If you know only a little bit about Charles Darwin, you know that he figured out Evolution via his study of the finches (and other birds) of the Galapagos. If you know a bit more than that about Darwin, you know that he totally messed up his collection of birds from the Galapagos Islands, and didn’t really think up Evolution until much later in time. If you know more than that about Darwin, then you know that neither of these characterizations of the great man’s work is accurate.

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We’re taking a break from live recording this week. On the podcast, we’re talking science and storytelling. Guest host Marie-Claire Shanahan speaks to science journalist and author Deborah Blum about her national bestseller The Poisoner’s Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York. The book tells the fascinating story of the way that chemical detectives started a revolution in the investigation of crime. And Desiree Schell talks to Bora Zivkovic, blog editor at Scientific American, about a new event that teaches science through personal stories.

The podcast will be available to download at 9 pm MT on Friday, February 24.

This will be cool. CLICK HERE FOR LINKS

“Deconstructing Mormonism” Thomas Riskas on Atheists Talk #155, Sunday, February 18, 2012.

If you think you’ve learned all you need to know about Mormonism from South Park episodes and the broadway musical, Book of Mormon, you must join us this Sunday! Atheists Talk will be interviewing author, lecturer, and secular humanist, Thomas Riskas about his book Deconstructing Mormonism: An Analysis and Assessment of the Mormon Faith, which is introduced in the forward by philosopher and professor Kai Nelson.

Thomas Riskas converted to Mormonism as a young man and spent 20 years in the Church. He rose up through the ranks of leadership, acting an Elder, Seventy and High Priest. He was a missionary, a mission leader and mission president for seven years. He had a family and raised his children in the Church. Years later he came to believe that the claims made by Mormonism – and by all religions with similar belief systems – are not only untrue, but an empty nonreality. In Deconstructing Mormonism, Mr. Riskas examines in detail the Mormon concepts of God, the “Plan of Salvation”, and faith in God and Christ, and then breaks down these ideas by illuminating the contradictions in Mormon faith and examining the psychosocial effects of the faith on its believers.

Details, links

Just in: (Hat tip Ed)

A Rhode Island public school committee on Thursday voted not to appeal a federal court decision ordering the removal of a prayer banner displayed in a high school.

The Cranston School Committee cast the 5-2 vote at a public hearing to discuss a lawsuit that had been brought on behalf of 16-year-old atheist Jessica Ahlquist, a junior at Cranston High School West.

“I’m thrilled,” Ahlquist said after the vote.

The banner, put up in 1963, has been covered since a federal judge last month ruled it was unconstitutional and ordered it removed. The Class of 1963, which was the first to graduate from the school, gave the prayer banner and school creed as gifts.

The full story is here.

Shall we now place bets on the kind of retaliation, and if it will be primarily anti-freethinking or simply blatant misogyny given that a female did this?

It is said that among those at the meeting, some were wearing “Evil Little Thing” tee shirts. This refers to a state rep’s comments about Jessica. Get your Evil Little Thing tee shirt here.

Anyway, thank you Jessica Ahlquist.

First, you should know, he does not steal any material goods. But he does weigh about 245 pounds and he tricks athletes into giving h him a piggy back ride. (Why do they call it a piggy back ride, anyway?)

Our local news station has the headline: “A 5-State Ban For ‘Piggyback Bandit’” which makes me wonder how you “ban” a strange guy who is tricking people into giving him piggy back rides.

This is all very confusing. Continue reading Have you heard of the “Piggy Back Bandit”? →

It used to be that there were always a few good Republicans to be found, even though the party as a whole represents the oppressors and yahoos 99% of the time. That’s hardly ever true today, except of course in the state of Maine:

Maine Republican Senators Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, two of the Republican party’s only moderate voices left and who have broken with the party in the past on health related issues, voiced their support of President Obama’s compromise on contraception.

From Here

Mice with a certain laboratory variant of Alzheimer’s disease have been shown to get much better with the use of an existing pharmaceutical. This is only in mice, only with a certain model of the disease, and is only one study, so we must be very cautious, but the results are on the face rather dramatic.

Here’s the rundown.

Anti-science and creationist rhetoric, coming from organizations like the Discovery Institute, often paints Darwin as handmaiden to the Nazis and founder of racist biology. The eugenics movement of the early twentieth century is uncritically melded with Darwin’s writings that touched on race, and the genetic determinism of certain aspects of modern biology is uncritically melded with Darwinian theories.

I’m giving a talk this weekend for the Minnesota Atheists that will address Darwin’s racism (or lack thereof) and explore the relationship between concepts of race and racism and evolutionary biology of Darwin’s day as well as that of the twenty-first century.

Darwin was a nineteenth century gentlemen who benefited greatly from his position in a world colonial empire, but it was his exploration of that world that led him away from religious dogma and soured him on certain racist concepts. He was the founder of much of the theory that was later to be used in rather nefarious ways, but those uses were never based on good biology. This talk will directly address the relationship between modern biology and modern race theory.

This will be at 2:00 at the Roseville Public Library on Hamline Avenue, following the Minnesota Atheists business meeting. After the meeting, we will dine at nearby Panda Garden Buffet. Please join us!

DETAILS HERE

Years ago, my friend Rick Bribiescas and I got into a friendly debate about the cause of muscle atrophy and bone loss during space flight. We both felt that a homeostatic mechanism was thrown out of whack by the circumstances of weightlessness. One of us suggested that zero gravity caused to lose their ability to regulate tissue mass because gravity would be part of the mechanism for measuring this variable. The other of us thought the body was reacting as though it was falling, and transforming ingested material into bodily tissue would be forestalled until some time after hitting the ground, but that never happened. I can’t remember which of us thought which.

But we were probably both wrong. It may be the case that gravity is an expected contextual feature of normal cellular activity, so when there is either not much gravity (as in zero-G of space flight) or even too much gravity, cellular processes to awry more or less randomly, which would ultimately translate into gene expression being up or down regulated, more or less randomly, across the genome.

A recent study placed fertile fruit fly eggs in three different environments: High magnetism and normal gravity, simulated zero G caused by a magnetic field, and double G caused by the same magnetic field but turned upside down.

The results are interesting.