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American bail bondsman
The NY Times reports:

Wayne Spath is a bail bondsman, which means he is an insurance salesman, a social worker, a lightly regulated law enforcement agent, a real estate appraiser — and a for-profit wing of the American justice system.

What he does, which is posting bail for people accused of crimes in exchange for a fee, is all but unknown in the rest of the world. In England, Canada and other countries, agreeing to pay a defendant’s bond in exchange for money is a crime akin to witness tampering or bribing a juror — a form of obstruction of justice. ...

Here as in many other areas of the law, the United States goes it alone. American law is, by international standards, a series of innovations and exceptions. From the central role played by juries in civil cases to the election of judges to punitive damages to the disproportionate number of people in prison, the United States has charted a distinctive and idiosyncratic legal path.

Bail is meant to make sure defendants show up for trial. It has ancient roots in English common law, which relied on sworn promises and on pledges of land or property from the defendants or their relatives to make sure they did not flee.

America’s open frontier and entrepreneurial spirit injected an innovation into the process: by the early 1800s, private businesses were allowed to post bail in exchange for payments from the defendants and the promise that they would hunt down the defendants and return them if they failed to appear.

Commercial bail bond companies dominate the pretrial release systems of only two nations, the United States and the Philippines.

The picture shows a young woman, with a baby in her arm, who owes her freedom to a low-life bail bondman. Only at the end of the article do we find out why she was in jail.

Kate Santana, a 20-year-old waitress, had spent eight days in jail when she found her way to Mr. Spath.

“Me and my husband got into a fight,” Ms. Santana explained, “and the cops were called and I was arrested because there was a bite mark on his shoulder.”

Mr. Spath took her $200 and posted her $2,000 bail. “I checked her criminal history out,” he said. “I found out she was a mother and really she shouldn’t be in jail.”

Isn't America great? The disreputable private bail bondsmen have more common sense than the district attorneys and judges. posted by Roger Schlafly at 19:12:26

 
Consumer spending dominates the economy
I just heard the NPR morning radio news say:

Consumer spending accounts for two-thirds of all economic activity.

A lot of others say the same thing, as if it means something. It is typically used to argue that consumer confidence must be kept high to avoid recession, or something like that.

The factoid makes people think that consumer spending is more important than business spending. But business spending is not that other third. Consumer spending is two thirds of GDP because GDP is defined to exclude business spending. posted by Roger Schlafly at 14:04:24

 
Deconstructing Gould
The Si Valley paper reports:

Famed Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould ...

But the late science historian has bequeathed to Stanford his priceless collection of books, papers and artifacts - a gift not only to the university but also to the public, which someday will be invited to visit the treasure trove.

With his gift, one of the 20th century's great thinkers will himself become the subject of a research project that will attempt to answer the question: Where did Gould find inspiration? ...

"We hope to deconstruct how he got his ideas," said Henry Lowood, curator for the History of Science & Technology Collection at Green Library. "It's reverse engineering." ...

Although Gould had a triple professorship at Harvard - in biology, geology and the history of science - the school was apparently not interested in the project, Lowood said.

Harvard has probably already deconstructed him. It's not that complicated. He was a Marxist kook who got academic praise only because he wrote politically correct leftist-atheist-evolutionist essays. He is more noted as a "science historian" than for any actual science he did. posted by Roger Schlafly at 09:27:24

 
The Preservation Predicament
Cornelia Dean writes:

Conservation organizations that work to preserve biologically rich landscapes are confronting a painful realization: In an era of climate change, many of their efforts may be insufficient or beside the point.

It is funny to see these folks get all confused when they discover that two of their politically correct ideologies are in conflict. posted by Roger Schlafly at 18:33:33

 
Questioning the health effects of cholesterol
Gary Taubes writes for the NY Times:

THE idea that cholesterol plays a key role in heart disease is so tightly woven into modern medical thinking that it is no longer considered open to question. This is the message that emerged all too clearly from the recent news that the drug Vytorin had fared no better in clinical trials than the statin therapy it was meant to supplant. ...

Because medical authorities have always approached the cholesterol hypothesis as a public health issue, rather than as a scientific one, we’re repeatedly reminded that it shouldn’t be questioned. Heart attacks kill hundreds of thousands of Americans every year, statin therapy can save lives, and skepticism might be perceived as a reason to delay action. So let’s just trust our assumptions, get people to change their diets and put high-risk people on statins and other cholesterol-lowering drugs.

Science, however, suggests a different approach: test the hypothesis rigorously and see if it survives. If the evidence continues to challenge the role of cholesterol, then rethink it, without preconceptions, and consider what these other pathways in cardiovascular disease are implying about cause and prevention. A different hypothesis may turn out to fit the facts better, and one day help prevent considerably more deaths.

Conventional wisdom has been that high dietary fat causing high blood cholesterol, which in turn causes heart attacks. But that is too simplistic as human cholesterol is divided between the bad LDL which seems to cause heart disease, and the good HDL which seems to prevent it. So then the story was that heart risks are raised by eating saturated fats that raise LDL, and lowered by taking LDL-lowering drugs. Some some of those drugs seem to help and some don't. The trans-fats that used to be in all the margarines are now seen as worse than the saturated fats in butter. In many people, blood cholesterol seems to have nothing to do with dietary cholesterol.

I've had people tell me all my life that I have an unhealthy diet high in saturated fats and that I will die young from a heart attack. And yet I have a low LDL and a high HDL. I would not be surprised at all if it turns out that most of the mainstream medical advice about diet has been wrong.

The best drugs for lowering cholesterol and preventing heart attacks are the statins like Lipitor, but the NY Times reports:

In studies of middle-aged men with cardiovascular disease, statin users were less likely to die than those who were given a placebo.

But many statin users don’t have established heart disease; they simply have high cholesterol. For healthy men, for women with or without heart disease and for people over 70, there is little evidence, if any, that taking a statin will make a meaningful difference in how long they live.

Joe writes:

The funniest thing about cholesterol is "total cholesterol." I have never understood what that number is for. Is a total of 150 good or bad? It might be unbelievably good or unbelievably bad. Why would you ever add good and bad stuff together to get one number?

As I understand it, total cholesterol is the easiest thing to measure. They don't measure LDL directly; they measure HDL and deduce LDL from the HDL and the total. And the total cholesterol is not just LDL+HDL. Close, but not exactly. I don't know whether that is because there is some other kind of cholesterol or what. posted by Roger Schlafly at 09:31:47

 
Personal music went digital went digital long before iTunes store
Randall Stross reports for the NY Times:

The digitization of personal music collections began, however, only after the right combination of software and hardware — iTunes Music Store and the iPod — arrived.

The iTunes Music Store arrived in 2003. Personal music went digital about 20 years earlier.

I don't know how reporters could write such nonsense. Hardly anyone under the age of 40 has ever even owned any non-digital music.

Digital music first got popular when compact discs hit the market in 1982. In a few years, people were using personal computers for digital music. The first portable mp3 players hit the market in 1998. In 1999, Diamond Rio won a big case against the RIAA (recording industry), annd Napster got wildly popular on college campuses. That combination was four years ahead of Apple in allowing people to have portable digital music collections. posted by Roger Schlafly at 23:05:36

 
Senate Looking at Endowments as Tuition Rises
If you are considering donating to your alma mater, read this NY Times article about how stingy colleges are with their endowments. They do not spend at the rate required by law for other tax-exempt foundations. They have more money than they know what to do with, and they can get away with charging huge tuitions whether they need them or not. posted by Roger Schlafly at 20:09:31

 
Using a symbol can be a hate crime
A Texas newspaper reports:

ALEXANDRIA, La. — A white man accused of driving past a group of black civil rights activists with two nooses dangling from the back of his pickup has been indicted on federal hate-crime and conspiracy charges, prosecutors said Thursday.

Jeremiah Munsen, 18, was arrested in September after driving past a crowd of people who had attended a civil rights march in Jena, about 40 miles northeast of Alexandria, police have said. The Jena march drew an estimated 20,000 protesters, and many stayed in surrounding cities, including Alexandria.

Putting a symbol on your car seems like free speech to me. posted by Roger Schlafly at 08:10:08

 
Leftist climate change denier
The kooky leftist Alexander Cockburn writes:

While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy.

The left has bought into environmental catastrophism because it thinks that if it can persuade the world that there is indeed a catastrophe, then somehow the emergency response will lead to positive developments in terms of social and environmental justice.

This is a fantasy. In truth, environmental catastrophism will, in fact it already has, play into the hands of sinister-as-always corporate interests. The nuclear industry is benefiting immeasurably from the current catastrophism. ...

More generally, climate catastrophism is leading to a re-emphasis of the powers of the advanced industrial world, through its various trade mechanisms, to penalise Third World countries.

His extreme leftist ideology clouds his judgment. In fact, there is conclusive proof that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. Atmospheric CO2 has grown steadily and in amounts directly attributable to the buring of fossil fuels. Furthermore, analysis of oxygen isotope has shown that the CO2 really did come from those fossil fuels. It is also a certainty that the extra CO2 has caused some warming, even if we don't know for sure how that warming compares with other warming and cooling factors.

The consequences of CO2 are subject to debate, of course. For several years the global warming nuts have told us that it causes more and worse hurricances. But a Florida newspaper reports:

Following in the footsteps of an earlier study, government scientists on Tuesday said warmer oceans should translate to fewer Atlantic hurricanes striking the United States.

The reason: As sea surface temperatures warm globally, sustained vertical wind shear increases. Wind shear makes it difficult for storms to form and grow.

posted by Roger Schlafly at 23:03:34

 
CD v digital music
Wired.com has this AP story:

LONDON (AP) -- Record companies' revenue from digital music sales rose 40 percent to $2.9 billion over the past year, but the growth is still failing to cover losses from collapse of international CD sales, the music industry's global trade body said Thursday. ...

The industry body said CD sales fell 11 percent between 2005 and 2006 and were likely to drop further in 2007. Digital music revenue has so far failed to make up for the decline - and is also showing signs of slowing, the IFPI said.

Somebody should tell these reporters that all CD music is digital!

The NY Times is just as bad:

LONDON — As consumers lose interest in compact discs and balk at paying for the digital alternatives, ...

But digital sales have yet to make up for the shortfall in sales of compact discs, ...

Every sale of a compact disc is a digital sale. The compact disc was invented about 25 years ago for the sole purpose of storing digital music. posted by Roger Schlafly at 12:06:02

 
Fighting steroids
Here is a really bad idea from Steven D. Levitt on his Freakonomics blog:

Aaron Zelinsky, a student at Yale Law School, recently proposed an interesting three-prong anti-steroid strategy for Major League Baseball:

1) An independent laboratory stores urine and blood samples for all players, and tests these blood samples 10 years, 20 years, and 30 years later using the most up-to-date technology available.

2) Player salaries are paid over a 30-year interval.

3) A player’s remaining salary would be voided entirely if a drug test ever came back positive.

I’m not sure about points 2 and 3, but there is no question that point 1 is essential to any serious attempt to combat the use of illegal performance enhancers. The state-of-the-art in performance enhancement is the best set of techniques that cannot be detected using current technology. So, by definition, the most sophisticated dopers will evade detection, unless they are unlucky or make a mistake.

The threat of future improvements in testing technology is the most potent weapon available in this fight, because the user can never know for certain that the doping he does today won’t be simple to detect a decade from now. Retrospective testing of samples attributed to Lance Armstrong suggest that he used E.P.O., which was not detectable at the time. The circumstances surrounding this test were sort of murky (the identification of the sample as Armstrong’s was indirect, and it was also unclear why these samples were being tested in the first place), so the Tour de France champion didn’t pay the price he would have if formal testing at later intervals had been a standard policy.

The Lance Armstrong example just illustrates the foolishness of the idea. Armstrong has rights to due process, and any attempt to punish him for 8-year-old blood samples will deny him those rights.

Do these same folks want to take away Gaylord Perry's pension if videotapes proves that he was throwing spitballs 30 years ago? The unfairness and maliciousness of these proposals is appalling. I say that sports authorities should try to catch petty cheaters if they can catch them in the act, but to forget about it otherwise. posted by Roger Schlafly at 09:09:19

 
Culture Affects How Brains Operate
Here is some new research:

It’s no secret culture influences your food preferences and taste in music. But now scientists say it impacts the hard-wiring of your brain.

New research shows that people from different cultures use their brains differently to solve basic perceptual tasks.

Neuroscientists Trey Hedden and John Gabrieli of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research asked Americans and East Asians to solve basic shape puzzles while in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. They found that both groups could successfully complete the tasks, but American brains had to work harder at relative judgments, while East Asian brains found absolute judgments more challenging.

I don't see where the research looked at cultural effects at all. Maybe Chinese brains work differently because of genes, or maybe culture. This study doesn't say. posted by Roger Schlafly at 16:25:55

 
Research claims to prove that evolution is not random
ScienceDaily reports:

According to Darwin’s theory of evolution, individuals in a species pass successful traits onto their offspring through a process called “deterministic inheritance.” Over multiple generations, advantageous developmental trends – such as the lengthening of the giraffe’s neck – occur.

An opposing theory says evolution takes place through randomly inherited and not necessarily advantageous changes. Using the giraffe example, there would not be a common neck-lengthening trend; some would develop long necks, while others would develop short ones.

Now, the findings of an international team of biologists demonstrate that evolution is not a random process, but rather occurs through the natural selection of successful traits. The collaborative study by researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Israel, the U.S, France and Germany is published in the November 2007 issue of Current Biology (vol. 17, pp. 1925-1937).

This is just nonsense. Darwin didn't say anything about deterministic inheritance. He knew nothing of genes. These arguments about whether evolution is random are just gibberish. Mutation is random. Inheritance of genes in individuals is random. Natural selection is a tautology.

Evolutionist Richard B. Hoppe tries to make sense out of the story, says that it "is at best confusingly incoherent". I say that this is another example of bad science, and low standard in the field of evolutionism. posted by Roger Schlafly at 08:39:59

 
String theorists win prize
The AAAS Science mag news reports:

Mathematician, Two Physicists Share Crafoord Prize
By Daniel Clery
ScienceNOW Daily News
17 January 2008

This year's Crafoord Prize, a sort of alternative Nobel, has been awarded to a mathematician and two physicists whose work ranges from the mathematics of string theory to the details of how black holes suck in matter. The mathematical half is shared by Maxim Kontsevich of the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS) in France and Edward Witten of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, for contributions inspired by modern theoretical physics. The astronomical half goes to Rashid Alievich Sunyaev of the Space Research Institute and the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Germany, for his work on black holes and neutron stars and on the structure of the cosmic background radiation.

No, not 1 mathematician and 2 physicists. The prize went to 2 mathematicians and 1 astronomer.

Witten is "the greatest theoretical physicist in the world." ...

Witten says he was "totally startled" to find that his achievements in mathematics had won attention rather than his physics.

He is trying to say that he really wanted to win a Nobel Prize in Physics for string theory. But that is never going to happen. String theory has totally failed to say anything of significance about the physical world.

Crafoord prizes are only given to those who cannot win Nobel prizes. posted by Roger Schlafly at 08:13:04

 
Questioning the candidates on science
Here is another silly AAAS Science mag editorial:

Given this new focus on religious disclosure, what does this U.S. election have to do with science? Everything. The candidates should be asked hard questions about science policy, including questions about how those positions reflect belief. What is your view about stem cell research, and does it relate to a view of the time at which human life begins? Have you examined the scientific evidence regarding the age of Earth? Can the process of organic evolution lead to the production of new species, and how? Are you able to look at data on past climates in search of inferences about the future of climate change?

Why not ask for evidence for black holes, quarks, dark matter, string theory, and extraterrestrial life? How about the efficacy of psychiatric meds, vitamin C, and cholesterol-lowering drugs?

Maybe one of these questions would illuminate whether a candidate is willing to reconsider his views based on scientific evidence. But why single out the age of the Earth? The obvious explanation is that it is a sneaky way of tricking politicians into repudiating the Bible.

I think that it would be better if politicians were asked scientific questions that actually had some bearing on what they might do in office. posted by Roger Schlafly at 07:58:59

 
More on the Pope
Here is more on the academics protesting the Pope:

The signatories of the letter said Benedict's presence would be "incongruous". They cited a speech he made at La Sapienza in 1990, while he was still a cardinal, in which he quoted the judgment of an Austrian philosopher of science who wrote that the church's trial of Galileo was "reasonable and fair".

The letter said: "These words offend and humiliate us." ...

The newspaper Il Giornale, which republished his 1990 speech, said the Pope had "expressed a different position" from that of the Austrian scholar Paul Feyerabend, "absolutely not adopting it as his own". The Vatican's own daily, L'Osservatore Romano, carried an article by the Jewish mathematician Giorgio Israel, in which he wrote that the Pope's address "could well be considered, by anyone who read it with a minimum of attention, as a defence of Galilean rationality against the scepticism and relativism of postmodern culture".

That Austrian philosopher of science, Paul Feyerabend, had some very wacky anti-science views, and yet he was treated as a very distinguished philosopher by major universities throughout his life. For example:

Feyerabend described science as being essentially anarchistic, obsessed with its own mythology, and as making claims to truth well beyond its actual capacity. He was especially indignant about the condescending attitudes of many scientists towards alternative traditions. For example, he thought that negative opinions about astrology and the effectivity of rain dances were not justified by scientific research, and dismissed the predominantly negative attitudes of scientists towards such phenomena as elitist or racist. ...

According to Feyerabend, new theories came to be accepted not because of their accord with scientific method, but because their supporters made use of any trick -- rational, rhetorical or ribald -- in order to advance their cause.

This is more more anti-science that anything the Pope has said. If the academic scientists are really so easily offended and humiliated, then they should complain about other academic profs like Feyerabend. posted by Roger Schlafly at 09:31:24

 
Cholesterol as a Danger Has Skeptics
The NY Times reports:

For decades, the theory that lowering cholesterol is always beneficial has been a core principle of cardiology. It has been accepted by doctors and used by drug makers to win quick approval for new medicines to reduce cholesterol.

But now some prominent cardiologists say the results of two recent clinical trials have raised serious questions about that theory — and the value of two widely used cholesterol-lowering medicines, Zetia and its sister drug, Vytorin. Other new cholesterol-fighting drugs, including one that Merck hopes to begin selling this year, may also require closer scrutiny, they say.

“The idea that you’re just going to lower LDL and people are going to get better, that’s too simplistic, much too simplistic,” said Dr. Eric J. Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute in La Jolla, Calif. LDL, or low-density lipoprotein, is the so-called bad cholesterol, in contrast to high-density lipoprotein, or HDL.

And dietary advice about cholesterol is often wrong also. Here is more on the subject. posted by Roger Schlafly at 21:56:53

 
Pope cannot speak at university
Some university scientists are censoring the Pope:

Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday cancelled a speech at Rome's La Sapienza university in the face of protests led by scientists opposed to a high-profile visit by the head of the Catholic Church to a secular setting. ...

One of the protesting professors, Carlo Cosmelli, told AFP: "Since the conviction of Galileo ... physicists are especially sensitive over interference by the Catholic Church in the scientific domain." ...

"The Church can no longer use pyres or corporal punishment," Cini said in the communist daily Il Manifesto. "Today it uses the Enlightenment's God of Reason as a Trojan horse to enter the citadel of scientific knowledge."

These scientists need to lighten up. The Pope is no threat to science, and never has been.

Motl, the Reference Frame blogger, compares Galileo to string theorists.

I don't really care whether Galileo's teaching was a new religion, new philosophy, or new science. I think it is much more important that he was right and his wisdom turned out to be essential for the development of our civilization. I happen to care about the fact that Galileo was infallible in the fundamental questions, unlike the religious authority. ...

Note that Galileo Galilei's description of the crackpots of his time is almost identical to your humble correspondent's favorite words about the contemporary heirs of the Inquisition - I mean the imbeciles who irrationally criticize string theory today and who are trash upon mankind and childish simpletons who haven't grown up. Well, let us admit that great minds think alike.

Galileo defied the Pope and made fun of him by creating a childish simpleton character named "Simplicio" in his book. The book's main argument was that the tides prove the motion of the Earth. Galileo may have thought that he was infallible and that only a fool would doubt the argument, but he turned out to be wrong.

I wonder why Motl even calls his blog the Reference Frame. It was the Catholic Church that correctly argued that maybe Earth-centered and Sun-centered coordinates might be valid reference frames for astronomical predictions. Galileo was the stubborn one. posted by Roger Schlafly at 21:48:12

 
Goofy cosmology
Here is an article about wacky ideas from cosmologists:

In eternal inflation, the number of new bubbles being hatched at any given moment is always growing, Dr. Linde said, explaining one such counting scheme he likes. So the evolution of people in new bubbles far outstrips the creation of Boltzmann brains in old ones. The main way life emerges, he said, is not by reincarnation but by the creation of new parts of the universe.

posted by Roger Schlafly at 22:14:28

 
The Moral Instinct
Evolutionary psychologist Steven Pinker puzzles over this moral dilemma:

You are on a bridge overlooking the tracks and have spotted the runaway trolley bearing down on the five workers. Now the only way to stop the trolley is to throw a heavy object in its path. And the only heavy object within reach is a fat man standing next to you. Should you throw the man off the bridge? Both dilemmas present you with the option of sacrificing one life to save five, and so, by the utilitarian standard of what would result in the greatest good for the greatest number, the two dilemmas are morally equivalent. But most people don’t see it that way: though they would pull the switch in the first dilemma, they would not heave the fat man in the second. When pressed for a reason, they can’t come up with anything coherent, though moral philosophers haven’t had an easy time coming up with a relevant difference, either.

This story is sometimes given to prove that people are irrational about morals. But I don't think that it proves that at all. We cannot have a society where people go around committing murder because of some utilitarian theory of greater social good. posted by Roger Schlafly at 00:23:48

 
Obama never truly opposed the Iraq War
People keep crediting Barack Obama with opposing the Iraq War, but here is Obama's 2002 speech:

I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him. ...

I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

Pres. Bush would agree with much of this. Everyone is against dumb wars. Obama fails to say that he is actually against the Iraq War, and in 2004, he said that he didn't know how he would have voted on the war. When he got to the US Senate, he voted to continue the war funding. I agree with Bill Clinton that Obama's war opposition is a "fairy tale".

I think that the Democrats could be making the same mistake that they made in 2004. They think that opposition to Pres. Bush's handling of the Iraq War is an electoral winner, but they don't have a candidate who has any credible story about how the war could have been handled any better. posted by Roger Schlafly at 19:44:14

 
Fluoridated water
The current Scientific American has an article on how adding fluoride to water has an assortment of health risks, and little benefit to those who brush their teeth. It essentially says that the John Birch Society was right after all! posted by Roger Schlafly at 19:44:14

 
Ron Paul's fringe views
Some bloggers seem to be just discovering that Congressman Ron Paul has some fringe views. Paul ran for President in 1988 as the nominee of the Libertarian Party. Of course he has fringe views.

What is really slimy is digging out old quotes to try to portray Paul as racist, anti-semitic, or homophobic. It is just idiotic name-calling. Someone would have to be really afraid of Paul's message to stoop so low. posted by Roger Schlafly at 11:21:41

 
Silly evolution argument
The Si Valley paper published this letter:

Drug-resistant TB sign of evolution

The Mercury News (Editorial, Jan. 4) points out another strong piece of evidence for evolution in its opinion about the increasing drug-resistant strains of tuberculosis. These drug-resistant strains are the direct result of TB evolving - survival of the fittest. Those strains that are most resistant to antibiotics survive and reproduce while other, less fit strains do not. This process is exacerbated by people not completing their prescribed antibiotic treatment. This is a simple and practical example of why it is important that everyone be taught about the process of evolution.

Bob Downs
Los Gatos

This is often given as a practical and easily verifiable proof for evolution. But it really proves nothing. My hunch is that creationists would readily believe that some drugs are more effective on some bacteria than other bacteria. That is all it takes to understand that drug-resistant bacteria could be a problem.

Here is a new anti-creationism book:

The National Academy of Sciences and Institute of Medicine have released Science, Evolution, and Creationism, a book designed to give the public a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the current scientific understanding of evolution and its importance in the science classroom. NAS and IOM strongly maintain that only scientifically based explanations for life should be included in public school science class.

The 70-page book argues that evolution is compatible with religion, and has various straw-man attacks on creationists. I wonder why they bother with such a silly book. Their main conclusion:

Nonscientific approaches do not belong in science classrooms.

Nobody disagrees with that.

The paper did publish this response:

Evolution isn't a proven fact

Bob Downs' use of the increase of drug-resistant bacteria as evidence for evolution (Letters, Jan. 7) is poor reasoning and poor science. While this example is a valid case of "survival of the fittest," it is not evidence for evolution. No new information was created in the genetic material of the surviving tuberculosis bacteria and none will pass to the next generation. This is nothing more than a new distribution of a small percentage of a population that was already present. No new species, genera or family are present.

It is a "leap of faith" to assume that survival of the fittest produces new or different species or kinds of organisms, animal, plant or protozoa. While I agree that everyone should learn about evolution as a point of view, it is not a proven fact. It is an assumption based upon a philosophical perspective.

Ken Van Meter
Superintendent Milpitas Christian School

It is possible that bacteria has mutated in drug-resistant strains as a result of anti-biotic use. I don't know. If so, it would be a good example of evolution. But the argument for evolution as stated in the original letter is meaningless. It is just "survival of the fittest", which nobody doubts or disputes.

Here is another silly letter:

Time to reactivate flat-Earth theory

Huzzah for Ken Van Meter (Letters, Jan. 12) for his stunningly logical and factual refutation of biological evolution. Inspired as I am by his intellectual tour de force, I feel the time is now finally right to take down that other pillar of secular science-babble, the round-Earth theory. As the Earth by observation is obviously flat (even from the highest mountain it appears only slightly bent), it is clearly a "leap of faith" to conclude that doctored photographs from faked Apollo missions prove that the Earth is any other shape than what it appears to be from the ground.

Scott Shellard
Santa Cruz

Somehow the evolutionists often come around to talk about the Flat Earth theory. You never hear about the Flat Earth, except from evolutionists. posted by Roger Schlafly at 16:37:46

 
Christianity v Islam
Half Sigma debates this comment:

Islam is just at the same point Christianity was a couple of hundred years ago with crusades, martyrs, and converting anyone it can get its hands on to a strict dogmatic set of doctrines. I can see why Christians (and those in Christian nations) are scared. They are seeing a shadow of their former selves, and know that if they let it be, they will be replaced just as the pagans were.

This is just too stupid for detailed comment. 200 years ago Christians were the most enlightened people on Earth, and the worst Christian country was better than the best Mohammedan country today. posted by Roger Schlafly at 17:47:33

 
Edge thinkers change their minds
Harvard philopher Rebecca Goldstein writes:

Another problem with the falsifiability criterion is that I have seen it become a blunt instrument, unthinkingly applied. Popper tried to use it to discredit not only Marxism and Freudianism as scientific theories but also Darwin’s theory of natural selection -- a position that only a creationist could hold today. I have seen scientists claim that major theories in contemporary cosmology and physics are not “science” because they can’t think of a simple test that would falsify them.

It is not just that there is no simple test to refute string theory; there is no way to relate string theory to anything that is observable at all. Yes, string theory is not science, and some other popular theories aren't either.

I am not a creationist, but I agree with Popper's criticism of Darwin. There is no experiment or observation that can tell us whether the Darwin’s theory of natural selection is correct or not.

I am not denying evolutionary theory. There is much in evolutionary biology that can be tested. Mutation rates can be measured. The function and inheritance of individual genes can be observed. Evidence for common ancestors to different species can be found in fossils and in DNA. But natural selection is just a meaningless tautology.

Natural selection just means any form of animal or plant reproduction other than artificial selection. Artificial selection refers to human-directed breeding programs as carried out by farmers and dog lovers. Anything else is natural selection. Any observation of life in nature is an example of natural selection, and there is no way it could be anything else.

You often hear evolutionists rave about how the theory of natural selection was the greatest scientific discovery of all time. But the fact is that no one ever thought that nature worked in any other way.

In another article, Steven Pinker changed his mind about humans evolving, and so Mark Pagel. It is amazing to see evolutionists suddenly discover that humans are evolving.

Keith Devlin and Paul Davies have decided to reject Platonism! posted by Roger Schlafly at 08:48:59