So the First Freedom First is doing a blogswarm against theocracy. And I saw this piece on PhysOrg.com, and I thought to comment on it.

Studying twins, the link between good behavior and religion is examed. There seems to be a strong link that behavior has a genetic component. So there is a balancing between the environment(nurture) and genetics(nature) that determines how “good” a person is. I think how this relates to religion, is that a person is more likely to be of the same religion as his/her parents. And this relates to goodness by the moral teachings of religion. However, those how have left religion or who were raised without religion are just as influenced by the genetic and environmental factors related to goodness. So that certain moral absoluts are connected to being human and not necessarilty related to religion.

So Rogers AR maybe the new Dover. Parents there seem to want “critical thinking” about evolution. But I doubt that any critical thinking about “creation science” will be allowed.

Cool shit in OZ. The South Australia Museum will be displaying fossils from the Ediacaran period. These PreCambrian fossils are some of the oldest animal fossils.

And finally, some help for the RNA World hypothesis. The discovery of a RNA enzyme that acts like RNA polymerase(meaning that it can join pieces of RNA together) is big news. Abstract

From the Christian Science Monitor, a study looking at soil respiration, finds that with increased temperatures, mushrooms, roots and other soil organisms will not released as much of CO2 as previously thought. The only thing wrong (and I’m nit-picking) is that the author said that mushrooms are the “tiniest terrestrial inhabitants.” Mushrooms can be some of the biggest organisms on the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

The iconic Hubble image the is probably the wallpaper on hundreds of million computers is no more. The Eagle Nebula was destroyed by a supernova 6ooo years ago according to the NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. Just imagine when humans were building the first villages a supernova was scattering the dust of the Eagle Nebula.

I use to get irritated when some fundy made the comment that science says that we are made out of rock or dirt or the like. Even when they say that Genesis is how we were created: Adam from dust (Genesis 2:7). I realized that what upset me was not that geochemical processes created life from non-life that eventually formed 3.8 billion years ago-give or take. What really bothered me was the belief that it was impossible for such a thing to occur without some form of divine assistance. That somehow rocks were inert. It makes me wonder if people do not know what the incredible mingling of water and limestone do over millions of years to from glistening caverns of calcite. Read the rest of this entry »

So this guy wants to debate about evolution. To “prove” evolution, he has three criteria. The first one I would say is the hardest, since it is the question about how life originated. There are several competing theories, so you can’t say with any kind of certainty how it occured. The second criteria depends on how “sexual species” is defined. This one might not be too hard, right now it is speculation, but two seperate species of European Black Caps could emerge. And the last is the evolution of the human brain. I don’t think that’s very hard, since we can look at the differences between the reptile brains and the mammalian brain as being one step and then look at human and chimp brains since they both are self-aware. If you look at the rules for this he says you can’t use audio/visual presentation. Which I think is pretty silly.