Vertröstung.

Da ich Donnerstag einen Vortrag halten muss und noch verhältnismäßig unvorbereitet bin (*hust*), werden die nächsten beiden Tage wohl ziemlich ruhig bleiben.

Aber ich habe ein paar nette Links:

'The Stifling Dominance of Secular Academia' von Tiny Frog. Die Gravitationstheorie mit der gleichen kreationistischen "Logik" und "Argumentation" behandelt wie die Evolutionstheorie. Sehr amüsant.

There are some things too important to leave to academia, tucked away in their elitist, ivory towers scoffing at people living in the US’ flyover area.

They claim that the secular theory of gravity explains planetary orbits, but the evidence simply isn’t there.

(1) Gravity is an attractive force. When you drop something, it doesn’t spin around the earth, it falls directly to the earth. If gravity were affecting the planets, they would all fall into the Sun - not orbit around the Sun. The gravitational theory of planetary orbits is refuted by the law of gravity.

'A lesson in creationist "kinds"' bei Northstate Science.

Christopher O'Brien zeigt, warum nur jemand, der von Zoologie keine Ahnung hat, eine Unterteilung der Tiere in biblische "Arten" (innerhalb derer Evolution als "Variation" möglich ist, deren "Grenzen" aber angeblich nicht überschritten werden können) plausibel finden kann. Am Ende seines Artikels finden sich folgende Aufgaben, die er gerne kreationistischen bzw. "IDistischen" Studenten stellen würde (er ist Adjunct Professor of Anthropology an der California State University). Die Antworten würde ich auch gerne mal lesen.

In my college courses I generally prohibit students from writing papers on creationist ideas (unless it is from a strictly historical comparative perspective). I sometimes wonder if that is not a mistake. If the idea is to get a creationist student to “think outside the box”, then perhaps allowing a paper on creationism would be a better learning tool, provided it adhered to strict scientific guidelines. Could a creationist student learn something from the following assignment?...

Write a term paper on the creationist “kind” model. Compare and contrast a minimum of three family level groups of animals within the same order (Ursidae, Canidae, Procyonidae, for example). Re-group all genera and species from these families according to biblical “kinds” and then justify, in detail, the characteristics you used to organize them into separate kinds and why these characteristics are discrete for each kind.

For the intelligent design creationists out there I would modify the essay requirements:

Write a term paper on the creationist “intelligent design” model of species origins. Compare and contrast a minimum of three family level groups of animals within the same order (Ursidae, Canidae, Procyonidae, for example). Discuss, in detail, the mechanism for species divergence within each. At what taxonomic level is the designer likely to have intervened to define a new group of organisms (what criteria would you use to define the point at which a designer intervened? What drives the mechanism for the divergence (why did the designer intervene at this particular point and not another?).

Bei Not Exactly Rocket Science gibt's noch diesen interessanten Artikel, 'New plant species arise from conflicts between immune system genes', der sehr anschaulich die Forschungsarbeit von Boblies et al. (insbesondere das PLoS-Paper; .pdf) zu möglichen Mechanismen der Artbildung bei Pflanzen erklärt und in einen größeren Zusammenhang stellt. Überhaupt sehr empfehlenswerter Wissenschaftsblog mit ausgezeichneten Beiträgen.

Plants from the same species can fail to breed together because incompatible genes from the parents cause the offspring’s immune system to fatally turn on itself. These conflicts between otherwise normal genes could split groups of the same plant into separate species.

So, das war's für's Erste. Viel Spaß beim Lesen.

MfG,
JLT