The wheels on the bus go...

'round and round, round and round. Just like the earth goes round the sun. This week the air felt clearer as if a weight had been lifted and the future once again bright. I was wondering what in the world many of us bloggers will write about now that our favourite target has retired to his ranch in Texas, when the light shone down and gave me a sign:

THERE'S PROBABLY NO GOD
NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE


What started as a little British story more than half a year ago, then spread to the continent has made the jump across the pond. That's right, it's the atheist bus campaign. In a two pronged attack the British movement is taking hold alongside an American incarnation. The nation that has spent so much energy trying to spread her beliefs across the globe finally seems to be willing to take some lessons from the rest of the world.

Could it be that the land of free and the home of the brave is once again ready to put science before the bible? While the first signs out of the new Obama administration are positive, there's still many reasons to fear the fundamentalists (I mean the scary kind, the Christians). Watching the Obama inauguration, not only did we have to listen to Rick Warren's invocation, one had to hear the g word uttered far too many times for comfort. However, there was a tiny crack in the religious armor that appeared with Obama's words: "For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." That's right, even non-believers are citizens!

Two things flew in under the radar last week. One, the Texas Board of Education tentatively adopted new teaching standards that would make it more difficult to teach creationism in Lone Star state schools in an 8 to 7 vote. Even more importantly, President Obama lifted the ban on US funding for international organisations that offer advice or perform abortions, hoping to ease the suffering of millions of women worldwide. In a move that is sure to piss off a boatload of fundamentalists, he quietly rescinded what had become known as the "global gag order"- not the comedy kind of gag, the one where if you so much as think the word abortion, you lose your funding from the US government. Reagan created it, Clinton repealed it, Bush re-instated it and now Obama has continued the ping-pong rally between knowledge and faith. In fact, much like a mirror-image of Obama, Dubya re-instated the law in his first working day as president. After a campaign in which he said, "If we're an arrogant nation, they'll resent us...If we're a humble nation but strong, they'll welcome us. We've got to be humble and yet project strength in a way that promotes freedom." Then upon taking office, his first executive order imposed his way of thinking, the morality of the Christian Right, on the world. Of course, these were more innocent times, before the US was at war and there were more important things to worry about: (Get to about 1:20)

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Yes, before 9/11 my friends, check out the date, June 14, 2001, ahh, those we're the days. One of the new president's biggest challenges is going to be overturning the ignorance that the Bush administration propagated and return his nation to the path of science.

Unlike the signing of the order to close Gitmo, this repeal was low-key. This follows the inauguration ceremony which featured a religious tightrope act by Obama involving the above mentioned Warren and the liberal appeasing invitation to Gene Robinson, the openly homosexual Episcopalian bishop. Someone from outside of America wouldn't understand the controversy surrounding the words "so help me G(g)od". The same could be said of the controversies around the Reverends Jeremiah Wright, Rod Parsley and John Hagee stories, strange doings in a strange land. Of course keeping people stupid has its advantages, especially for the big corporations, particularly big oil. A little learning might make us question why a nation would want to continue feeding a habit that directly supports and created the people who wants to destroy them. The only reason to deny that climate change is possibly created by mankind's actions and thereby avoid doing anything about it is the religious answer. Only God has the power to change the world, little ol' us couldn't possibly do any harm. They miss the point. Whether or not climate change is a dire threat, the solutions to it is primarily an energy problem. Reducing pollution is an energy problem, concerns about the global oil supply is an energy problem, reducing dependence on foreign oil is an energy problem, reducing the trade deficit is an energy problem, improving national security is, you guessed it, an energy problem.

Maybe we should capitalize the word Science. The window of opportunity is closing for America to change its ways, to become energy independent through smart investment in Science. Even one of the American dollar oil fed creation of Abu Dhabi is creating a zero-carbon city, heck it won't even have any cars, as the emirate can foresee a time when alternative energy is king. Yet, mention CO2 reduction as a good idea to a fundamentalist and the same old myths to protect their right to continue supporting the enemy in the 'war on terror' through the continued reliance on black gold spew forth. Maybe we should ask a Bulgarian if they think it's a good idea to continue to rely on Russian gas anymore. At a time when more effort needs to be focused on investing in education, specifically real Science, we shouldn't be wasting our energy arguing about whether or not intelligent design should be taught alongside evolution or if women should have access to all possible health information. It didn't seem to matter when it was far more important to get into business school and someday work on Wall Street, become a Master of the Universe by inventing a new financial derivative. The true Masters of the next century need to be the Science nerds who invent things we can use and once put a man on the moon. This time the work needs to be done closer to home, from the $1.6 trillion in needed infrastructure to the power grid to the means of producing that power. Time will tell if America can be guided off its course toward ignorance and hate, but reaffirming the division between church and state is a good place to start.

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Your Cousin's a Platypus

Yes indeed, somewhere in your family tree there's a platypus. OK, you might have to go back a few years, but there's one there somewhere near the end of one of those branches. Yes, about 165 million years ago the platypus branched off the same mammalian path that we derived from. Go back a little further and you'll find a few reptiles as well that share some genes with you and me. The funny thing about the platypus though is that they kept a few more of the traits of their reptilian cousins, they lay eggs for instance, making it one of only two monotremes (egg laying mammals) in the world. However, like other mammals, it has fur and produces milk, although here again is another oddity, they lack nipples. The males also possess venomous spurs on their hind legs that are loaded with a venom so potent it can kill a dog. All of these eccentricities can be studied to determine when and maybe even why so many of our features evolved.

I love imaging a creationist, or ID (intelligent design) believer, reading these lines, face going red, blood pressure skyrocketing. NO! It was bad enough when science tried to tell them that we are related to monkeys, but a platypus? One of nature's oddest creatures, seemingly a random mixture of spare parts left over from a beaver, a duck, a lizard and maybe even a mole, has had it's genome decoded as reported in the journal Nature. Of course, it's just another piece of the evolutionary puzzle to aid the study of human evolution which will help scientists in innumerable areas, but particularly the development of the immune, nervous and reproductive systems. While scientists are hard at work with their latest scientific propaganda coup, I'm sure the ID folks will be hard at work with building another museum in the States to show their view of the world.

I may be getting a little ahead of myself here. If you are a European reading this, or for that matter, from almost anywhere else in the world besides the US, you might be unaware of the fact that there is a controversy over whether or not we are all here due to evolution. While evolution is known as a theory, it is one of the most solid theories yet proposed, with enough scientific data supporting it to sink a battleship. Yet, there is a hardcore group of people who believe that ID should be taught alongside the theory of evolution to children in biology class. What exactly is ID though? Many of the proponents of the idea go to great lengths to separate it from creationism. Their basic argument being that whereas creationism "typically starts with a religious text and tries to see how the findings of science can be reconciled to it. Intelligent design starts with the empirical evidence of nature and seeks to ascertain what inferences can be drawn from that evidence". They (IDers) try to present their idea as scientific method, a four-step process involving observations, hypothesis, experiments, and conclusion. Intelligent design begins with the observation that intelligent agents produce complex and specified information (CSI). Design theorists hypothesize that if a natural object was designed, it will contain high levels of CSI. Scientists then perform experimental tests upon natural objects to determine if they contain complex and specified information. One easily testable form of CSI is irreducible complexity, which can be discovered by experimentally reverse-engineering biological structures to see if they require all of their parts to function. When ID researchers find irreducible complexity in biology, they conclude that such structures were designed. In other words because there is complexity, it must be designed, the old burden of proof argument, whatever has not been proved false, must be true. Unfortunately for them absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Before you laugh these people off, you must consider the forces that are behind this movement. They have taken their case of teaching ID in schools all the way to the Supreme Court in the US, where fortunately they failed, but unfortunately will try again. They have produced a movie, one that I am loathe to advertise here, but one that you should know exists, as many people will see the documentary style and take it as fact. It is called Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Fortunately there are many honest scientists out there who are working to counter the lies that these people are setting forth. Among it's fear mongering lies, the movie puts much of the responsibility for the holocaust on Darwin's theory. Also, in case you missed it, there is the Creation Museum, located somewhere in the wilds of Kentucky. Preparing to celebrate their first year anniversary, this $27 million "museum" presents the history of the world through a literal interpretation of the bible. In this museum dinosaurs exist together with people and scenes from the bible are portrayed as fact, no not metaphors, fact. Lastly, I'd like to remind all of you what happened when the question of whether or not the Republican candidates for the presidency of the US of A believed in evolution was posed:

Back in the real world, the scientists compared the platypus genome with human, mouse, dog, opossum and chicken genomes and found that the platypus shares 82 percent of its genes with these animals. Comparing us with the platypus means that we can say something about our common ancestor, which was one of the earliest mammals, so that means that we can ask questions about what happened to make us mammals. When the platypus was first brought back to England, many people thought it was a hoax, that there was no way it was a real animal, of course science proved them wrong. Today, I think most people would also view the ideas and beliefs being put forward by the Christian right as some kind of joke but therein lies the danger. If we don't stay on our guard, not only could we lose the knowledge gained from evolutionary theory in the past 150 years, but you never know, the world could go flat again.