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Showing posts from August, 2005

Lions and tigers and bears...

Okay, so we actually do have lions and bears in North America. As well as cougars, wolves, and a variety of other predators. Not to mention a large variety of food for those predators. But apparently some guilt-ridden busybodies want to take African "megafauna" (i.e., very large animals, such as elephants, African lions, cheetahs, etc) and "re-wild" North America with them. You see, they feel bad that some species went extinct in North America at the end of the last Ice Age 13,000 years ago, and think that we ought to "fix" things. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4160560.stm There are numerous, substantial problems and errors with this idea. 1. Large predators are dangerous to human beings. Just wait until these researcher's giant kitties start eating pets and children. 2. While ice age megafauna were clearly hunted by Homo Sapiens, we don't really know if it was Homo Sapiens that was responsible for their extinction. It could well be

Out of the mouths of religious kooks

My friends know that I am generally supportive of George Bush. But his recent comments suggesting that "intelligent design" should be taught in schools alongside evolution were just plain dumb. "Intelligent Design" is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific whitewash of Christian creation myth. The notion that "life is so complex it must have been created by an intelligence" is not only simplistic and primitive, it's just plain wrong. If life was created by an intelligence, it was an incompetent intelligence. E.g., why do I have an appendix? All it does is collect crap and get infected. Does the Creator belong to a union that protects this kind of incompetence? There is an overwhelming mountain of evidence supporting evolution. To compare this to "intelligent design" and to teach kids that the two are somehow equivalent unproven "theories" is to show no understanding of how science works, and ignores that mountain of evolutionary evid