1. 'Irrational Atheist' trounces God-deniers

Comment #120581 by DavidMcC on February 2, 2008 at 3:56 am

Day:"Dawkins thinks humanity should follow Darwin just long enough to cast off Jesus Christ, then ditch Darwin in favor of following Richard Dawkins' opinion on life, the universe and everything."
So Day thinks that Darwin was a social Darwinist?
Maybe Day needs to study more.

2. I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

Comment #77915 by DavidMcC on October 11, 2007 at 5:22 am

Steve99:"It is worth considering that there is probably not much that Venter could invent in the lab that has not been tried by evolution over billions of years."
The difference is that Venter can arrange different selection rules for his new organisms, that would not have prevailed, even if nature did try them before.

3. The Problem with Atheism

Comment #75547 by DavidMcC on October 3, 2007 at 1:31 am

Any comparison between the "A word" and the "N word" would surely be unthinkable in the UK. This therefore indicates a big difference, at the moment at least, between the US and the UK. I sincerely hope it never gets that bad in the UK, even though I don't live there much any more.

4. Atheists arise: Dawkins spreads the A-word among America's unbelievers

Comment #74929 by DavidMcC on October 1, 2007 at 6:38 am

The Prof. has every right to take the battle against religious groups in the US (and elsewhere) who are trying to undermine his job as Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science. In a sense, they started this by using politics to attack science education, first in the US, and then elsewhere, including the UK.

5. Why Christians should take Richard Dawkins seriously

Comment #74003 by DavidMcC on September 27, 2007 at 4:15 am

"He is currently undertaking doctoral research in the area of spirituality and evolutionary psychology."
At first, I thought: "How the hell can he be an evolutionary psychologist and not understand that man created God, not the other way round?" Then, I noticed that he is also a "therapist", and it suddenly made sense! He's in the same predicament as a homeopathist who realises his/her pure water potions are just placebos, but can't admit it, as this would destroy their effect!

6. There Go The Dinosaurs

Comment #73999 by DavidMcC on September 27, 2007 at 3:44 am

"Maybe if I hadn't given him that economy size box of LSD soaked communion wafers for Christmas '69 he'd still be one of us, fighting the bad fight..."
Thanks for that, Goatboy2012! That's priceless!

7. India's Internal Partition

Comment #63977 by DavidMcC on August 17, 2007 at 5:56 am

There is some hope, posiedon:
http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/rwb.nsf/db900sid/YAOI-6YK2ZE?OpenDocument

8. Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing

Comment #62101 by DavidMcC on August 8, 2007 at 6:51 am

Luthien, I suppose it's a bit like window-dressing - it attracts you, but if you want to see more, you have to come inside the shop!

9. Eight-million-year-old bug is alive and growing

Comment #62026 by DavidMcC on August 8, 2007 at 12:58 am

Have you tried the "Evolution and Natural Selection" forum, HH, rodviking?

10. Vatican cardinal calls on Catholics to stop funding Amnesty

Comment #50357 by DavidMcC on June 17, 2007 at 6:32 am

"I think Amnesty International should open a file on the Catholic Church's human rights abuses!"
Good idea, Luthien!

11. Vatican cardinal calls on Catholics to stop funding Amnesty

Comment #50095 by DavidMcC on June 15, 2007 at 3:00 am

So, the Vatican is ganging up with rapists to make the innocent suffer in order to follow their own logic ad absurdam! Why am I not surprised?

12. Majority of Republicans Doubt Theory of Evolution

Comment #49524 by DavidMcC on June 12, 2007 at 9:05 am

Only 14% of Americans accept unguided evolution as the process by which humanity came to exist. Very sad.
__________

Fezik, the concept of evolution existed before Darwin published his famous book. I suspect that he just made it more controversial, by taking it to its logical conclusion.

13. Teaching assistant quit in protest at Harry Potter

Comment #48775 by DavidMcC on June 9, 2007 at 3:20 am

Poor Ms Allen! But the only difference between her magical hero and those in Harry Potter is that no-one pretends that the latter are real.

14. Hamas Kindergarten Graduation Ceremony

Comment #48222 by DavidMcC on June 7, 2007 at 5:34 am

I think the reason that this looks worse than, say G.I. Joe could be that the Palestinians don't have helicopter gunships, cluster bombs, etc. Other than suicide bombs, they only have all-but-useless weapons, but to use the suicide bombs requires this tragic sort "grooming". Therefore, it's only to be expected as long as there isn't peace.

15. Group Threatens to Sue Pentagon Over Military Role in Evangelical Festival

Comment #45737 by DavidMcC on May 29, 2007 at 5:19 am

Well, trapper, if the US military is being taken over by the "rapture and Armaggedon" brigade(with their Armaggedon being in Iraq), then you bet it's serious!

16. I'm Sure God is Scared

Comment #44670 by DavidMcC on May 25, 2007 at 6:57 am

After all, Mango, you can't hate an entity that doesn't actually exist. (RD probably said that.)

17. Let us pray for the soul of Richard Dawkins

Comment #40314 by DavidMcC on May 14, 2007 at 5:38 am

"But there is hope. In a recent interview, Dawkins describes a gigantic intelligence which designs the universe. He acknowledges that there may be an awe-inspiring and uplifting force out there and that he is prepared to encounter it. It sounds suspiciously like God under another name."
Ridelo, this sounds more like Fred Hoyle's "cosmic intelligence" to me. RD has refered to such a possibility, but Odone conveniently left out this (or words to the effect): "... but it is extremely unlikely."

18. Disney daughter calls Muslim Mickey evil

Comment #39545 by DavidMcC on May 11, 2007 at 5:21 am

It looka as if "Muslim Mickey" is going to become yet another source of tension between Hamas and the PA:
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2530783.ece

19. Disney daughter calls Muslim Mickey evil

Comment #39543 by DavidMcC on May 11, 2007 at 5:04 am

Catchy_nick, it was the fact that Walt Disney used Joe McCarthy's unamerican activities witch-hunt in his fight to break his cartoonists' union when they went on strike that got him a reputation for not being the most sensitive of employers.
http://disney.go.com/disneyatoz/familymuseum/exhibits/articles/waltandhuac/index.html

20. World's most prominent atheist takes on the Biblical God (and other topics)

Comment #39514 by DavidMcC on May 11, 2007 at 3:36 am

IQHQ, their "happiness" is probably just media training. You have to smile if you want to influence people. Having two people, both smiling and backing each other up is another trick.

21. Just 120 Trillion Miles From Home

Comment #36448 by DavidMcC on May 1, 2007 at 7:02 am

Devolution, it pays to take some of the more speculative stuff in NS with a large pinch of salt, especially when it comes to time travel and extra dimensions.

22. Darwin nearly failed to evolve in print

Comment #36360 by DavidMcC on May 1, 2007 at 1:48 am

Unmesh, male nipples are simply the result of the fact that the skin (including the nipples) is formed before an embryo's gender is expressed. Thus, if men didn't have nipples, nor would women!

23. New Noah's Ark ready to sail

Comment #36146 by DavidMcC on April 30, 2007 at 9:42 am

'"I don't think the man who made this ever expected that global warming will become (such an important) issue -- and suddenly having the ark would be meaningful in the middle of Holland."

Under sunny skies Saturday, Huibers said he wasn't worried about another biblical flood, since according to Genesis, the rainbow is the sign of God's promise never to flood the world again.'

There's a double irony here: Huibers doesn't think global warming will flood the Netherlands (because of rainbows, for God's sake!), but the Dutch people will probably take home the message from his ark that the country could be in danger of just such a disaster!

24. New Noah's Ark ready to sail

Comment #36143 by DavidMcC on April 30, 2007 at 9:31 am

AnatheistinNigeria, I suspect that this stunt of Huibers is a desperate measure to try to reverse an historic trend. Here's a revealing quote from the CNN article:

"Huibers said he hopes the project will renew interest in Christianity in the Netherlands, where churchgoing has fallen dramatically in the past 50 years."

25. Just 120 Trillion Miles From Home

Comment #36139 by DavidMcC on April 30, 2007 at 9:16 am

Slartibartfast: 'Yeah. Another motto might be "bringing peace and tranquility to habitable planets across the galaxy by crashing spacecrafts into them at half the speed of light". :-)'
Yes, an all-too-often overlooked aspect of the steady acceleration approach to space travel! In fact, wouldn't it be more likely to miss and go sailing past, never to be seen again? The only way out would be to use reverse thrust from the destination star, but that would obviously add a lot to the journey time.

26. New Noah's Ark ready to sail

Comment #36113 by DavidMcC on April 30, 2007 at 8:04 am

MIND_REBEL, I have just watched a CNN news broadcast about Huibers' ark, here in the Netherlands. I am pleased to inform you that Michael and Colleen sent the whole thing up very nicely!

27. God Is in the Dendrites

Comment #36093 by DavidMcC on April 30, 2007 at 7:14 am

"By spirituality, I meen that feeling I am sure we have all had that we are connected to each other and everything else in the universe."
Or maybe only those who suffer temporal lobe epilepsy?

28. The God disunion: there is a place for faith in science, insists Winston

Comment #35076 by DavidMcC on April 26, 2007 at 6:21 am

Anotherclinton: "Did he have a big hand in killing group selection?"
Could be a red herring, AC. RDs argument against group selection might have a hole in it (see some of the threads in the forum), and even if it doesn't, it is beside the point of this thread.

29. Gay hate church to picket VT gun rampage funerals

Comment #33738 by DavidMcC on April 21, 2007 at 12:48 pm

The only sense I can make of these fundie nuts is that they believe we are now in the "end times", with the Iraq war as the "Armageddon" predicted by the book of revelations, so that anyone who dies is being denied rapture and is therefore a "sinner". Crazy!

30. Atheists for Jesus

Comment #28818 by DavidMcC on March 31, 2007 at 4:22 am

Richard: "Let's put it even more bluntly. From a rational choice point of view, or from a Darwinian point of view, human super niceness is just plain dumb."
I see religion, and, separately, morality as manifestations of emotion in modifying what would otherwise be "cold reason". Yet emotions are clearly a mixed bag of things that appeal and don't appeal to us atheists. When it comes to science, one needs cold reason, but we cannot always apply it in politics, otherwise we could become murderous machines - social animals without the positive social emotions of morality. It is regrettable that emotion gets applied to politics through religion instead of directly.

31. Dawkins says religion is 'like sucking a dummy'

Comment #28590 by DavidMcC on March 30, 2007 at 3:12 am

MelM: "A religion gene? Arn't we getting close to the "inate idea" business that Locke had to fight against."
Not necessarily, maybe just a genetic tendency to give emotion more say than logic in decisions. Difficult circumstances might also tend to favour emotion.

32. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27822 by DavidMcC on March 27, 2007 at 1:23 am

Steven, do you know of any evidence for this resonance effect causing the violet band in the rainbow? I always thought it was purely down to ratios of absorption-related cone signals.

33. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27668 by DavidMcC on March 26, 2007 at 4:00 am

Ciaomhe McKenna (From "science writer" awards: "All I need now for four colour vision (tetrachromacy) is a superior brain."
It looks like she was unlucky!
Edit: ...by which I mean she is apparently stuck with the same old trichromatic visual cortex that the rest of us have to manage with! Maybe it was the same with those two transgenic mice that couldn't see red.

34. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27663 by DavidMcC on March 26, 2007 at 3:32 am

TeapotInOrbit: "Oh BTW, I believe 3D mapping doesn't rely on trichomacy. If memory serves, different ganglion cells transmit signals preferentially from different orientations of light; ..."
Are you saying that our eyes can potentially sense the state of polarization of light? I thought that was bees!

35. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27506 by DavidMcC on March 25, 2007 at 4:27 am

According to this, tetrachromacy can arise in the daughter of a red-green colour-blind woman! An ironic result of the way X-chromosomes work, it seems:
http://www.ryansutherland.com/media/tetrachromats.pdf

BTW, Karl, I couldn't get your aris.ss.uci.edu link to work, unfortunately.

36. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27489 by DavidMcC on March 25, 2007 at 2:39 am

PsyPro, is it known how people with the various kinds of colour-blindness respond to the images on the Wendy Carlos site? Do any of them see any colours that they don't normally see when they look at the slides? I imagine that if the blindness arises from the cones, they would, but if it is in the visual cortex, they wouldn't.
Edit: I suppose that even though most colour-blindness is due to lack of a particular cone pigment, the visual cortex might, or might not be structured for trichromacy. Therefore it would be an interesting experiment for colour-blind people to try.

37. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27425 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 1:49 pm

Ridelo, I am sure the small size of insect eyes helps them see UV. Below about 320nm (ie the so-called UV B and UV C), human eyes absorb nearly all of the UV before it reaches the retina. However, as you suggest, the cut-off would be at shorter wavelengths in small eyes (and maybe the fluids would be different in any case, I really don't know).
In fact, at some wavelength >320nm (ie UV A), there could be UV detection in human eyes, because our retinas are vulnerable to UV damage at such wavelengths, at least until "yellowing" occurs (see eg http://www.optometrists.asn.au/eyevision/consumers/uv ) In other words, with our normal eye fluids, UV A vision would progressively fail if we were in the sun too much without sun-glasses!

38. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27417 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 1:11 pm

Ridelo, a likely problem with UV and IR sensors in humans would be absorption in the humours of the eye. Chances are, they will not pass much at those wavelengths. Also, if we did see UV, it would interfere with RGB vision, reducing colour contrast there, because those cones remain sensitive into the UV, to some extent.

39. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27416 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 1:05 pm

I wonder if neuroscience is sufficiently advanced to see differences between the way the visual cortex of modified mice works compared with "normal" mice and with primates, that see three primary colours anyway? This might resolve the matter.

40. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27387 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 10:25 am

Karl, the learning I referred to was by a different part of the brain from the conscious learning that we engage in as older children and adults. It is akin to the "learning" that usually eliminates synaesthesia in babies.

41. Atheist banned from committee on religious education

Comment #27368 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 8:49 am

I guess West Sussex isn't the only offender. Here's a quote from the British Humanist Association website:
"...Many LEAs are plainly discriminating against conscientious unbelievers such as humanists", says Hanne Stinson, executive director of the British Humanist Association.

42. New clues to why we see red

Comment #27358 by DavidMcC on March 24, 2007 at 8:13 am

KarlJ, isn't this result evidence that mammalian brains actually learn to use their retinal abilities (ie form neuron connections in the visual cortex) after they are born.

43. Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right

Comment #26934 by DavidMcC on March 22, 2007 at 11:39 am

Padster, Einstein aparently decided to put the cosmological constant into his general theory of relativity in order to allow the universe the possibilty of avoiding ultimate gravitational collapse. In other words, it imparts some "springiness" to space itself, to counter the effects of gravity. (It is sometimes called the universal constant, but that causes confusion with fundamental constants, sometimes known as universal fundamental constants!)
There's a good article on the issue at this URL:
http://super.colorado.edu/~michaele/Lambda/why.html
BTW, I should have said that Einstein predicted the photoelectric effect, rather than demonstrated (which apparently came ten years later, by someone else).

44. Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right

Comment #26870 by DavidMcC on March 22, 2007 at 4:37 am

Padster1976, I think you mixed up one 1905 discovery by Einstein with another. Steve Jones was referring to the photoelectric effect, which Einstein demonstrated in 1905. This really did blow much (trhough not all) of classical physics away. Ironic really, as Einstein never accepted the quantum theory that went with the photoelectric effect!

45. Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils

Comment #26863 by DavidMcC on March 22, 2007 at 3:14 am

HunterZolomon, I was mainly referring to the BNP, although I also suspect that over-enthusiastic campaigns against religious expression can have the opposite of the desired effect, by entrenching the religious extremists within mtheir own communities

46. Britain Proposes Allowing Schools to Forbid Full-Face Muslim Veils

Comment #26848 by DavidMcC on March 22, 2007 at 1:51 am

DavidJMH: "...sensible Britains supporting the BNP"
A contradiction in terms. The inter-ethnic strife that the BNP seeks to stir up, partly through jumping on any bandwagon that suits, isn't sensible. It may is desirable to achieve the withering away of religion, but stirring up trouble has the oposite effect.

47. US TV Commercial for The God Delusion during Countdown with Keith Olbermann

Comment #26555 by DavidMcC on March 20, 2007 at 11:06 am

I just have one niggle with the ad. It is a bit over simplistic. Before there were religiously inspired suicide bombings, there were suicide bombings inspired by nationalism (eg by the LTTE in Sri Lanka), so there is no reason to claim that there would be none without religion. Possibly fewer, though.

48. Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It?

Comment #26153 by DavidMcC on March 17, 2007 at 9:09 am

If a genetic basis for religiosity could be established, then in utero removal of christianity would be an option worth considering.

49. Cold is hot in evolution -- Researchers debunk belief species evolve faster in tropics

Comment #26009 by DavidMcC on March 16, 2007 at 4:51 am

I don't see that a region containing more species than another should be taken as anything more than an indication of that region containing more terrain-related ecological niches than the other, initially mainly through plants having more variation.

50. Conservapedia v Wikipedia

Comment #25309 by DavidMcC on March 12, 2007 at 2:13 am

The current Conservapedia on dinosaurs: "An expedition which included Charles W. Gilmore, Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology with the United States National Museum, examined an ancient pictograph which is claimed to point to dinosaurs and man existing [6][7] Since it is a pictorial representation produced by human beings, it has no validity as proof whatsoever, much like the Bible."
I bet that won't last long!