So there’s a little bit of a kerfuffle over my posting on Geocentrism which appears to be working itself out. I posted it because of reports that some goofball Georgia state representative put out a memo about the Jews running the Earth, how evolution is a Jewish plot of some kind, and how the Earth doesn’t spin. He was the one who brought up the mind-numbing tear-your-eyes-out-of-your-head website www.fixedearth.com in the first place. Have fun reading that. It should come with a warning label.

But to make matters worse, another goofball — this time a Texas legislator — used the state House distribution system to send that memo out to the entire Texas legislature. That’s when this thing hit national attention, as well it should. If you’re going to do something that ridiculous and humiliate yourself to that kind of level, it’s best to do it in front of as big an audience as possible.

Someone, at some point, must have clued the Texan in on what he actually did, because he did something people rarely do– he actually went and read the Fixed Earth website. Red faced, he has now apologized and said he should have looked at the website first.

You think?

Blecccch. This story gets weirder and weirder. Go to Talking Points Memo for details. This whole thing is making me dizzy. Maybe I’m just feeling the Earth spin.

Oh, remember the days when Senator and presidential wannabe Senator John McCain was the straightest talker in the political arena?

Poof. Gone.

He’s speaking in Seattle at an event co-sponsored by the Discovery Institute, the think-tank den of iniguity where creationists dream up how to more convincingly lie to the public about science.

Unless McCain is going there to tell them to their faces that they are evil, unscrupulous liars, then I am done with McCain. Honestly, the past few months he’s done what he can to alienate the mainstream of America by courting the fundamentalists and going back on promises he made, which really ought to be enough. This is just icing on that cake. If he’s willing to woo (and I use that word quite purposely) that collection of scammers, then he is not to be trusted in the White House. Period.

Ask Chris Mooney. He caught them red-handed, lying about the President’s stance on global warming.

It’s this simple, folks: the White House lies about science. Every time? Maybe not, but having spent time in Vegas I can tell you it’s the the way to bet. Over and over again, we see them manipulating the truth (i.e. lying) whenever some scientific evidence (fact) comes out that goes against whatever policy (insanity) they are promoting (shilling).

In science, a basic premise is "Assume a statement is false and investigate". This works well when dealing with the natural world, so you can make sure you’re not fooling yourself. It’s time — way, way past time– for everyone to apply this to all aspects of life.

Especially anything this Administration says. It really is that simple.

From the Times Online UK:

Dr Abdul Majid Katme, head of the Islamic Medical Association, is telling Muslims that almost all vaccines contain products derived from animal and human tissue, which make them "haram", or unlawful for Muslims to take.Islam permits only the consumption of halal products, where the animal has had its throat cut and bled to death while God’s name is invoked.

Will they invoke God’s name when their child is suffering from measles? How about mumps? In Islam, the men are regarded more highly than women; how would they feel if their borderline-adult son had these symptoms:

Mumps in adolescent and adult males may also result in the development of orchitis, an inflammation of the testicles. Usually one testicle becomes swollen and painful about 7 to 10 days after the parotids swell. This is accompanied by a high fever, shaking chills, headache, nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain that can sometimes be mistaken for appendicitis if the right testicle is affected.

I can imagine yelling lots of blasphemous statements under those conditions.

The Times Online article goes on to say:

His warning has been criticised by the Department of Health and the British Medical Association, who said Katme risked increasing infections ranging from flu and measles to polio and diphtheria in Muslim communities.

I sometimes joke that if creationists don’t want to believe in evolution, then they shouldn’t benefit from it, including vaccinations. However, the ramifications would spread to the larger population which understands just what medical science has done for humanity (as someone who is older than 30 and wears glasses, I am grateful to be alive because of medical science).

There are so many reasons to fight fundamentalist religion. Your very life — and the lives of your kids — should be at the top of that list.

Tip o’ the surgeon’s mask to Respectful Insolence.

Note: I meant to publish this post last week, but somehow it slipped between the cracks. It should have gone up before this post for sure. Sorry about this.

Through Northstate Science comes the tip that Kurt Repanshek has posted about the PEER press release on creationism at the Grand Canyon on his blog, National Parks Traveler.

If you don’t know about this issue, you can read what I wrote here and here (though maybe in reverse order would be better).

Kurt has a rather devastating list of evidence against the PEER group, showing the press release to be pretty far off the mark. I disagree with one conclusion though:

Now, one piece of PEER’s release that comes pretty close to standing up is the group’s claim that the Park Service has failed to review the propriety of the park’s bookstores to sell “Grand Canyon: A Different View.” This book, by Tom Vail, claims that the Grand Canyon was created by the great flood that forced Noah to take to his ark. PEER would like it banned from the park.

[...]

Now, I say the claim “comes pretty close” to being true because the book has indeed been discussed within the agency but no final, official, decision has been reached by the agency’s Office of Policy.

I think that part of PEER’s release is dead on. The NPS has taken three years to review this problem, which is too long even for the government to move. This is not a difficult problem to understand or to solve. In fact, there are several solutions:

• Remove it from the store.
• Sell it, but under the "myth" section.
• Put a sticker on it saying "The contents of this book are speculative, and in fact are indeed provably wrong. The authors are not well (or, apparently, at all) versed in the scientific method, the best way through which to test the nature of reality. The authors put their personal beliefs ahead of facts. In case you are still not clear, this text should be thought of as a religious tome and therefore cannot be endorsed by any branch of the U.S. Government."

You get the idea.

However they wanna do it, they could do something. Stalling is not the answer, and in fact will bite them on their collective butts. The nibbles have already begun.

Some people have accused me of being anti-religious, anti-christian, whatever. The truth is, I am anti-irrational. As long as you make sense, you’ll have no quarrel with me (well, that’s not strictly true– you can make sense and still be wrong… but if you don’t make sense then I guarantee you’ll be wrong).

But if you want to make absolutely no sense, spew irrationalities, and then claim that you are irrevocably correct and that everyone else is wrong, then fundamentalist religiosity is a great place to start.

Take this screed, for example. Acording to Dr. Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid, a "scientist" at the Egyptian National Research Center, we should dump Greenwich time and switch to… wait for it… Mecca time!

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: When British colonialism or the British kingdom were in control, and it was “an empire on which the sun never sets,” it imposed Greenwich Mean Time. This creates two problems for the world. The first problem is that in Greenwich, the magnetic field of Earth is 8.5 degrees, whereas in Mecca the magnetic field is zero.

[...]

Interviewer: What other benefits are there to calculating time according to Mecca?

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: If you calculate time according to Mecca, those 8.5 minutes… The magnetic field of Earth, for example… What I say is that there are people at the North Pole and the South Pole who cannot come here in multitudes.

Interviewer: Really?

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: This is because the magnetic force is concentrated there, which affects people’s blood and the biological movement of life. It has been proven that if magnetism, anywhere, exceeds 1,000 gauss, which equals one tenth of a tesla, it affects the ability of the hemoglobin in the blood to carry oxygen to the body’s tissues, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues.

Interviewer: In other words, the ability to live…

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: Yes, to live… This means is that when you are in Mecca, the ability of the blood to carry oxygen to the tissues is greater than anywhere else in the world.

Interviewer: That’s why, when people travel to Mecca, they return full of energy.

Abd Al-Baset Al-Sayyid: In Mecca, you don’t exert any effort. That’s why you may see an old man, who cannot walk, or who walks with crutches, and even though it gets very crowded around the Ka’ba, he is filled with great strength, and he circles the Ka’ba. You do not exert any effort, and you are filled with energy, because you are in a place in which there is no magnetic force.

I was going to tear this apart step by step, but c’mon, why bother. This guy is so full of crap it would just be kind of sad to do it. People want to visit Mecca from the north and south poles? That ought to be a short list. And the stuff about magnetic fields and blood is utter garbage. I have had MRIs on my back and my knee in the past, and if blood flowed differently depending on magnetic field strength, my body would have exploded like an overstuffed balloon during the procedure. MRIs use a huge magnetic field, tens of thousands of times stronger than the Earth’s field. Plus, what does anything he is saying have to do with Greenwich time? It’s like Al-Sayyid wrote down scientific-sounding words on a piece of paper, cut it into pieces, and drew them randomly out of a hat.

So this guy is full of it. But why get upset?

What makes me so angry about stuff like this is that he claims he’s a scientist, when he is anything but, together with the fact that this is all based on fundamentalist Islam. So what we have here is a middle-eastern version of the young Earth creationist, someone who has the incredible ability to totally ignore every single fact and observation about reality, and instead substitute them with fantasy based on something in an ancient book written before we understood germs and electricity.

But what really, really makes me angry is that I know that this twinkie will be praised by millions of people who will take his word as, pardon the expression, gospel. They won’t wonder that Dr. Al-Sayyid’s words were sent over the Internet — a triumph of human engineering knowledge — or that what he said was broadcast over a television signal that took centuries of scientific progress to create.

Fundamentalist ignorance is many things, but irony is one of of its most obvious properties. But another property, and its most insidious, is its infection rate. The only cure for this sort of thing is knowledge.

Arm yourself.

Once upon a time, I lost a race for Best Science Blog of 2006. It was a glorious race, and one that was extremely close. But in the end, PZ Myers of Pharyngula became the winner by a little over 1% of the vote. A mandate!

I had promised that, if I were to lose, I would do a couple of things. One was praise PZ at The Amaz!ng Meeting. That will come this Saturday, when I give my talk. I have plenty of time to take antacids before then.

The second was to write a post praising biology. I am a man of my word (even if it takes me a few weeks), so here you go. Now, I could talk about pure biology, but really, that would be incredibly dull and pointless. The only way to possibly make it interesting would be to mix in some astronomy… so how about astrobiology?

[Okay, I'll stop being sarcastic now.]

Astrobiology used to be a discipline without any data– how do you study alien life without any actual, y’know, aliens?

In fact, there is a huge amount to learn. As far as we know, life needs air, warmth to some degree, a planet, a star to give it energy (or maybe energy from internal sources like radioactive decay, leftover heat from its formation, or tidal energy from nearby big moons), complex chemistry, and much more. All of these are well within our abilities to study, and in many of these fields there is a fair amount we can say with some certainty. So far from being pie in the sky, this is a very down-to-earth field of study.

But there’s so much to know! How do you keep up?

I can think of two ways. One is Astrobiology Magazine. This NASA-run site has tons of information on all the sciences involved with astrobiology, including the ones I mentioned above, and far more. It’s updated daily and it has an RSS feed as well (if you don’t know about RSS feeds, then read this first. I use it here on the BAblog, and I use it to read blogs all the time).

Still, maybe you don’t want to just jump in; you’d rather have a warmup first, something to walk you through the basics. Happily, Mary Ann Liebert publishers have put online a free PDF version of The Astrobiology Primer. This is a pretty amazing collection of what astrobiology is and what it’s based on. As they say on Page 1:

The Astrobiology Primer has been created as a reference tool for those who are interested in the interdisciplinary field of astrobiology. The field incorporates many diverse research endeavors, but it is our hope that this slim volume will present the reader with all he or she needs to know to become involved and to understand, at least at a fundamental level, the state of the art.

I am going to sit and read this marvelous work when I have an hour or two to snuggle up in the warm sunlight of our nearest star. Unfortunately, Mike Griffin, the current Administrator of NASA, has made it pretty clear he doesn’t think astrobiology is all that important (there are devastating cuts to the field planned for the next two years). However, he has also said, "I did think astrobiology was less important than traditional space science. It had less intrinsic subject matter to it, and was less advanced. If the community rises up and says it should be funded, we’ll rethink it.".

I am rising up. Astrobiology is an incredible field with as much or more to offer than many other areas of research NASA is doing, and in my opinion is critical to our effort to go back to the Moon and on, eventually, to Mars.

After all, when we get to these other worlds, the aliens will be us.