God's Gift To The Ignorant
That would be creationism, writes Richard Dawkins, and the morons trying to wedge it into the curriculum in Kansas and other places, as if it has some validity:
The creationists’ fondness for “gaps” in the fossil record is a metaphor for their love of gaps in knowledge generally. Gaps, by default, are filled by God. You don’t know how the nerve impulse works? Good! You don’t understand how memories are laid down in the brain? Excellent! Is photosynthesis a bafflingly complex process? Wonderful! Please don’t go to work on the problem, just give up, and appeal to God. Dear scientist, don’t work on your mysteries. Bring us your mysteries for we can use them. Don’t squander precious ignorance by researching it away. Ignorance is God’s gift to Kansas.
I'm in Austin, Texas, right now, at the yearly Human Behavior & Evolution Society conference. I believe there's T-Mobile at the hotel, so I'll try to live-blog from a few of the sessions. First is Martin Daly and Margo Wilson on impulsivity: how we "discount the future" and think it's in our interest to gamble or commit crimes. But, I'm really looking forward to UCLA's Martie Haselton, talking on "sexual regret." My only regret right now is that you can't see the hundreds of bats dotting the sky in this photo.
You'll just have to trust me that they're high-tailing it over the bridge.
I'm sure there's some sort of "evolution of group psychology" explanation for why I actually followed Alan Kugel and Catherine Salmon out to "The World's Largest Urban Bat Colony." Either that or I have a very high fever.
The bat colony traveling exhibit is soooo cool. I saw the rolling show at the Portland Zoo two months ago. The most amazing thing to me (in an evolutionary way) is that bats have roughly the same number of bones as humans, in all the same places. Think of the wing bones as being highly extended fingers. They have a mockup of a six foot tall bat skeleton next to a human skeleton, and the similarities are erie. Like us, bats are mammals. I hope you got to see that display.
eric at June 2, 2005 9:03 AM
There are bats in the palm trees at Venice Beach. At night, I can hear their fleshy flapping as I ride my bike.
Lena's got 'em in the belfry at June 2, 2005 5:51 PM
Oh, forget the skeleton - it's bat sonar that blows me away. Go ahead and whistle at a moth 15 feet away, then tell me not only where it is, but which way it's flying.
The bat has been using FM - frequency modulation - for millions of years.
We use it to see that all of America hears the same ten songs for 35 minutes out of the hour - on the stations that brag about how they shut up and play music.
Radwaste at June 2, 2005 9:27 PM
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