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Most people I know have seen this already over at Pharyngula, but this is for someone specific, and I'd like Los_Cat, and anyone else who works at a museum of natural history to weigh in on this:
I would put up the BPSB tag on this one, but can we even raise creationism to the already appallingly low level of pseudo-science?
...and just because this leaves such a bad taste in my mouth, I'll follow the advice of Ben over at Bad Science and Cody at 90% True and take that with a Feynman chaser.
In fact, I'm so thrilled with this chaser, not only do you get an excerpt from The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, but the links to the rest of it AND the book:
VIDEO ON YOU TUBE |
3 comments:
Glad to see other people are running with the idea.
The flower piece is one of my favorite bits by Feynman. There's a similar take on that example by Ken Miller that I quite like as well:
"Look at the beauty of a flower," he began. "The Bible tells us that even Solomon in all his glory was never arrayed as one of these. And do you know what? Not a single person in the world can tell us what makes a flower bloom. All those scientists in their laboratories, the ones who can split the atom and build jet planes and televisions, well, not one of them can tell you how a plant makes flowers." And why should they be able to? "Flowers, just like you, are the work of God."
I was impressed. No one argued, no one wisecracked. We filed out of the church like good little boys and girls, ready for our first communion the next day. And I never thought of it again, until this symposium on developmental biology. Sandwiched between two speakers working on more fashionable topics in animal development was Elliot M. Meyerowitz, a plant scientist at Caltech. A few of my colleagues, uninterested in research dealing with plants, got up to stretch their legs before the final talk, but I sat there with an ear-to-ear grin on my face. I jotted notes furiously; I sketched the diagrams he projected on the screen and wrote additional speculations of my own in the margins. Meyerowitz, you see, had explained how plants make flowers.
I know I'm a good thirty years older than Cody, and I suspect I'm considerably older than Kate, but I do like Feynman, and I had to follow both Ben, and you two.
I think Feynman is very entertaining, so thank you both for your comments.
Probably not "considerably", Chemobrain. But I'll grant if you're at least 30 years older than Cody that you're older than me.
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