In Louisiana students in public schools learn about the religious magical creationism fantasy instead of evolution in biology classrooms taught by extremely stupid incompetent biology teachers. And everyone in that state is so dense nobody cares.

The Stupid, It Burns in Louisiana.

The Bible v. the Constitution - Politicians, school boards, principals, and teachers are pushing creationism on kids.

When a student in Louisiana opens her textbook in biology class, she might not have the standard Miller and Levine Biology with a dragonfly on the cover, and she might not ever learn about evolution. For some Louisiana public school students, their science textbook is the Bible, and in biology class they read the Book of Genesis to learn the “creation point of view.”

From: Shawna Creamer Shawna.Creamer@BossierSchools.Org Subject: [Defender Restored] Creationism Date: May 7, 2015 at 3:42 PM To: Jason Rowland /O=BOSSIERSCHOOLS/OU=First Administrative Group/cn=Recipients/cn=Jason.Rowland

Mr. Roland, You wanted me to let you know when I was planning the Creation point of view. I will be doing this on Monday 3/21. The students will actually be doing most of the presenting. We will read in Genesis and them some supplemental material debunking various aspects of evolution from which the students will present. We will start off at the beginning of the period and I do not anticipate it lasting the entire time. That will be 1st and 2nd block. Shawna Creamer Science Teacher Airline High School http://www.millerandlevine.com/intro.html Ken Miller's Home Page - Brown University

0:16

Hi, my name is Ken Miller, and I want to talk to you today about

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why evolution matters to biology, not just biology, but all of science.

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I've got to start right up front by telling you that I'm not an evolutionary biologist.

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I don't dig for fossils. I'm actually a cell biologist,

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and most of my career has been spent working on the structure of biological membranes,

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especially the photosynthetic membrane.

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I use the electron microscope; that's where my training is.

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I've used a technique called freeze etching to look inside those membranes,

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and I've also used image analysis and reconstruction to develop things like

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a 3-dimensional model of a photosynthetic membrane. This ended up on the cover of Nature.

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And more recently my laboratory has also worked on the translocon,

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which is a little channel by which proteins leave the ribosome and enter the rough endoplasmic reticulum.

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So how does a nice cell biologist get interested in evolution?

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There are actually two answers to that.

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The first answer came from a student.

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When I first began to teach at Brown University, where I still am,

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a student came to me in the spring of 1981 and he challenged me.

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He asked me if I wanted to debate a scientific creationist.

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I had actually never heard of scientific creationism before

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and the more I looked into it, the more I thought, "Yeah, I might like to go ahead and do this."

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So the students ended up establishing and setting up a debate at my university.

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To my amazement, an enormous crowd bought tickets to this event,

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so many that we had to put it in the largest room on our campus

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which was the ice hockey rink, believe it or not.

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And I participated that year in another debate as well.

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And in fact, in the two debates, in that year (1981), more than 3000 people showed up in aggregate.

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I'd given scientific talks before, but I'd never attracted a crowd even close to that or seen that level of interest.

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That made an impression on me.

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That told me this was an important issue; one that people care about in the general public.

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And also, I was appalled by the amount of scientific distortion

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and misinformation that was garnished in the name of scientific creationism.

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A second thing happened. Pretty much the same year, and that is, when the debates were over,

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a former student of mine came to me with what I thought was an outlandish idea.

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And that is: how about you and I get together and write a high school biology textbook?

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Well, after a few debates, I decided that was over.

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I sat down with my friend Joe Levine,

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and Joe and I published a series of biology textbooks designed for high school students

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that have been very successful and have been used through all parts of the country.

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That's the second part of the story as to how I came to be interested in evolution.

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Our books, being cutting edge biology, had a very strong treatment of the theory of evolution.

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In some school districts, they were banned.

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In other school districts chapters were cut out,

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and in one, very important school district, a warning label,

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which you can see right here, was actually placed on the surface of the textbook,

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warning students that evolution was a theory and not a fact.

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That brought me, in a way,

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right back into the issue of whether evolution should be taught as part of mainstream biology.

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Now a lot of my scientific colleagues ask me from time to time,

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"Didn't we settle all this in 1925 during the Scopes so-called monkey trial?"

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And unfortunately, I'm afraid, that what they're thinking of when they talk about this

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is in fact the movie, Inherit the Wind, which is loosely based on the Scopes trial.

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The reality is that when William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow squared off

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in that Tennessee court room, John Scopes was convicted,

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and evolution basically disappeared from science textbooks in the United States for almost 50 years.

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It's an extraordinary thing.

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And even today, the anti-evolution movement in this country is thriving.

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TIME magazine, several years ago, had a cover story on it. They called it the evolution wars.

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Books, pamphlets, movies and even a museum have been opened to support the idea

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that evolution is fundamentally wrong and that evolutionary science is completely mistaken.

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This sort of activity led to a dramatic confrontation in 2005 in a federal court room

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in the state of Pennsylvania after a town, Dover, Pennsylvania, decided to

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order its teachers to prepare a curriculum on an anti-evolution idea called 'intelligent design'.

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What followed was a dramatic and widely publicized seven week trial.

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I had the honor, but I'm never sure if that's the right word,

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of serving as the lead witness in that trial,

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and what you see right here is actually the NBC TV court room sketch of my cross-examination

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during the first days of that trial.

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At the end of the seven weeks, what happened?

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Well, the judge, actually a conservative republican,

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appointed by George W. Bush, looked at the evidence and testimony and said,

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"Intelligent design simply isn't science."

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In my opinion, of course, exactly the right verdict.

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And this was big news. It appeared on the nightly news on every one of the major networks,

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front page of the New York Times, everywhere you can possibly imagine.

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Now, despite this verdict as it turns out, or perhaps because of the verdict,

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a lot of us who testified in the trial, and I was just one of several scientists who did that,

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ended up with some very interesting requests when the trial was over.

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I appeared on a couple of TV programs, here's a snapshot of one of them.

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And those TV programs appeared on unlikely networks like Comedy Central.

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And, yes, I actually appeared as a guest on the Colbert Report,

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and if any of you listening to this would like to find a clip of that, it's really easy to do.

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You just go to Google, and you type in my name and Colbert Report

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and a couple of appearances on Colbert will come up.

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It was an extraordinary thing.

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It got, I think, the message of science across to an audience that normally wouldn't get it.

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But something interesting comes out of that,

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and that's one of the key points that I want to make.

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All too many of my colleagues in the biological science community think that

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evolution's just a story about the past, and therefore defending evolution is the job of

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paleontologists and fossil hunters and that sort of stuff.

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But the reality of science today is that evolution is everywhere.

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It's even in our blood, and because it's in our blood, it's in our genome.

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Now, what I've put up here is an image showing hemoglobin,

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the red protein that carries oxygen in our blood stream.

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We know the exact location of the genes for alpha and beta globin on the human chromosome,

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and there's something very different and very interesting about their structure and organization.

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We actually have five copies of the gene for beta globin.

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We use this at different times in our life cycle.

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They were all produced, any evolutionary biologist would tell you,

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by the process of gene duplication, but here's what's really cool.

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Right in the middle of this collection of genes, and you can see it right there,

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is in fact a pseudogene. You can see the Greek letter psi above it.

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That means it's a gene that is broken. Now why do I say it's broken?

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It means that one of these multiple copies

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accumulated so many mistakes that it couldn't work anymore.

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What are the nature of the mistakes? You can see them here.

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They involve altered control regions, frame shift mutations.

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Even if this piece of DNA could be transcribed,

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it could never be translated; it could never be made into a protein.

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Now, why is all of that significant? It's significant for a very simple reason.

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Mistakes are unique. They occur only once, and then they're propagated to

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all of one's descendants, and that's what's happened with the beta globin pseudogene.

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But, the interesting part is that we share not only the structure of this beta globin locus,

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but we also share those mistakes with three other organisms.

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Want to know who they are?

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They're the gorilla, the chimpanzee and the orangutan.

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And what does that mean? It means that all four of these species,

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these three guys and us, share common ancestry.

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And our genome is testament to that. But, there's even more.

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As a cell biologist, I've worked prety much my entire career on organelles within cells.

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Two of the most interesting are chloroplasts and mitochondria.

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And my lab has done some research on both.

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These are extraordinary organelles that are involved in the transduction of

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either chemical or solar energy into a form that the cell can use.

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Now there are some weird things about these two organelles.

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One of them is: they both import proteins from the cytoplasm (the rest of the cell).

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Now, that's not surprising, but they import them, take them inside,

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and then re-export them into their own membranes.

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It's sort of a roundabout route.

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It's like going to one side of the shopping center and then the other,

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and then coming back in and then going back out again.

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It makes very little sense.

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It also turns out, they're both surrounded by two membranes.

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Most organelles of the cell-only one.

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How come two? It's a bit of a puzzle.

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Another thing is they are not made by the cell from scratch. They're self-replicating.

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In other words, they come only from the division of pre-existing mitochondria and chloroplasts.

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In addition, the ribosomes, the protein synthesizing machines, within these are distinct.

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They're very different from ribosomes from the rest of the cell.

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Why should these guys have their own unique ribosomes?

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And last but not least, they've got their own DNA.

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They have their own genetic systems.

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Why is all of this the case?

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Well, the answer, from evolution, turns out to be very clear and very straightforward.

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Mitochondria, there's very clear evidence, arose from primitive bacteria

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that were then taken inside an early eukaryotic cell and then surrounded by a second membrane

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and eventually formed into the organelles that today we call mitochondria.

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Chloroplasts are pretty much the same thing,

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except it was a cyanobacteria (a photosynthetic prokaryotic organism).

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And once you understand this process, which is called evolution by endosymbiosis,

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everything makes sense, protein import and re-export, the double membranes,

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the self-replication and the unique ribosomes, and the fact that these organelles have their own DNA.

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It all fits together, and it fits together quite beautifully.

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Today, evolution itself is a research tool.

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We use evolution to understand the relationships of proteins in the cytoskeleton, for example.

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We also use evolution to understand the development of body plans

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in the field of evolutionary developmental biology.

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If you want to read up on this, pick up Sean Carroll's great book, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful".

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And in this, Carroll explains the way in which the animal body is modular.

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It's made up of repeating parts and these repeating parts

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basically produce the forms and patterns that we look at and appreciate as biologists.

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Now, one of the problems that I see as a scientist and an educator is

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that evolution acceptance in this country is near the bottom of the industrialized world.

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There were 29 countries polled in which a larger proportion of their citizens

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accepted the theory of evolution than in the United States.

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We're at the bottom of that list. The only country we beat out in Western Europe is Turkey.

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Why is that? I think in large measure that's because

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evolution is presented as a fearful doctrine, as something to be afraid of.

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And that fear that characterizes, or the induction of fear that characterizes

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the anti-evolution movement is dangerous.

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Not just because it might cause people to reject evolution,

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but rather because it might lead to us raising up a generation of young people

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who have been taught that science is to be feared and distrusted.

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And if we do that, this country will give up world scientific leadership,

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something that we simply cannot afford to do.

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In fact, in the current year, 2011, anti-evolution measures have actually

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been introduced and attempted to be made law in no fewer than 7 state legislatures.

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I'd like to pretend this is in the past, but it is in fact an ongoing problem.

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So, what do we make of this?

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Defending evolution is really defending the scientific method.

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It isn't about Darwin anymore. It's about the science that we do today.

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And I think every member of the scientific community

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whether student, post-doctoral researcher, faculty level researcher or independent scientist,

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owes it to themselves to defend evolution for two reasons.

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One is, it is the unifying principle that makes sense of everything we do in biology.

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And number two, acceptance of evolution means acceptance and embrace

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of science and the scientific method.

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Nothing could be more important for the scientific enterprise,

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and in my opinion, nothing could be more important to our country.

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Thanks for listening.

CHESS.COM SUCKS. http://en.lichess.org IS THE BEST.

"Chess will all be memorized due to computers?

It won't be memorized by me. What computers are good for is analyzing games played by humans. Which by the way for some reason takes several hours at chess.com while it takes only 30 seconds at lichess.org and it's totally free at lichess.org 

"Because the analysis is quite deep and the resources are shared by all Chess.com members, this process can take up to 24 hours to complete.  You will get a message when it is finished and you can view your results."

http://www.chess.com/forum/view/general/chess-will-all-be-memorized-due-to-computers?page=5

https://support.chess.com/customer/portal/articles/1444868-computer-analysis-how-do-i-get-my-games-analyzed-

http://en.lichess.org

At the Wall Street Journal I compared America's Christian scum to the Islamic State.

The more religious people are the more insane they are. The Islamic State is a good example.

America's Christians don't cut off heads and they don't blow themselves up, but they share many fantasies with the Islamic State, especially the Bible thumpers. They share a belief that an ancient book of fiction is the word of a magical being (god, allah). They also share a love for brainwashing children (also known as child abuse), a desire to suppress the teaching of evolution, and both American Christians and the Islamic State share the exact same cowardly magical heaven fantasy that makes terrorism possible.

My point is how can we tell the terrorists they're insane when most of our population has the same mental illness.

Islamic State Advances Further Into Syria’s Aleppo Province. The militants are just 7 miles from main highway connecting Aleppo to Turkish border.

Incredibly the Wall Street Journal deleted my comment. I wrote another comment, hoping it gets passed the cowardly censors.

In Mosul, Iraq the Islamic State has banned the teaching of evolution. Christians have been trying to do the same thing here in America. It's interesting that most Americans have so much in common with terrorists, including a war against science education, brainwashing of children, and the magical heaven fantasy that makes terrorism possible.

I wrote a comment at Pamela Geller's website.

Atheist here. I have extreme contempt for all religions but one religion stands out that needs to be completely eradicated from this planet, the terrorist organization called Islam. I have even more contempt for the wimps who suck up to these subhumans. Thank goodness for defenders of free speech like Ms. Geller.

http://pamelageller.com/2015/05/pamela-geller-cbs-news-if-we-surrender-now-freedom-of-speech-is-a-relic.html/

"Scientific theories are the most reliable, rigorous, and comprehensive form of scientific knowledge." -- Wikipedia

Wikipedia Scientific theory

A Magic Man Done It.

Decoding History Robin Ince on creationism

This awesome graphic of all lifeforms will make you feel tiny

http://www.businessinsider.com/this-evolution-graphic-will-make-you-feel-tiny-2015-5

Today I discovered a website called Christian Forums and a thread called Evolution or Creationism? I wrote this stuff there.

Evolution or Creationism?
I have read 5 books about how evolution works and the evidence for it. To give you an idea of how much evidence there is, I noticed there is virtually no overlap in any of the 5 books. They all discuss different evidences for evolution. I have also studied evolution at numerous science blogs, and at news websites about new discoveries in evolution. After all this education it would be impossible for me to deny the established truth of evolution.

The evolution deniers have no idea how much evidence they have to throw out to defend their magical creationism fantasy. There is, for example, countless thousands of evidences from DNA sequencing, and this powerful evidence is growing every day. Another example is the fossil record that describes the evolution from land animals to whales. That fossil record is complete, thanks to very many discoveries in Pakistan. I recommend http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/09/0919_walkingwhale_2.html if you're interested in those fossils.
An important thing to understand is the fossils are not necessary to show that evolution is how the world works. The evidence from DNA sequencing is all that's required to call evolution the strongest fact of science.

http://www.christianforums.com/threads/evolution-or-creationism.7880556/page-20

At the Wall Street Journal I replied to an idiot who doubted most scientists are normal, aka atheist.

Here is fact for you, sir. 93% of the scientists (which include Nobel Prize winners) of the National Academy of Sciences are normal people, aka atheists. Look it up.

We normal people live here in the 21st century. Everyone else seems to stuck in the Dark Ages.

If you ever want to throw out your ancient fantasies, it's very easy. All you have to do is realize magic is not real.

One more thing. There are so few religious biologists many biologists have never met one.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/planets-priests-and-a-persistent-myth-1432250521#livefyre-comment

Pneumono­ultra­microscopic­silico­volcano­coniosis is an English word that refers to a lung disease that is otherwise known as silicosis.

http://www.arcamax.com/thefunnies/pearlsbeforeswine/s-1659108

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

My comment for a bullshit Wall Street Journal editorial: "Planets, Priests and a Persistent Myth The Catholic Church and scientific discovery are utterly incompatible, right? History disagrees."

What Barr and Mullan wrote does not change the fact that the Catholic Church is an anti-science cult. For example what could be more anti-science than their disgusting fantasy about a 3 day old decomposing corpse magically rising from the dead? And what could be more anti-science than their cowardly magical heaven fantasy, a belief which they share with the Islamic State?

Some time ago I was wondering how these superstitious Catholics justify their magical resurrection fantasy. Imagine the smell. So I looked it up. To explain the magical resurrection of a decomposing corpse they of course invoked more magic. They said the corpse magically did not decompose at all.

The stupidity, it burns.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/planets-priests-and-a-persistent-myth-1432250521

Mark Fyten

That which you can't understand, you ridicule. God still loves you.

@Mark Fyten

What I can't understand is your gullibility and your total inability to think. You and a few other million superstitious people. This is the 21st century and you people still believe in magic. It's pathetic.

The "god loves you" fantasy is the wishful thinking of cowards. There's an invisible magical being in the sky who loves us and who will magically make us magically fly to a magical paradise where we will have a magical 2nd life after we drop dead. Some people are afraid to grow up and face facts. For example American Catholics and the Islamic State. So terrified of reality and willing to believe any childish nonsense that might make reality go away.

A word to rioting Muslims, video from Pat Condell

See the comments and search for "Hilo" for lots of anti-religion quotes from USA presidents. This post is about creationist asshole Bobby Jindal, governor of Louisiana.

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/bobby_jindal_runs_for_president_louisiana_governor_allowed_creationism_in.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/05/bobby_jindal_runs_for_president_louisiana_governor_allowed_creationism_in.html

My comment: Imagine the stupidity required to believe in magical creationism. 

"Bronstein on the King’s Indian" by David Bronstein

I made lots of mistakes in this game against Melipal and lost badly. I liked the quote on his profile, translated from Spanish using google translate. Translation not perfect but good enough.

"Apreciar nuestras partidas no por ganar o perder, màs bien por las lecciones sacadas de los aciertos y los errores."

"Appreciate our games not about winning or losing, rather by the lessons learned from the successes and mistakes."

http://www.schachversand.de/e/detail/buecher/4889.html

Introduction

Chess is a friendly game, which is why it was invented. The main idea of each player is to capture the chief of the opposing chess army, which according to the rules of the game leads to the surrender of the opposing forces. This rule was introduced because it was thought more beautiful for a lesser army to be able to outplay and force the surrender of a superior force. If you can understand the spirit of chess in this way, then you will see that the fewer men that are captured, the more noble is the victory, and this reflects a peculiarly human way of thinking.

So, winning or losing is not the main idea of chess at all. A chess game is in fact a friendly exchange of intentions, hidden in individual moves. You always have the choice either of putting into action your planned move, or of first calmly preventing the intended move of the friend with whom you are playing chess in this brief, finite moment of your life.

When chess is considered in this way, there is no better opening than the King's Indian Defence, for both players - White and Black, of every age, from beginners to masters. The King's Indian gives you the maximum opportunity to test your ability to make reasonable decisions in situations on the chess board that are always complex and uncertain. Now let us begin to look at the moves which introduce this beautiful chess opening.

1. d4 Sf6

Black brings out his knight to a good square, preventing the white pawn from immediately occupying the e4 square, and makes the first step in preparing a residence for his king.

2. c4 g6

While the white pawns are occupying the centre, Black prepares a post for his bishop at g7.

3. Sc3 Lg7

The bishop occupies the prepared post, and the residence is now ready for occupation by the black king.

4. e4 d6

Black is careful to forestall the advance of the white pawn to e5. He is now ready to take his king into safety by castling, and then to strike at the white centre by advancing his own pawn to e5.

This, basically, is what constitutes the King's Indian Defence! Of course, White is not obliged to choose this particular move order, but, as will be seen from the examples in the book, a King's Indian set-up can be adopted against a wide variety of opening moves.

At this point we consider it appropriate to make a brief journey into history, to see how this opening was played by some of the great players from the past.

How this book was compiled

In the course of many meetings, telephone discussions and exchanges of correspondence, David Bronstein provided me with a wealth of analyses and ideas relating to the King's Indian Defence, which I have endeavoured to arrange in a coherent and instructive form. On his suggestion I have also included a few of my own games, and although it may seem incongrous to have these appearing alongside battles between world-class players, they do have the merit of highlighting certain basic errors which one would not encounter in grandmaster games. Considerable assistance in the compilation of the material was made in Moscow by Sergey Rosenberg, and the two authors are deeply grateful to him for his contribution to the book.

Ken Neat

Durham, June 1999

The stupidity, it burns.

• alex-rodriguez 
  "And let's not 4get....evolution is miles from a science. In fact, it's actually barely within the definition of a theory based on the lack of Consensus Reality."

  Take your complaints to the Nobel laureates at the National Academy of Sciences.

  THEORY: In science, a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world that can incorporate facts, laws, inferences, and tested hypotheses. The contention that evolution should be taught as a "theory, not as a fact" confuses the common use of these words with the scientific use. In science, theories do not turn into facts through the accumulation of evidence. Rather, theories are the end points of science. They are understandings that develop from extensive observation, experimentation, and creative reflection. They incorporate a large body of scientific facts, laws, tested hypotheses, and logical inferences. In this sense, evolution is one of the strongest and most useful scientific theories we have.

  -- The National Academy of Sciences
• 
  3 minutes ago · Quote · Edit · Delete · #559
  alex-rodriguez 
  "evolution is miles from a science"

  The best scientists in the world disagree. Maybe you could tell them why they're wrong.

  The concept of biological evolution is one of the most important ideas ever generated by the application of scientific methods to the natural world. The evolution of all the organisms that live on Earth today from ancestors that lived in the past is at the core of genetics, biochemistry, neurobiology, physiology, ecology, and other biological disciplines. It helps to explain the emergence of new infectious diseases, the development of antibiotic resistance in bacteria, the agricultural relationships among wild and domestic plants and animals, the composition of Earth's atmosphere, the molecular machinery of the cell, the similarities between human beings and other primates, and countless other features of the biological and physical world. As the great geneticist and evolutionist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote in 1973, ‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’

  -- The National Academy of Sciences
• 
  a few minutes ago · Quote · Edit · Delete · #560
  alex-rodriguez 
  There are Holocaust deniers. There are people who think the 9/11 atrocity was an inside job. There are people who deny the human race ever landed on the moon. There are evolution deniers. All of these people seem to have an incurable mental problem.

Muslim scum are killing Christian scum. The only solution that makes sense is throw out these moronic cults.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-plight-of-the-middle-easts-christians-1431700075

"Can the West find a way to preserve the Christian presence in the Middle East—and stave off a ‘clash of civilizations’?"

I have a better idea. Since we now know Christianity, Islam, and Judaism are ridiculous fantasies, we should encourage these superstitious people to grow up, face facts, and throw out their childish cowardly cults. The magical god fantasy was the human race's greatest mistake. It's about time we fixed the problem. The only alternative is more violence and more stupidity.