What Shaw did was con people, many of them elderly, to invest millions of dollars in a phony real estate scheme. In fact, she used their money to buy warehouses full of Amway products in an effort to become a major distributor.
When the scheme collapsed in 2003 Target 8 Investigators broke the story. It led to a Montcalm County Sheriff’s investigation and the subsequent fraud charges.
In the early ‘90s, he served two years in federal prison for credit card fraud. He was later sued by the Illinois attorney general over an alleged pyramid marketing scheme, and he has tangled twice with the Federal Trade Commission over claims that he made in infomercials for various alternative remedies.
[…]
Trudeau has amassed millions from producing infomercials and from direct sales of products. Promotional materials he used in the mid-‘90s boasted of a net worth of more than $200 million. Today, Trudeau says he does not know how much money he has, but it is “probably a lot.” He said he owned 10 cars and dozens of houses and condominiums around the world.
Dr. Eichler argues that it is important to figure out what that is because a number of human congenital diseases are associated with chromosome rearrangements at these same break points.
“Here you have a beautiful connection,” he said. “The same thing that causes big-scale rearrangement between a human and chimp or a gorilla, these same sites are often the site of deletion associated with diseases.”
“We should accept that most research findings will be refuted. Some will be replicated and validated. The replication process is more important than the first discovery,” Ioannidis says.
Indeed, no intelligent design hypothesis has even been ventured as a rival explanation of any biological phenomenon. This might seem surprising to people who think that intelligent design competes directly with the hypothesis of non-intelligent design by natural selection. But saying, as intelligent design proponents do, “You haven’t explained everything yet,” is not a competing hypothesis. Evolutionary biology certainly hasn’t explained everything that perplexes biologists. But intelligent design hasn’t yet tried to explain anything.
Where were these scientific claims in the Qur’an before the discoveries were made? Nowhere, because Muslims did not read any scientific meaning into those vague verses. As for Darwinism, perhaps the writer ought to work harder at distinguishing between scientific literature and the pseudo-scientific folklore sponsored by certain organizations for their own agenda.
According to Gravlox’s theory, when a child loses a baby tooth, an invisible yet very real spirit signifies the event with a shiny coin, often a quarter, deposited under the child’s pillow the next morning—“clear evidence that something is going on. And then, six months later—bingo!—a brand new tooth appears.”
Writes Gravlox, “Traditional medical experts will laugh, of course, but no other explanation is possible other than the existence of an angel of dental design.”
Professor Egger said: “We acknowledge to prove a negative is impossible.
“But good large studies of homeopathy do not show a difference between the placebo and the homeopathic remedy, whereas in the case of conventional medicines you still see an effect.”
There are only religious fanatics who are frightened by knowledge and being responsible for themselves. I did not write this to debate anyone because there is no debate. Alternately repeating, “No it isn’t!” and humming with your ears plugged isn’t a proposition or a rebuttal.
I wrote this to counter popularized ignorant propaganda with evidence and information; information that has been duplicated, tested, and studied by people with doctorates in hard sciences in every country of the world going on 15 decades.
There are organisms with smaller genomes—Mycoplasma genitalium has about 400 genes. But these are all obligate parasites or symbionts, relying on other organisms to do the jobs they have abandoned. Pelagibacter is entirely self-sufficient.
High school driver’s education classes include motor vehicle safety instructions of all kinds: seat belts, defensive driving techniques, covering the break through intersections, the obligatory blood-soaked drunk driving film. But isn’t it also important to teach our nation’s high school students about the increasingly popular belief that angels are grappled onto car bumpers and somehow emit force fields (known as “Cherubic Repulsor Arrays”) which sometimes prevent accidents from happening?
Likewise, the theory of evolution doesn’t detract from our sense of awe and divine humility in the face of the miracle that is life. On the contrary. It’s even more awesome, even more humbling, even more divinely majestic to consider that all this living diversity emerged from something akin to random trial and error. To consider that a rose is a result of such a prosaic process: what a marvel! And to think that trial and error, survival of the fittest, led to the human experience of awe … this, too, is divine. I associate God with my experience of holy wonder, rather than thinking of God as an “intelligent designer” who exists apart from the universe, tinkering with it from afar. Evolution just gives me one more reason to be awestruck.
You can believe in God and evolution as long as you keep the two in separate logic-tight compartments. Belief in God depends on religious faith. Belief in evolution depends on empirical evidence. This is the fundamental difference between religion and science. If you attempt to reconcile religion and science on questions about nature and the universe, and if you push the science to its logical conclusion, you will end up naturalizing the deity, because for any question about nature—the origins of the universe, life, humans, whatever—if your answer is “God did it,” a scientist will ask, “How did God do it?, What forces did God use? What forms of matter and energy were employed in the creation process?” and so forth. The end result of this inquiry can only be natural explanations for all natural phenomena. What place, then, for God?
If we take the president up on his deceptively fair-minded idea of “teaching the argument,” I think we could advance the ball a little further in other directions also. Houses of worship that do not provide space for leaflets and pamphlets favoring evolution (not necessarily Darwinism, which is only one of the theories of evolution and thus another proof of its scientific status) should be denied tax-exempt status and any access to public funding originating in the White House’s “faith-based” initiative.
“I’m kind of embarrassed that I ever got involved with this,” Davidson says.
He was shocked, he says, when he saw the Discovery Institute was calling evolution a “theory in crisis.”
“It’s laughable: There have been millions of experiments over more than a century that support evolution,” he says. “There’s always questions being asked about parts of the theory, as there are with any theory, but there’s no real scientific controversy about it.”
4. Are you seriously going to rewrite the ENTIRE BIBLE??
We're certainly going to try.
In all seriousness, the most self-defeating attitude for progressives would be to give an elitist sneer to those who shop at Wal-Mart, shrugging our shoulders not only at Wal-Mart’s censorship but at its union busting, sex discrimination, and reprehensibly stingy health plans for already underpaid workers. To Wal-Mart shoppers: There’s nothing wrong with wanting religious or G-rated entertainment material in your own home and wanting to shield children from materials that you might find offensive. But, it is a problem when the biggest retailer in the country, which is a staple for millions of people, only offers up a sanitized world of culture that is comprised primarily of Veggie Tales videos and Toby Keith albums (wonder if they include the “gonna put a boot in your ass” lyric).
And until her book Faces of Science, she had never photographed scientists. Her usual portrait subjects were artists and writers, and while she won’t say anything unkind about artists and writers as a social group, she confesses that she was impressed with scientists. For one thing, they gave her their full attention. For another they almost all—and that includes the 28 Nobel prize winners who agreed to pose for her—answered their own phones. When she asked them questions about their research, they answered, courteously, and in clear language.
The poster, which is modeled after an advertisement for the movie “The Matrix,” is the brainchild of Father Meyer. It features a priest in full cassock—and the requisite Roman collar—holding a cross in one hand and a rosary in the other. And he is wearing sunglasses.
The burden of proof is on those making the claims, not those who find the data dubious. If there are investigators who are convinced that craft from other worlds are buzzing ours, then they should present the best evidence they have, and not resort to explanations that appeal to conspiratorial cover-ups or the failure of others to be open to the idea. The UFO advocates are asking us to believe something very important. After all, there could hardly be any discovery more dramatic than visitors from other worlds. If they could prove that the aliens are here, I would be as awestruck as anyone. But I still await a compelling Exhibit A.
Time was when the past was seen as a long march towards an inevitable present. But historians have come to realize that the present is anything but inevitable. And so New Scientist asked a panel of experts to speculate on the scientific pasts that might have been. Follow the links below to find out what might have happened if Darwin had not sailed on the Beagle, or Einstein not had his miracle year, as well as many other scenarios.
One of the puzzling features of the human genome is that although genes are numerous they actually form less than 5% of the DNA in a cell nucleus. The rest was thus, rather cavalierly, dubbed “junk DNA” by those who discovered it. Gradually, a role for some of this junk has emerged. In particular, parts of it regulate the activity of genes, and thus which proteins are produced and in what quantities. That has implications for what a cell does—or, to put it another way, what type of cell it is.
Yesterday the French cosmetics giant L’Oreal was forced by the Advertising Standards Authority to withdraw a major ad campaign after making claims for two products, Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease face cream and Perfect Slim anti-cellulite cream, that it couldn’t back up scientifically. The TV ads, which starred Claudia Schiffer, claimed that 76% of women had “visibly reduced expression lines” after using Anti-Wrinkle De-Crease, and that 71% of women found that Perfect Slim “visibly reduced the appearance of cellulite”. The ASA found there wasn’t enough evidence to support either claim, and the ads will now have to be amended. In May, similarly, advertisements by Estée Lauder were also found to be misleading.
So what is it about big butts?
“I think thanks to Jennifer Lopez, having a larger derriere has become the ‘in’ thing to have. It used to be an ample bust, now I think it’s an ample derriere,” said Hoffman.
In fact, Star Trek paraphernalia has so routinely been found at the homes of the pedophiles they’ve arrested that it has become a gruesome joke in the squad room. (On the wall, there is a Star Trek poster with the detectives’ faces replacing those of the crew members). This does not mean that watching Star Trek makes you a pedophile. It does mean that if you’re a pedophile, odds are you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek.
Women, for example, who are told that they’re too stupid for science, that science isn’t for them, that science is a male thing, are turned off. And women who despite that try to go into science and then find hostility from the high school math teacher—“What are you doing in my class?”—find hostility from the 95 percent male science classes, with the kind of raucous male culture in which they find themselves excluded, those are powerful social pressures to leave science. It is amazing that there are any women in science as a result of this. I wrote a novel once, Contact, in which I tried to describe what women dedicated to science have to face, that men don’t, in order to make a career in science.
So—kids, the next time your history teacher starts trying to force-feed you Revolutionary “theory” as if it were “fact,” you know what to do!
This Might Explain A Few Things
Have you heard of the “Bright” movement? It’s an idea dreamed up by some skeptics. The basic thought is that most people don’t really understand what it means to be a skeptic. They think it means someone who denies everything, a nay-sayer, a cynic. It brings to mind a curmudgeon, someone who is, well, a jerk.
But in reality, it means someone who demands evidence for a claim. That’s all. That’s not so terrible, is it? But the word is so twisted by others, the real connotation lost, that a lot of skeptics don’t like to use the word anymore. So some folks tried to think up a new word. Lots were tried, but none stuck.
Still, no matter how imperfect these studies are, when you put them all together and examine them closely, the message is clear: While post-birth development may well play a supporting role, the roots of homosexuality, at least in men, appear to be in place by the time a child is born. After spending years sifting through all the available data, British researchers Glenn Wilson and Qazi Rahman come to an even bolder conclusion in their forthcoming book Born Gay: The Psychobiology of Sex Orientation, in which they write: “Sexual orientation is something we are born with and not ‘acquired’ from our social environment.”
Burdett added: “Gravity—which is taught to our children as a law—is founded on great gaps in understanding. The laws predict the mutual force between all bodies of mass, but they cannot explain that force. Isaac Newton himself said, ‘I suspect that my theories may all depend upon a force for which philosophers have searched all of nature in vain.’ Of course, he is alluding to a higher power.”
Insofar as intelligent-design theory can be tested scientifically, it has been falsified. Organisms simply do not look as if they had been intelligently designed. Would an intelligent designer create millions of species and then make them go extinct, only to replace them with other species, repeating this process over and over again? Would an intelligent designer produce animals having a mixture of mammalian and reptilian traits, at exactly the time when reptiles are thought to have been evolving into mammals? Why did the designer give tiny, non-functional wings to kiwi birds? Or useless eyes to cave animals? Or a transitory coat of hair to a human fetus? Or an appendix, an injurious organ that just happens to resemble a vestigial version of a digestive pouch in related organisms? Why would the designer give us a pathway for making vitamin C, but then destroy it by disabling one of its enzymes? Why didn’t the intelligent designer stock oceanic islands with reptiles, mammals, amphibians, and freshwater fish, despite the suitability of such islands for these species? And why would he make the flora and fauna on those islands resemble that of the nearest mainland, even when the environments are very different? Why, about a million years ago, would the designer produce creatures that have an apelike cranium perched atop a humanlike skeleton? And why would he then successively replace these creatures with others having an ever-closer resemblance to modern humans?
That's because mice and men are nearly genetically identical, each possessing just a few hundred different genes out of a possible 25,000 or so. Cancer in mice is a lot like human cancer, for instance. Mice have become powerful, living research tools.
The propaganda that evolution is a theory in crisis is hardly new. In 1925, William Jennings Bryan falsely contended that evolutionary science was on the verge of collapse, as his heirs argue today. Yet the evidence for evolution is stronger than ever.
It’s time that we acknowledged honestly what most people believe, that religion is at bottom nonsense. I do not deny the good work of religious people, nor the cultural effects of religion, nor its deep penetration into our consciousness, but what I think we should acknowledge is that religion contains a massive falsehood, namely that there is a God who determines our actions and responds to our plight. As AJ Ayer said, if God has constituted the world in such a way that he cannot resolve the phenomenon of evil, logically it makes no difference whether we are believers or unbelievers. The hypocritical respect now being accorded to Muslim “scholars”, people who believe that the Qur’an was dictated word for word by God, is just one example of the mess we have got ourselves into by pretending to take religion seriously. Disagreements about society can only be resolved in the here and now on liberal principles of discussion and compromise. You cannot have a sensible discussion with fundamentalists, be they Christian, Jewish or Muslim, because they start from a different point.
One of the defects of democracy is that we usually have quite ordinary persons as our leaders. Sometimes this doesn’t matter; their particular defects don’t bear upon public affairs, or the times are sufficiently placid that it just doesn’t matter that they drink, or play too much poker, or cultivate friends of doubtful character, or whatever.
These are not such times. The President’s ignorance of science might have remained a private matter, but he chose to speak on the subject of evolution and “intelligent design.” This is a great pity.
PLEASANTVILLE, NY—Reader’s Digest editors reported Monday that submissions to their “Humor In Uniform” feature have fallen off sharply since 2001. “The submissions that are trickling in are just not making me laugh,” said Jackie Leo, an editor at the magazine. “I’m looking for amusing send-ups of peeling potatoes on KP duty, not another vignette about a soldier waking up screaming because he accidentally shot a pregnant Iraqi woman.” Leo said she almost published one soldier’s story about being financially devastated by shrinking veteran benefits “just to help him out with the $300 publication fee, but it just wasn’t funny enough.”
Over the years, Scientific American has published some ridiculous articles belittling creation and extolling the virtues of evolution. Of all the articles I have seen, this one (April 2005, p. 10, “Okay, We Give Up”) has to be the dumbest.
Poison frogs can’t make their own poison—they steal it from ants. Poison frogs secrete a variety of chemicals called alkaloids to create a poisonous defense against predators. Since they can’t produce alkaloids on their own, these frogs maintain a steady diet of specific alkaloid-rich ants to keep up their defense.
Now, Valerie Clark of Cornell University and her colleagues have detailed two instances of convergent evolution—the process in which organisms not closely related independently acquire similar characteristics while evolving in separate ecosystems—between frogs and ants on two continents.
“This simple theory explains many unresolved features of the current genetic code. No one has ever been able to do this before, so we are very excited.”
The theory also explains how the structure of the genetic code maximises error tolerance. For instance, ‘slippage’ in the translation process tends to produce another amino acid with the same characteristics, and explains why the DNA code is so good at maintaining its integrity.
There’s been a lot of talk about Intelligent Design (ID) lately. However, some important and fairly basic questions seem to have gone unanswered.
Read more …
In a letter dated July 18, the biochemistry faculty wrote: “Among scientists, there are many discussions and arguments about how evolution came about and the mechanisms that drive it. However, there is NO argument, at least among scientists, about whether evolution occurred. Any assertion to the contrary would be completely false.”
Nearly all working biologists accept that the principles of variation and natural selection explain how multiple species evolved from a common ancestor over very long periods of time. I find no compelling examples that this process is insufficient to explain the rich variety of life forms present on this planet. While no one could claim yet to have ferreted out every detail of how evolution works, I do not see any significant “gaps” in the progressive development of life’s complex structures that would require divine intervention. In any case, efforts to insert God into the gaps of contemporary human understanding of nature have not fared well in the past, and we should be careful not to do that now.
–Francis Collins
Muhammad was also a successful merchant and heard, on his travels, the Nestorian Christians’ desert versions of Bible stories that the Koran mirrors closely (Christ, in the Koran, is born in an oasis, under a palm tree). It ought to be fascinating to Muslims everywhere to see how deeply their beloved book is a product of its place and time, and in how many ways it reflects the Prophet’s own experiences.
However, few Muslims have been permitted to study their religious book in this way. The insistence that the Koranic text is the infallible, uncreated word of God renders analytical, scholarly discourse all but impossible. Why would God be influenced by the socioeconomics of seventh-century Arabia, after all? Why would the Messenger’s personal circumstances have anything to do with the Message?
John, surfing, said to his mother, surfing beside him, “How do you like surfing?” —E. Davis (Winner)
[…]
Dr. Metzger turned to greet his new patient, blithely unaware he would soon become a member of a secret brotherhood as old as urology itself. —A. Kyras
It is time that scientists and other public intellectuals observed that the contest between faith and reason is zero-sum. There is no question but that nominally religious scientists like Francis Collins and Kenneth R. Miller are doing lasting harm to our discourse by the accommodations they have made to religious irrationality. Likewise, Stephen Jay Gould’s notion of “non-overlapping magisteria” served only the religious dogmatists who realize, quite rightly, that there is only one magisterium. Whether a person is religious or secular, there is nothing more sacred than the facts. Either Jesus was born of a virgin, or he wasn’t; either there is a God who despises homosexuals, or there isn’t. It is time that sane human beings agreed on the standards of evidence necessary to substantiate truth-claims of this sort. The issue is not, as ID advocates allege, whether science can “rule out” the existence of the biblical God. There are an infinite number of ludicrous ideas that science could not “rule out,” but which no sensible person would entertain. The issue is whether there is any good reason to believe the sorts of things that religious dogmatists believe—that God exists and takes an interest in the affairs of human beings; that the soul enters the zygote at the moment of conception (and, therefore, that blastocysts are the moral equivalents of persons); etc. There simply is no good reason to believe such things, and scientists should stop hiding their light under a bushel and make this emphatically obvious to everyone.
But while the skeptics’ paper was still in the works, the Cornell team provided several audio recordings to Dr. Prum and Dr. Robbins. Dr. Jackson, who was out of the country, has not had a chance to listen to them, Dr. Prum said. The evidence was so convincing—the characteristic nasal “kent” call and double raps on a tree—that Dr. Prum and Dr. Robbins withdrew their challenge.
“The thrilling new sound recordings provide clear and convincing evidence that the ivory-billed woodpecker is not extinct,” Dr. Prum said in a statement.
