Declaring With Clarity, When Gender Is Ambiguous

Declaring With Clarity, When Gender Is Ambiguous
(New York Times)

Q. Can children grow up mentally healthy if they have ambiguous genitalia?

A. I think that these sexual assignments often create more problems than they solve. The children grow up with unhealthy secrets. What the kids tell me is that while they didn’t know they were males, they always knew something was wrong because they were “too different” from all the other girls.

In my psychiatric practice, I’ve had families where the parents asked me to be with them when they told their children, “You were actually born a boy.” That turned out to be a critical moment because every child converted to being a boy within hours, except for two. With those two, they refused to ever discuss their sexual identity again. Still, none of them stayed female.

Does Size Matter?

Does Size Matter? Most Romantic Partners Say ‘No’
(Red Nova)

Frederick acknowledges that previous, smaller studies have suggested that men view large breasts as “ideal.” That’s because those studies have usually asked men to simply pick their favorite from a series of photos, he said. “What we wanted to get at in this study was how satisfied men are with their partner, because it could be that men find a variety of breast sizes to be attractive, regardless of what they rate as ideal.”

Grasping metaphors

Grasping metaphors: UC San Diego research ties brain area to figures of speech
(EurekAlert)

“While it would be premature to conclude that the angular gyrus is the ‘metaphor center’ of the human brain, we suggest that the evolution of the dominant angular gyrus contributed enormously to the evolution of many quintessentially human abilities, including metaphorical—and other abstract—thinking,” Ramachandran said.

“Any monkey can reach for a peanut,” he said, “but only a human can reach for the stars or even understand what that means.”

11 Steps to a Better Brain

11 Steps to a Better Brain
(New Scientist)

It doesn’t matter how brainy you are or how much education you’ve had—you can still improve and expand your mind. Boosting your mental faculties doesn’t have to mean studying hard or becoming a reclusive book worm. There are lots of tricks, techniques and habits, as well as changes to your lifestyle, diet and behavior that can help you flex your grey matter and get the best out of your brain cells. And here are 11 of them.

Prejudice Is Hard-wired Into The Human Brain

Prejudice Is Hard-wired Into The Human Brain, Says ASU Study
(Live Science)

Unfortunately, says Neuberg, because evolved psychological tendencies are imperfectly attuned to the existence of dangers, people may react negatively to groups and their members even when they actually pose no realistic threat.

Group Seeks Ban of 20th Century

Group Seeks Ban of 20th Century from Kansas School Textbooks
Last Century ‘Just a Theory,’ Activists Say
(Borowitz Report)

“These textbooks state unequivocally that the twentieth century occurred, as if that were a proven historic fact,” said Gordon Lavalier, the group’s leader and spokesman. “The simple truth is, the twentieth century is and has always been nothing but a theory.”

Natural-Born Liars

Natural-Born Liars
(Scientific American Mind)

The obvious question raised by all of this accounting is: Why do we lie so readily? The answer: because it works. The Homo sapiens who are best able to lie have an edge over their counterparts in a relentless struggle for the reproductive success that drives the engine of evolution. As humans, we must fit into a close-knit social system to succeed, yet our primary aim is still to look out for ourselves above all others. Lying helps. And lying to ourselves—a talent built into our brains—helps us accept our fraudulent behavior.

If these bones could talk

If these bones could talk
(The Guardian)

It’s humbling, Stringer says. “We shouldn’t see ourselves as the summit of the perfection of whatever evolution is trying to achieve. We seem to be very successful at the moment in terms of our numbers but, looking at it on a geological timescale, how successful will we look in 50,000 years, which is a very short time, geologically speaking?”

OK, Einstein, but let’s ask Paris

OK, Einstein, but let’s ask Paris
by Tom Blackburn (Palm Beach Post)

Anti-evolution guerrillas could be pitied for their sincerity in a cause that is over their heads, except that their zeal, applied as political pressure on school boards, is messing up the education of other people’s kids as well as their own. Kids need a sounder educational base than what they choose to think when they are in sixth grade. They won’t get it from intelligent design.

Devolution

Devolution
by H. Allen Orr (The New Yorker)

Those of us who have argued with I.D. in the past are used to such shifts of emphasis. But it’s striking that Dembski’s views on the history of life contradict Behe’s. Dembski believes that Darwinism is incapable of building anything interesting; Behe seems to believe that, given a cell, Darwinism might well have built you and me. Although proponents of I.D. routinely inflate the significance of minor squabbles among evolutionary biologists (did the peppered moth evolve dark color as a defense against birds or for other reasons?), they seldom acknowledge their own, often major differences of opinion. In the end, it’s hard to view intelligent design as a coherent movement in any but a political sense.

Just give me that old-time atheism!

Just give me that old-time atheism!
by Salman Rushdie (Toronto Star)

But religion today is big public business, using efficient political organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return.

As Evans and Ruse would do well to recognize, atheists such as Dawkins, Miller and Wilson are neither immature nor culpable for taking on such religionists.

They are doing a vital and necessary thing.

Understanding sarcasm is a complex business

Understanding sarcasm is a complex business
(New Scientist)

Shamay-Tsoory and colleagues found that people with prefrontal damage had trouble recognising sarcasm, while people with damage in posterior brain areas were unaffected. People with damage in the right hemisphere and the prefrontal lobe also had problems understanding the emotional cues involved in processing sarcasm, such as tone of voice or theory of mind, which correlated with their ability to understand sarcasm.

Well, d-uh! Nobody said it was going to be easy.

Would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it

Would you Adam ‘n’ Eve it ... dinosaurs in Eden
(The Guardian)

Nestling deep in the Ozark mountains of Arkansas, in the heart of America’s Bible Belt, this is the first dinosaur museum to take a creationist perspective. Already thousands of people have flocked to its top-quality exhibits which mix high science with fundamentalist theology that few serious scientists accept.

Welcome to the Brave New World.

Animal instinct’s wordy realm

Animal instinct’s wordy realm
(San Francisco Chronicle)
Review of Madame Bovary’s Ovaries: A Darwinian Look at Literature

Apparently, even love is a genetic adaptation. Thus, from the works of Homer through Shakespeare to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Dickens, Twain, Faulkner, Austen, Joyce, Nabokov, Steinbeck and right up to Kundera, Marquez, Alice Walker and even Charles Bukowski, the storylines, however poetic, convoluted, steamy or spiritual, are really about the rules of the jungle—or desert, or boardroom or bedroom or anywhere the struggle for survival takes place—even though most authors have been largely unaware they are being guided to some degree by the “evolutionary bottom line.”

My God Problem

My God Problem
by Natalie Angier (Free Inquiry)

In other words, for horoscope fans, the burden of proof is entirely on them, the poor gullible gits; while for the multitudes who believe that, in one way or another, a divine intelligence guides the path of every leaping lepton, there is no demand for evidence, no skepticism to surmount, no need to worry. You, the religious believer, may well find subtle support for your faith in recent discoveries—that is, if you’re willing to upgrade your metaphors and definitions as the latest data demand, seek out new niches of ignorance or ambiguity to fill with the goose down of faith, and accept that, certain passages of the Old Testament notwithstanding, the world is very old, not everything in nature was made in a week, and (can you turn up the mike here, please?) Evolution Happens.

To understand how organisms evolve ...

To understand how organisms evolve, biologists start at the beginning
(Signon San Diego)

Through the years, polls have repeatedly shown most Americans don’t believe in evolution. Does evo devo answer the disbelievers?

For those whose minds are open to evidence, evo devo will really help. We can show that tiny changes account for major differences that we can see. There’s that old lament: What good is half an eye or half a wing? It’s so hard to imagine how new things arise. Where is the intermediate step?

Evo devo provides an understanding of the deep foundation. For instance, there is the understanding that all eyes evolved from a simple arrangement of nerve cells that could sense light that goes way back into the bacterial kingdom. By understanding that all this variation we see is a modification of ancient processes and ancient organizations of cells, then you can realize there is continuity here. It’s not having to make a large leap of faith to connect A to B.

Professor Sean B. Carroll is not to be confused with the less hirsute physicist Sean Carroll of Preposterous Universe fame.

A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm

A Critic Takes On the Logic of Female Orgasm
(New York Times)

Rather, Dr. Lloyd says the most convincing theory is one put forward in 1979 by Dr. Donald Symons, an anthropologist.

That theory holds that female orgasms are simply artifacts—a byproduct of the parallel development of male and female embryos in the first eight or nine weeks of life.

Clitoris captured alive and well

Clitoris captured alive and well
(ABC Science)

She says unlike the penis, the clitoris is freer to expand because the bulbs, which are a major component, are only covered by a fine membrane.

”You could see that it would easily swell.”

Related: Did Renaldus Columbus discover the clitoris in 1559?

Creationism and evolution can work together

Creationism and evolution can work together
(Capital Journal)

If public education can’t be a place to discuss intelligent design, neither should it be a place for the discussion of sex, alternative lifestyles, condom distribution or half of the other malarkey that passes for “education” today. Those issues, like religious faith, are private matters best left for the family and church to discuss.

Where do I sign up for this comic genius’s newsletter?

Not So Golden Silence on GM Rice

Not So Golden Silence on GM Rice
(American Council on Science and Health)

The author’s words from the article abstract nicely state the research conclusions: “Farm surveys of randomly selected farm households that are cultivating the insect-resistant GM rice varieties, without the aid of experimental station technicians, demonstrate that when compared with households cultivating non-GM rice, small and poor farm households benefit from adopting GM rice by both higher crop yields and reduced use of pesticides, which also contribute to improved health” (Huang 2005).

Related: We’ve never had it so good—and it’s all thanks to science, an old Guardian article by Matt Ridley, a favorite science writer.

‘Intelligent design’ suggests faith in God isn’t enough

‘Intelligent design’ suggests faith in God isn’t enough
(In-Forum)

The contradiction is interesting. Usually, we think of faith as a central tenet of religion and the hallmark of spiritual journeys. But I.D. suggests that God’s existence must be scientifically proven, not accepted by faith. It also puts God in the role of a fill-in or an alternative where there are gaps in scientific knowledge.

Niobrara

Niobrara
(Pharyngula)

Reading about the ridiculous anti-evolution trial going on there was rather depressing. It isn’t just that the creationist arguments are so poor, but that they are making them in Kansas, where beneath their very feet are the relics of an ancient world that show them to be wrong. Don’t schoolchildren there take pride in the paleontological wealth of their home? Do the people bury their imaginations and avoid thinking about the history that surrounds them?

Go read it in full. It’s worth it.

Jesus For President

Jesus For President
(Orkut Media)

Apparently, my humanistic bias had blinded me to the fact that evolution is actually imaginary. When I think of those poor deluded archaeologists toiling away with their “fossils,” it brings a tear to my eye. I wonder how they have managed to project these imaginary objects into three-dimensional space. The human mind is a curious thing, indeed.

It’s funny ‘cause it’s true. One hundred percent. (Link via Red State Rabble.)

Man, chimp difference may have made us prone to cancer

Man, chimp difference may have made us prone to cancer
(EurekAlert)

A comparative genetic study led by Cornell University researchers suggest that some mutations in human sperm cells might allow them to avoid early death and reproduce, creating an advantage that ensures more sperm cells carry this trait. But this same positive selection could also have made it easier for human cancer cells to survive.

You win some, you lose some.

Kids’ book on evolution stirs censorship debate

Kids’ book on evolution stirs censorship debate in Monticello
(Star Tribune)

“This is a signal that school administrators may not be backing up good science teachers, that good science teachers may not be teaching evolution, teaching it correctly, or allowing religious beliefs to be substituted in the classroom for fear of controversy,” Spath said. “This is a sign that should concern any parent who cares about good education.”

America is going the way of Turkey and Saudi Arabia, where fear takes precedence over legislation or good sense.

Google Content Blocker

Google Content Blocker

I like my satire funny and thoroughgoing, complete with pdf whitepaper.

One Longsome Argument

One Longsome Argument
by Dennis R. Trumble (Skeptical Inquirer)

Because no physical body of evidence exists to document the beginning of life on Earth, this information gap has proven to be a wildly popular (albeit wholly inappropriate) foil for those seeking to discredit evolutionary theory. In truth, the origin of life is an issue entirely separate from the origin of species, rendering this otherwise important question utterly irrelevant as far as the veracity of natural selection is concerned. Whether the first primitive life form arose from known physical processes or was somehow willed into being through means beyond our understanding, evidence that all life on Earth descended from simple primordial beings remains just as compelling, and the myth of independent creation just as untenable.

Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology

Scientology Losing Ground To New Fictionology
(The Onion)

Fictionology’s central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church’s ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permitted—even encouraged—to view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.

“My personal savior is Batman,” said Beverly Hills plastic surgeon Greg Jurgenson. “My wife chooses to follow the teachings of the Gilmore Girls. Of course, we are still beginners. Some advanced-level Fictionologists have total knowledge of every lifetime they have ever lived for the last 80 trillion years.”

“Sure, it’s total bullshit,” Jurgenson added. “But that’s Fictionology. Praise Batman!”

My personal savior is Charles Montgomery Burns.

The Science Of Gender And Science

The Science Of Gender And Science
Pinker Vs. Spelke, A Debate
(Edge.org)

Pinker: To sum up: I think there is more than “a shred of evidence” for sex differences that are relevant to statistical gender disparities in elite hard science departments. There are reliable average difference in life priorities, in an interest in people versus things, in risk-seeking, in spatial transformations, in mathematical reasoning, and in variability in these traits. And there are ten kinds of evidence that these differences are not completely explained by socialization and bias, although they surely are in part.

[…]

Spelke: My feeling is that where we stand now, we cannot evaluate this claim. It may be true, but as long as the forces of discrimination and biased perceptions affect people so pervasively, we’ll never know. I think the only way we can find out is to do one more experiment. We should allow all of the evidence that men and women have equal cognitive capacity, to permeate through society. We should allow people to evaluate children in relation to their actual capacities, rather than one’s sense of what their capacities ought to be, given their gender. Then we can see, as those boys and girls grow up, whether different inner voices pull them in different directions. I don’t know what the findings of that experiment will be. But I do hope that some future generation of children gets to find out.

The Darwinian Interlude

The Darwinian Interlude
by Freeman Dyson (Technology Review)

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over. The epoch of species competition came to an end about 10 thousand years ago when a single species, Homo sapiens, began to dominate and reorganize the biosphere. Since that time, cultural evolution has replaced biological evolution as the driving force of change. Cultural evolution is not Darwinian. Cultures spread by horizontal transfer of ideas more than by genetic inheritance. Cultural evolution is running a thousand times faster than Darwinian evolution, taking us into a new era of cultural interdependence that we call globalization. And now, in the last 30 years, Homo sapiens has revived the ancient pre-Darwinian practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species will no longer exist, and the evolution of life will again be communal.

A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain

A Career Spent Learning How the Mind Emerges From the Brain
by Carl Zimmer (New York Times)

“The interpreter tells the story line of a person,” Dr. Gazzaniga said. “It’s collecting all the information that is in all these separate systems that are distributed through the brain.” While the story feels like an unfiltered picture of reality, it’s just a quickly-thrown-together narrative.

[…]

Neuroscience’s biggest contribution to ethics, Dr. Gazzaniga predicted, is only just emerging: a biological explanation of morality. “In the next 20 years, we’re probably going to define why our species seems to have a certain sort of moral compass,” he said.

Science Fare

Science Fare
(Bad Astronomy Blog)

Science is a way of finding things out. It’s a way of testing what’s real. It’s what Richard Feynman called “A way of not fooling ourselves.”

No astrologer ever predicted the existence of Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. No modern astrologer had a clue about Sedna, a ball of ice half the size of Pluto that orbits even farther out. No astrologer predicted the more than 150 planets now known to orbit other suns.

But scientists did.

Brought back memories of Sagan’s Cosmos—the wonder, excitement, awe. Hope some of the kids are as lucky.

Pheromone attracts straight women and gay men

Pheromone attracts straight women and gay men
(New Scientist)

Smelling a male pheromone prompts the same brain activity in homosexual men as it does in heterosexual women, a new study has found. It did not excite the sex-related region in the brains of heterosexual males, although an oestrogen-derived compound found in female urine did.

The Intelligent Designer sure does have a wicked sense of humor.

Certain fish have a special mating preference

Certain fish have a special mating preference
(EurekAlert)

A biologist at Washington University in St. Louis has shown that for some fish species, females prefer males with larger sexual organs, and actually choose them for mating. That does not exclude males with an average-sized sex organ, called a gonopodium. These fish out-compete the larger-endowed males in a predator-laden environment because they have a faster burst speed than the males with larger genitalia, who lose out because the size of their organ slows them down, making them ripe for capture by larger fish.

[…]

Langerhans also plans to examine whether other species of livebearing fish also exhibit female mating preference for males with large genitalia. If true, he said, the evolution of this mating preference might help explain the evolution of swords in male swordtail fishes. Swords are conspicuous, elongate projections of the tail fin and are known to be subject to female mate choice.

Get ready to find mentions of this study in your spam folder.

Homeopathy: the real alternative?

Homeopathy: the real alternative?
(The Guardian)

But this seems typical of the alternative enthusiasts. Health food shops stock hundreds of natural remedies. How do their non-medically trained owners know which ones work? Perhaps they have bought into the myth that medicine is “what works for you” and as long as it’s natural, it can’t do you any harm. But the list of natural things that can do you harm is endless: toadstools, E. coli, sunlight, tornadoes, sharks. The only thing that can guarantee no side effects is something that has no effects. That’s why homeopathy is “safe”. You’re basically drinking water.

And even then, you could die of water intoxication or some such.

Mineral evidence paints life-friendly picture of early Earth

Mineral evidence paints life-friendly picture of early Earth
(San Francisco Chronicle)

Only a scant 200 million years after Earth was formed, our planet was already a watery world well suited for life to emerge, two scientists have concluded from fresh evidence they found in ancient microscopic minerals.

[…]

It shows a rocky crust already stable and possibly even undergoing continental drift; oceans of water, hot but not inhospitably so; a ready supply of organic molecules brought in by comets from far-off space; and ample energy—needed to build organic complexity—from a brilliant young sun.

Darwin’s Lament

Darwin’s Lament
(Democratic Underground)

So, today, Darwin is once again on trial. Who cares if the human genome project has shown that humans and chimpanzees have 98.4% of their genes in common? Who cares if increasingly accurate radiological dating techniques put the age of the earth at about 4.5 billion years old? Who cares if the human limbic system resembles, in structure and function, that of a reptile brain?

Who cares? The true believers. The born-again Christians who see metaphorical, best-guesses of the ancients’ stories in the Bible as the literal truth, and their political friends who want to make political hay while riding the crest of this fervent minority’s beliefs.

Don’t be so exclusive. True believers abound. In fact, they are the majority.

From Islam and Evolution

As for claim that man has evolved from a non-human species, this is unbelief (kufr) no matter if we ascribe the process to Allah or to “nature,” because it negates the truth of Adam’s special creation that Allah has revealed in the Qur’an. Man is of special origin, attested to not only by revelation, but also by the divine secret within him, the capacity for ma’rifa or knowledge of the Divine that he alone of all things possesses. By his God-given nature, man stands before a door opening onto infinitude that no other creature in the universe can aspire to. Man is something else.

And woman, something totally else.

And now, a li’l comic relief:

My question to all of the Darwinists out there is: If your belief is true, then how come humans didn’t develop into something more intelligent and physically different than us today?

Wow, I’m stumped.

Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings

Linguists boycott Kansas intelligent design hearings
(Language Log)

Backers of intelligent design say it is a theory with scientific backing. According to dissident linguist and itinerant preacher Immanuel Quierbaiter, who plans to testify at the hearings in favor of intelligent design, “Anyone who takes an unbiased look at the intricacies of the English language as detailed in Harvey’s English Grammar will see that it shows evidence of having been carefully designed for its communicative purpose. It is beyond belief that such a system could have simply evolved through random processes of change.”

Historical evidence of such processes of change has been refuted, he claims: “There are gaps in the literary record that the linguistic evolutionists have never explained.”

Opponents of the theory, however, believe that it represents an attempt to smuggle religion into English classes. Said Dr Liberman: “If intelligent linguistic design is a viable theory, it should be defended through articles in peer-reviewed journals, not lobbied for politically in school boards.”

Heh heh.

Update: Apparently, there were people who didn’t realize it was satire.

Scientists Clueless over Sun’s Effect on Earth

Scientists Clueless over Sun’s Effect on Earth
(Live Science)

The bottom line, according to a group of experts not involved in any of these studies: Scientists don’t know much about how sunlight interacts with our planet, and until they understand it, they can’t accurately predict any possible effects of human activity on climate change.

Tsk tsk. An experienced astrologer could show these ignorant scientists how, in a jiffy.

Actual Expert Too Boring For TV

Actual Expert Too Boring For TV
(The Onion)

“I’m sure he knows what he’s talking about,” Salters added. “But we have a responsibility to educate and entertain our viewers. In the end, we had to go with someone else.”

MSNBC chose Skip Hammond, former Arizona State football player, MBA holder, and author of Imprison The Sun: America’s Coming Nuclear-Power Holocaust. Hammond is best known for his “atomic domino” theory of chained power-plant explosions and his signature lavender silk tie.

It’s funny ‘cause it’s true. Sorta.

Evolution stickers May removal upheld

Evolution stickers May removal upheld
(Marietta Daily Journal)

Asked what she plans to do now, Dr. Plenge said, “I guess we have to take them out. They’re stuck, so it’s going to be messing with the inside cover of the book.”

School staff has already experimented with removing the stickers, using such things as nail polish. Removing so many stickers will not be easy, she said.

Creationism facility here on a mission

Creationism facility here on a mission
(The Cincinnati Post)

The Answers in Genesis museum plans include more than 30 rooms and 240 exhibits to present Biblical history, including creation, the fall of man, the flood, the Tower of Babel, the life of Christ and the end time, when God reveals a “new heaven and new earth,” said Mike Zovarth, vice president for the museum.

He said the exhibits will include an exploration of modern scientific methods.

Er … why? Quit while you are ahead, dude!

Einstein and Darwin: A tale of two theories

Einstein and Darwin: A tale of two theories
Q&A with ‘Origins’ astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson
(MSNBC)

What were the consequences in the mid-1800s of saying you didn’t believe Darwin? There weren’t any, really. But today, with biotech companies, there is no understanding of biology without the theory of evolution. And so if you say, ‘I don’t believe the theory of evolution, I think we were all specially created,’ you must understand the consequences of it to your own employability.

Now if you don’t want to become a scientist, then maybe it doesn’t matter. Fine. There are plenty of professions that do not involve scientists. But as I said, the emergent economies are going to be scientifically and technologically driven, with biotech front and center. If you’re coming in saying that there was Adam and Eve, you’re not going to get past the front door. Because they can’t use your knowledge base to invent the next vaccine, the next medicine, the next cure for cancer. That knowledge base does not track into discoveries we know are awaiting us in the halls of biotech firms.

You’re saying that your perspective on those theories affects the pace of innovation?

Yes. And I would add this, just to nip this argument over “theories” in the bud: Until Einstein, all tested, confirmed physical theories were labeled laws. There’s Newton’s three laws of motion … the laws of gravity … the laws of thermodynamics. When Einstein came along, he showed that Newton was incomplete — not wrong, but incomplete, describing just a subset of reality. Einstein showed that a deeper understanding was required to account for this reality. At that point, physicists – I think not even consciously, just sort of subconsciously – stopped calling things “laws.”

There are no “laws” of physics in the 20th century. It’s quantum theory … the theory of relativity … you just look in the books, they all use the term “theory.” I think it’s a recognition that someone who comes after you may achieve an even deeper understanding of how things work. But “deeper” doesn’t mean that what you did is no longer valid. It just means that there’s a larger sphere of understanding that awaits you, in which what you just learned is embedded.

Acupuncture Treatment No More Effective Than Sham Treatment

Acupuncture Treatment No More Effective Than Sham Treatment In Reducing Migraine Headaches
(Science Daily)

“In conclusion, in our trial, acupuncture was associated with a reduction of migraine headaches compared with no treatment; however, the effects were similar to those observed with sham acupuncture and may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both,” the authors write.

The inadvertent manipulation of wayward qi could be a factor influencing the high of shooting-up junkies.

Lies, damn lies, and quote mining

Can I Call Him a Pathological Liar Now?
(Evolutionblog)

I suppose I can look forward to a gloating reply from Dembski about how just a handful of lies from him provoked this lengthy response from me. Well, let him gloat. It is evident that we are writing for two different audiences. He writes for simpletons who know nothing about science, but enjoy seeing someone smarter than they parrot the idiocies they already believe. I prefer to write for people who wish to obtain some facts about the current state of evolutionary science.

A gross overgeneralization perhaps, but which I wholeheartedly take to.

Fake × 2

Can’t afford real fakes? Bra offers illusion of gel-filled sacs
(Star Tribune)

The Evolution bra is aimed at “women who lust after the look of cosmetic breast implants,” according to Brastraps Inc., a Florida-based company that introduced the new bra on Friday. The Evolution features a sculpted, graduated cup “specially designed to mimic the appearance of cosmetic breast implants.”

With hundreds of thousands of American women undergoing breast-enhancement surgery each year, Brastraps believes it’s time to take a fresh look at cleavage.

“To be honest, the new standard for women is to be cosmetically enhanced, or to at least feel that’s what you look like,” company spokeswoman Michelle Soudry said. “It’s a completely new ideal from what we’ve seen before, and this is a company that is catering to that.”

Evolution? More like Intelligent Design, I’d say; and just as honest.

Link: Evolution By Margarita Convertible Bra

The 666 Revelation

Revelation! 666 is not the number of the beast (it’s a devilish 616)
(The Independent)

A newly discovered fragment of the oldest surviving copy of the New Testament indicates that, as far as the Antichrist goes, theologians, scholars, heavy metal groups, and television evangelists have got the wrong number. Instead of 666, it’s actually the far less ominous 616.

The new fragment from the Book of Revelation, written in ancient Greek and dating from the late third century, is part of a hoard of previously unintelligible manuscripts discovered in historic dumps outside Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. Now a team of expert classicists, using new photographic techniques, are finally deciphering the original writing.

This needs further corroboration, but for now, this guy can breathe a sigh of relief, whereas this one needs to get back to his adding table.

Related: Papyrus Reveals New Clues to Ancient World
The “classical holy grail” or unholy hype?

Cougars & wolves

Cougars & wolves versus your fucktarded irrational insistence to never see the answers
(Sedition.com)

If you weren’t such cowards and were willing to accept that cougars are going to get someone now and then—with education it would be no more than it is already—we’d save maybe 100 lives a year. That makes 10,000 when my great-great-granddaughter sits down to write about it all to your dimwitted descendants. The ones who didn’t eat venison tartare avec le verre on I-40 one night.

Related: Without Top Predators, Ecosystems Turn Topsy-Turvy
Kill the Pig, Save the Fox