Tag Archives: Evolution

Saturday Catching Up

A lot has been going on lately and I need to tell you about it.

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My beautiful wife Heather has become certified as a Zumba instructor and is now teaching classes at our gym.  Check this link if you want to see a video demonstration of Zumba. (I am not embedding the video because so many of them have the auto start enabled which is annoying.) Anyways she works hard coming up with routines to make the class interesting for the customers. She is having a lot of fun at it.

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Son Logan just finished his Junior year at his new school. He did very well. As you may recall he has Asperger’s Syndrome and had been in a special needs school since second grade. This year he switched over to a college prep Christian School. The academic load zoomed up off the chart over what he was exposed to before and he responded well and has made all A’s and B’s. He has worked his butt off to do that and has learned a lot about academics.  Heather learned American Sign Language and I got a pretty good refresher in Geometry and Biology. Geometry has changed much in the last 44 years but Biology has zoomed forward a bunch.

I had to bite my tongue in biology on the whole Creation Science vs Evolution thing, because it is a Christian school,  and I told him before he got into it that his Dad was a Christian and also a die hard evolutionist and further I didn’t see any contradiction between the two. I also told him that he was old enough to decide for himself what he wanted to believe. Hopefully I haven’t scarred the poor child or caused him to get a bad grade. I have a feeling that I may have made it on a few prayer lists as well. No harm in that though.

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And let me see, in my new job as Director of Project Development I actually had somebody call up and offer me a ticket to the Big 12 Conference Baseball Championship here in Tulsa that past week. After spending 21 year entertaining and hustling drinks for other people it felt strange to be on the other side again but I made the most of it. We sat behind a scouting team from the Baltimore Orioles. They had radar guns, complicated charts and nice haircuts. The guy on the far right had a big old giant World Series ring on his finger also. I don’t know who he is but when he stood up I could see that he was big, real big. It was all very cool. And you know something college baseball is good although I still don’t like the “ping” of the bats instead of crack of a wood bad. But hey, I’ll get over it.

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And last Sunday Heather and I went to the Hopjam festival sponsored by Hanson. It was great. Great music and great beer. What a combination.

Also, we are fixing to (as we say in Oklahoma) on our family vacation. All you burglars out there don’t get too excited because we have a full time house/pet sitter.  I’m going to be taking a digital break so I won’t be posting for about a week and a half probably starting late next week. I’m a host of the Skywatch Friday meme that comes out on Thursdays and I have already prepared the next two week’s posts. I hope that I didn’t screw up the linky’s or the posts or anything because there won’t be much I can do it about it.

Anyway, what is new with you?

The Age of Disbelief

The March issue of National Geographic has a great article titled “The Age of Disbelief” discussing the rise of skepticism about science and our increased polarization. I found it fascinating.

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Logan at Tulsa’s great Children’s Science Museum

It delved into the beliefs and disbeliefs of Climate Change, Evolution, The Moon Landing, Vaccinations, and Genetically Modified Organisms.

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Indigenous South Dakota Giraffes

 

I liked the article because it delved into the reasons why people don’t accept science rather than attacking the people. Science, the article says, is often counter-intuitive. It doesn’t appear to make sense to us. Even scientists have trouble sometimes.

#sunrise #southtulsa #igersok #myoklahoma

For instance, I know in my head and believe with all my heart that the earth revolves around the sun yet I can see with my own eyes that the sun comes up in the east and sets in the west. It takes considerable effort and the view of a night time sky to grasp the truth. That induces considerable awe when one begins to think about it and our place in the universe.

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The whole evolution thing upsets lots of people. Many people don’t believe in evolution. The genius of the theory of evolution is that Darwin proposed it before we had any idea of DNA or RNA and all that. The problem of course with denying evolution is that one quickly moves to denying physics, chemistry, astronomy, and just about every other branch of science.

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Logan at the wonderful City Museum in Saint Louis several years ago.

 

Vaccinations are another thing. Many well educated parents are not letting their children be vaccinated and that is endangering us all. The study published in 1998 in The Lancet has been thoroughly discredited but there are still many parents out there convinced that their children’s autism was caused by vaccinations.

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Me, looking forward to more global warming

 

Climate change is getting a lot of press now. I’m a Chemical Engineer and I remember in my Heat Transfer classes  in school discussions in our classes and text about radiative heat transfer and how certain molecules such as carbon dioxide help hold the heat on the earth. They didn’t talk about global warming because that wasn’t a concern back in the 1970’s.

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Closest thing to a lab photo I had.

 

Many people don’t understand that science is more than just a set of facts, it is a method. It is a method that eventually gets to the truth. Some of my creationist friends tell me that scientists are always changing their minds. Well, duh, yes. That is what you do when new facts force you to change your beliefs.

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Logan’s old school

 

The article points to a kind of tribalism that affects beliefs. The article asserts that people believe things because their “tribe” believes them. I think they are on to something. I’ve been long fascinated how beliefs are grouped up to a great extent. So that it seems to me that many evangelical Christians are also Republicans and also believe in the right to bear arms, creationism, and support the Keystone pipeline. Other people are Unitarians, who tend to be Democrats, vegans, abortion rights, and oppose the Keystone pipeline. (Everybody understands I’m going extremes, right?)

So, the article asserts, we believe things in order to retain membership in our tribe. (Maybe that is why sometimes I feel like I don’t have a tribe. Let me see, I’m a Christian, who is ambivalent about Keystone, am a devout evolutionist. I think GMO’s are probably harmless but support labelling because I think people have a right to know what the heck they are eating. I firmly believe in human climate change but wonder about our ability to reverse the changes that are coming.) Anyways the article implies that the tribalism leads to polarization. And I think polarization is bad.

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Non GMO sheep. These sheep are pets who will probably die of old age.

 

So maybe the way out is to talk with each instead of at each other. The older I get the more I think people are entitled to their beliefs. I also think that beliefs and acting on those beliefs have consequences. I also think that our often timid science education is partly to blame. Too many people don’t understand the scientific method and how unmerciful it is too erroneous thinking. I’m not a scientist, I’m an engineer and I’ve been to technical conferences where the debates about these technical matters really got heated. Science will win in the end.

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Horse mounted YogiCam

 

What do you think?

Additional Information: Infographics, I love infographics. I am all over information in graphical form.

Infographic on Climate Change Denials from ReUseThisBag.com

++ Click to Enlarge Image ++

Source: Reusable Bags

Infographic on Americans Views on Evolution vs Creationism

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America’s View on Evolution and Creationism (Infographic) | The BioLogos Forum.

Information on Vaccines and Autism

Vaccines and Autism
Source: Healthcare-Management-Degree.net

Are you still with me? How about another Infographic on the Scientific Method. I like it except it doesn’t show the feedback that often occurs between hypothesis and results. Scientists have to change their feedback if their experiement doesn’t work.

I have to tell you that finding a decent Infographic for GMO foods was hard. I hardly consider Monsanto and the American Enterprise Institute independent sources and I thought most of the anti GMO infographics were very sketchy and were also not independent. The university sponsored data were boring long youtube videos. Here is an infographic that I thought was pretty good from GMOAnswers.com

GMO Infographic