomic particles. A small tweak to general relativity solves these problems - and seemingly proves the universe must have come from a black hole elsewhere.

As it stands right now, the explanation for the universe's beginnings is built around a combination of Einstein's general relativity and observation of the ancient universe. Mixing these two theories together creates some problems - for instance, the universe is impossibly large according to its current rate of expansion, so astrophysicists have to invoke the idea of inflation, in which the early universe expanded at a tremendous rate within the first second after the Big Bang.

General relativity, however, can't explain inflation, so another theory is required to account for it. There's nothing technically wrong with that, but it's an inelegant solution, and physicists tend to prefer an all-encompassing explanation to a bunch of piecemeal solutions. That's not the only issue with the current explanation - it can't deal with many properties of subatomic particles, consigning them entirely to the realm of quantum mechanics.

Nikodem Poplawski of Indiana University thinks solving the latter problem can also solve the former, and that's just the start of the craziness. In a new paper, he explains that the standard version of general relativity totally ignores the intrinsic momentum of subatomic particles like protons and neutrons, but a modified version known as the Einstein-Cartan-Kibble-Sciama theory of gravity solves that problem. The theory states these particles interact repulsively, creating tiny amounts of a force called torsion.

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Fossil links humans and monkeys

Researchers have discovered the skull of a 29 million-year-old animal that could be a common ancestor of Old World monkeys and apes, including humans.

It indicates that apes and Old World monkeys diverged millions of years later than previously thought, say the scientists.

The discovery was made in Saudi Arabia by researchers from the University of Michigan.

They described the primate, Saadanius hijazensis, in the journal Nature.

Dr William Sanders from the University of Michigan, who led the research, said this was "an extraordinary find".

The skull of this previously unknown species had some features that are shared by Old World monkeys and apes, including humans, today.

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