OoS: Happy Anniversary!

The Origin of Species is 150 years young today.

Read it, and other works by Darwin at Gutenberg.
The Panda's Thumb links to a few essays in honour of OoS.

Image from here.

Man, now Korea has a creationism centre?

The one in Kentucky is sickening enough on it's own and, as a Canadian, I cannot look down on the Americans because we now have one in Alberta.

I have to say I didn't expect to read about, "the recent opening of the Gyeonggi Creation Center (GCC), located in Ansan, Gyeonggi Province."

Here is more:

``In Seoul, I understand there is a new exciting initiative where some 15 new centers are coming up. It is an incredible endeavor and one that the world will be watching closely. I don't know of another city planning a project of this scale,'' Caro said.

Oh, wait a minute...

The center offers an art residency program to support creative work and research by local and foreign artists.

``GCC acts as a platform to gather artists from all over the world for international exchange, to share a nomadic spirit, and to collectively engage and cultivate creative synergy among artists of various genres as an experimental and progressive contemporary art center,'' the organizers said, in a statement.

Sorry about that. Good luck, you guys.

Happy Darwin Day!

Photo from Darwinday.org

The discoverer of evolution would have been 200 today.

Darwinday.org claims that Feb 12 won't start for 19 more hours, which is a little US-centric, I think. On the other hand, he was born in England, and it isn't Feb 12 there yet.

Darwinday also lists an event in Seoul, at zenitum at 7:00pm

Happy Darwin Day Celebration with Interactive Arts ( Public )

Date and Time: 2009-02-12 19:00:00

Event Website: http://www.zenitum.com

Activities:
Darwin day celebration party with Interactive Arts homage for Darwin's GREAT WORKS.

Address:
627-1, Yeoksam-dong, Gangnam-gu
Seoul/Seoul 135-908 SOUTH KOREA

Sponsor: Zenitum, Inc.

Contact: Albert Kim
Email: albertk@zenitum.com
Phone: 011-229-5083

...but the website doesn't have anything listed yet. I guess you should just go knock on the door this evening.

Darwin Day events in Seoul

D-14

From the Dong-a Ilbo (September of last year)

"Korea will also hold a series of commemorative exhibitions and publications. The Darwin Forum, consisting of philosophers and biologists, is revising the translation of Darwin’s three classics, “The Origin of Species,” “The Descent of Man,” and “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.”

Gwacheon National Science Museum, which opens Nov. 14, will hold a Darwin exhibition to commemorate its opening in Gyeonggi Province. The event will be jointly held with Dong-A Science and display Darwin’s publications and fossils he collected for six months."

I am not sure if the museum will show the fossil for six months or it is a display of fossils Darwin himself collected over the course of six months. Probably the former.

MInd Mapping Evolution

Click to bigify
D-25!

A few years ago, I made an ecology textbook for ESL students at the Minjok camp for middle school students. I hope to have an evolution text ready for summer camp and it is my intention to learn (and teach, or, at least, use) mindmaps as an informal experiment to see how well students remember the material.

Darwin Day is coming!

(From The BBC 'Digi-magazine, via the Loom)

In fact, I have trouble navigating the online magazine and I hope the downloaded version works better.

D-26!

I hunted for a countdown widget but many in the Blogger directory were broken and the few I tried from off-site didn't work.

In less than a month, it will be Darwin's birthday. If he were alive now, he would be hailed as the most amazing man ever - nobody else is 200 years old!

That aside, in his time, he was one of the most famous men alive. Even before he published On the Origin of Species, he was well known from his Beagle travel diaries and his scientific work.

John Wilkins, on his blog, Evolving Thoughts, reminds us, however, that we should not deify Darwin. He was a remarkable man, but evolution has changed greatly since his time.

There are many Darwin day events in the US and elsewhere, including one in Yeoksam Dong in Seoul. It appears to be organized by a computer company and I am not sure what is planned. I will contact them and give further news. The contact website, currently with no Darwin Day information, is Zenitum.

Below are two images of the man. The first shows the currently iconic Darwin, old and bearded, while the second shows him as he likely appeared during his voyages as a young man and is from the Darwin Day website, linked above..



Oh, my understanding that America's first Jewish president was born on the same day. C'mon, Abraham is a Jewish name, isn't it? It was funny when Meathead said it on Archie Bunker.

"In one famous episode in the TV sitcom "All in the Family," Archie Bunker said that Jews had a secret way of identifying each other -- they changed to Anglo last names but kept their Jewish first names. Then Meathead piped up with another example, "Abraham Lincoln," and Edith responded, "I didn't know Lincoln was Jewish."

(im from missouri)

Church of England apologizes to Charles Darwin

The Daily Mail uses the word ludicrous in the title of its article. The Vatican apologized to Galileo some time ago so it may be ludicrous but not unique. I might use the word ludicrous when describing the actions of religious groups but this is at least a step in the right direction.

Dr Brown writes: ‘People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and Churches are no exception. When a big new idea emerges that changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights.

‘The Church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy and has since realised its error. Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

'So it is important to think again about Darwin’s impact on religious thinking, then and now.’

Dr Brown argues that there is nothing incompatible between the scientific theories adopted by Darwin and Christian teaching.

In using "the Church" to describe the offender with regards to Galileo and Darwin, does the Church of England trace RC history as it's own until they split?

In reading the article, I think the goal of the apology was not to make Mathhew Chapman or the other descendents of Darwin feel better (although the Church would not be displeased with that outcome) but to show opposition to creationist Christians. Possibly after being an upstart youngster, the Anglicans want to be an elder statesmen to the modern anti-science upstarts.

Don't trust reason

I intend to focus more closely on issues relating to Gangwondo and Korea in the future, but this collage greatly amused me. Thanks to the catshark.

More remarkable Korean research in the international news

An American Evolution blog has made the news here for its fisking of Hwangian Research concerning mitchondria by a Korean scientist (and an apparently Egyptian colleague - this link is to a screen shot of the Korean article. The words are a little blurred but I think it says Warda, the second author, is from Egypt). The newspaper is not named at Pharyngula.

UPDATED: Here is the Korean newspaper page, the Hangyoreh.

Pharyngula (the Evolution blog) author Myers generally accepted the research until these few sentences caught his eye:

This might be true, but we still need to know the secret behind this disciplined organized wisdom. We realize so far that mitochondria could be the link between the body and this preserved wisdom of the soul devoted to guaranteeing life.

Mitochondria are remarkable organelles but one seldom finds research or reference to souls in biological reports (or chemistry reports or Physics reports...)

The article has also been criticized for plagiarism (BTW, check out Joe Seoul Man on the subject).

The Korean author is Han Jin of FIRST Mitochondrial Resarch Group, Inje University, Busan

The article has been removed from the journal's website.

Dr. Han has responded directly to Pharyngula but did not particularly clear things up.

Someone on the internet is wrong!

I've been involved in a fairly cordial discussion of creationism vs evolution - it plays out in the comments of my Darwin Day of Feb 12.

How engrossing or fascinating has it been (for me anyway- you are likely to find it boring)? I think this comic perfectly describes the situation.

Darwin Day and SermonAudio

The photo is from Washington university. Since the URL is on the photo, I hope I can use it.
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A commenter, for no good reason, suggested I visit SermonAudio (I discuss religion frequently, so there is good reason to mention such a site, but this was a post about sharing soup, not the body of Christ or Loaves and Fishes or the like). The link was broken but I looked around while I was there. I am uninterested in theological issues in general, but searched for evolution and found a few sermons on the subject.

EDIT: The link was probably fine. Comments cannot exceed a certain number of characters or they get cut off. I could probably read it from inside Blogger and I may do so. My commenter and I need to use 'tinyurl.com' to make the address fit on the blogger comment page.

February 12th is Darwin Day. Charles Darwin (and Abraham Lincoln) were born one hundred and ninety-nine years ago.

I listened to one sermon and considered trying to tear it apart, as a good atheist should, but in honour of Darwin Day, let me instead go over the sermon and point out one particular group of errors in it: evolution is not purely atheistic.

I started listening, intending to hear the whole thing before commenting or the putting finger to keyboard but I felt I wouldn't be able to take another time through. I started writing quotes then started listing where the quotes were as I wrote them down. The first few quotes, then, have no time-stamp, but later ones do.

Dr. Griswold died in 1982 and I don't know when these recordings were made. I still find them relevant because the site felt they were relevant, posting them in 2004. The claims and points of the sermon are similar to those that could be found today. The final third is mostly about the evolutionistic worldview -which he thinks is the same as an atheistic worldview. As I am not defending atheism today, I left that part out.

Selected quotes from the sermon with my commentary in blue:

"Maybe the most subtle, and the dangerous satanic forces to undermine [Christianity] is evolution."

Without question as a believer, as a Christian, we accept what the bible says on the subject about creation.

[scientists] brag about their belief in evolution, not realizing that they are placing their faith in religious and philosophical principles and not in scientific fact.

They are opposed. You can not believe in both.

"The most logical and reasonable place to deal with an atheistic, evolutionary worldview is in the pulpit."

The evolutionary worldview is a non-theistic conception of reality.

Let's start here: evolutionary biologists reference God in their observations just as frequently as other scientists do (which is to say, not at all). I wanted to mention a situation here where a mathematician was explaining his calculations to royalty, but I can't find the details online, I don't remember enough of the story to search for it. Anyway, the King said something like, "you forgot to add God into your explanation", whereupon the mathematician replied, "God wasn't necessary".

Science cannot disprove God. It may be able to disprove certain specific claims made regarding a deity but not against the idea of God. Even disproving specific claims is challenging.

In 2005, there was a trial in Dover, Pennsylvania about Intelligent Design. In it, Michael Behe suggested an experiment that could test his claims for ID. He never actually performed the experiment.

The idea was to culture a group of flagellum-less bacteria and hold them in conditions that would encourage them to evolve flagella. The problem with this experiment is in interpreting any results. Let's see: No flagella appear- that could mean that evolution did not work or that flagella were evolving but the intelligent designer caused a miracle and removed the flagella. Flagella appear - either they evolved or the designer felt they needed them and created flagella for the bacteria. If we accept that no one can know the mind of God or that God works in mysterious ways, no result in such an experiment is meaningful. (Thank you, Richard B. Hoppe )

I suppose that scientists can (and do) argue that no flood of the proportions necessary for Noah occurred. That event might be argued for or against, but if God created such a flood and hid the evidence, we will never know.

9:30 Wherever evolutionists give any place to God, it is an abstract, cosmic mind, or cosmic hand that exploded an egg that came out to be the universes of the world.

A common error for creationists; he is mistaking evolution for all of science – here wants to argue against the Big Bang – that’s the realm of physicists, not biologists. I cheerfully accept his “…the universes of the world” remark – everyone makes little slips and such. Remember, my choice to not comment negatively means you can’t comment negatively on whatever spelling errors and non-content-related problems are found here!

12:___ But wherever evolutionism is accepted the God of the bible, biblical theism must of necessity and logic and philosophically be rejected. God must be eliminated from man's understanding of the world. But, you say, isn't that the scientific view. My dear friends, I do not know of a more loaded world view than evolution.

Any knowledgeable and reasonable evolutionist knows that he operates on presuppositions. That is presuppositions that he accepts by faith which cannot be proven scientifically.

16:25 - Some slime or mud became protoplasm...

Not exactly evolution. Abiogenesis in some form (God’s hand would be fine) had to occur before evolution had material to work on.

17:00 teachers act like red-seated baboons and its hard not to imagine that they might not have evolved from one.

I am reminded of Huxley and Bishop Wilberforce:

…the Bishop rose, and in a light scoffing tone, florid and he assured us there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words [Kwandongbrian says legend has reshaped the words so often that I don’t know what he said exactly, but it boiled down to “If you use such a cheap debating technique, I would rather have a monkey than a Bishop for a father”]

17:45 The evolutionary worldview is not only non-theistic, ruling out god, but it is an irrational conception of reality. Irrational.

If a scientist should arise on Monday morning, dress himself, drive to his laboratory, or to his university chair, or to his theological field, or whatever endeavour in the name of science and operate on the principles of his evolutionary pre-supposition, he would take his clothes off, go back to bed, take an overdose of sleeping pills and go to Hell. Why? Because, with his concept of reality, the world is irrational. It was only by chance, by luck, that the sun came up. He goes down to that laboratory, its only by chance that it'll be there. And its only by chance that the mathematical formula he used to solve yesterday won't work today.

Here is where I am pissed off. A man totally ignorant of science should be more carefully making arguments based on scientific research.

The main point of this post is to correct creationists on this matter: evolutionists can be religious. See more after the quoted section.

[he is still talking about evolutionary pre-suppositions]...if he is a physician, the prescription he writes today that was usable for a man yesterday for a certain illness will kill him dead: because it is an irrational universe. In a universe without God, without rationality, things will go wild.

Again, I don’t know when this sermon was first given. When did scientists and physicians learn about evolved immunity resistance? Quinine was once an anti-malarial drug. Now it has no effect. I still take frequent quinine supplements in a juniper-berry distillation, just in case. They make me feel better; I guess you could call them a ‘tonic’ or some such thing. Anyway, this is a crazy-bad example.

21:00 presupposition ...blind laws that can not think, they might not know they are laws, and so they might not operate.

“They might not know they are laws so they might not operate.” A wonderful argument.

Here ends the quoted section

There were a few things later in the sermon I wanted to comment on. Probability. It doesn’t directly relate to my main point but creationists misuse probability so much that I must mention it.

Dr. Griswold states that a scientist stated that for humans to evolve from the first living cells was very unlikely. The odds against it were two billion to one. I have heard other, much higher numbers and always the point is to show that evolution couldn’t have happened.

Well, outside my apartment building are a row of cars. Let’s look at ten of them. Each car has a four digit license plate (there is another set of digits and a Korean syllable, but I will leave them out as I don’t know the bounds of those terms). Forty digits then. The odds of guessing, of predicting, what those forty digits are come out to one times ten to the fortieth power against. One followed by forty zeros.

Those odds are so bad that no one could ever guess them. No guess would ever be right. The odds of any forty digit number being right- well, it’s impossible.

Does that mean the ten parking spaces are empty? No. I could go down there and record those numbers and bring them back to my computer. Lets say they are 4,3,7,5,7,9,3,3,4,1,5,…..5. What are the odds of those numbers being right? One hundred percent. I am not predicting anything. It already happened.

Back to evolution, the scientist Dr. Griswold was quoting was not making a prediction at all. Things evolve, occasional catastrophes occur, and certain animals are given a lucky break. The weather is basically random, asteroid hits are random. Although Natural Selection is not random, it is affected by random occurances. There is no reason to expect people to be inevitably created by evolution. We are one possibility of, well, two billion, I guess.

Near the end of the sermon, Dr. Griswold again mistook evolutionists for atheists and atheists for bad people. He claimed Hitler was an evolutionist and that euthanasia was an evolutionist scheme. He apparently never heard of animal husbandry, which was ongoing long before Darwin and which was tied more tightly to these events than evolution (and was misused as well – I don’t want the animal husbandry people after me). Despite being a clergyman, I guess he never studied Martin Luther - the guy didn't like Jews much and Hitler didn't have to look outside of religion to invent an excuse for his monstrosities (I'm saying Hitler could have misused religion).

Dr. Griswold died more than twenty years ago. He could not have learned of the Clergy Letter Project, in which more than 11,000 Christian clergyfolk signed a letter accepting that evolution and Christianity and evolution are not in conflict and that evolution appears to be the best explanation for life’s diversity.

He did touch on theistic evolution at the end of the sermon, claiming that such a compromise was unacceptable. He is entitled to his view but this brings me back to my point of being unable to know the mind of God. The evidence is clear, the Earth is billions of years old, flowering plants occurred before bees and other pollinating insects did and there was no world-wide flood. There was also no Tower of Babel but I don’t know if that is, um, a bible myth, or a no bible myth.

The evidence is compelling: the bible, taken literally, and the evidence don’t match. Trying to claim that they do is only going to create atheists.

Happy Darwin Day, everyone!

Darwinday.org

transitional species between fish and moth

All those who doubt evolution, look on this 'fith' - a transitional species between FIsh and moTHs - and despair! (click to enlarge)
Six legs?-check.
Wide wings? Check!
If you've seen a moth through a window, you'll notice the eerie similarities. If the body were a little less chunky, you wouldn't know the difference (maybe the gills and fishmouth might bother you a bit, but not much).

More seriously, anyone know anything about this fish? It has two pair of pectoral fins which separates it from older fish families, like salmon and trout, but that still leaves a huge number of species to distinguish it from.

I apologise for the glare from the tank. I just noticed it at a sashimi restaurant by the bus stop and had to shoot it.

UPDATE: friends at the talk origins google group have identified it as a sea robin, or close relative, the Red Gunard. Thanks, Mel, Dana and John.

Altruism

Altruism, behavior that helps others to your detriment, has long been claimed as a refutation of evolution. It is claimed that evolution dictates or requires selfishness so if selfless behavior exists, there are problems with evolution.

Social animals, as I was taught, and have in some small part have observed, do indeed help each other sometimes for abstract or distant reward. Seagulls make an alarm cry when danger approaches, attracting attention to themselves. This behavior is advantageous because other gulls will perform the same activity at other times. Is this altruism?

On BBC4's "In Our Time" is another interesting podcast with academics discussing altruism. As the [in]famous Richard Dawkins is one of the speakers, I suspect altruism will be shown to, or at least claimed to, have evolution roots. The recording will be available starting this Thursday, for a week.

On an unrelated note, this week I start volunteering at a Sokcho church, teaching English.

Which radical religious group uses this image?

There are moderates as well as radicals in every group.
I don't mean to attack the more moderate members of this religious group but, WOW!
Religion of peace?
Thou shall not kill?
I don't want to link to them. The site's name is "answers in..." and often uses the initials, "AIG" -they don't sell any kind of insurance I would want to buy!


(Click on the image to expand)