gall and gumption

Monday, April 04, 2005

Wonderful World

Stir and simmer the following.

First, David Hume:


Second, Wallace Stevens:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall? Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?
Why set the pear upon those river-banks
Or spice the shores with odors of the plum?
Alas, that they should wear our colors there,
The silken weavings of our afternoons,
And pick the strings of our insipid lutes!
Death is the mother of beauty, mystical,
Within whose burning bosom we devise
Our earthly mothers waiting, sleeplessly.

Third, Niobraraand do go and read the whole thing, by PZ Myers at PharyngulaPharyngula:

There is a geological formation in Kansas called the Niobrara Chalk. Actually, it's not just in Kansas; it extends all the way up into Canada, but the Niobrara has been exposed by erosion over much of northwestern Kansas, making it easy to dig into. And this is where the Sternbergs and Cope and Marsh went hunting for sea monsters.

Chalk is interesting stuff. It's made of a mineral calcium carbonate, that is formed into the shells of microscopic, one-celled golden brown algae. These Chrysophyceae are photosynthesizing organisms that float in large numbers at the surface of the sea, gather sunlight for energy and scavenging calcium dissolved in the water to build their protective shells. They occasionally shed the the minute calcium plates, and when the plants die, their skeletons drift slowly downward. The seas have a slow, soft, invisible rain of tiny flecks of calcium carbonate that very, very slowly builds up at the bottom.

The Niobrara Chalk formation is 600 feet thick.

It was building up for a long, long time, tens of millions of years. The exposed chalks of northwestern Kansas are also old, dating to between 87 and 82 million years ago, near the end of the Mesozoic era and deep in the Late Cretaceous...

The inescapable conclusion is that Kansas was under water during the age of the dinosaurs. During the Mesozoic, the world was warm and the oceans were at a high level, and the entire central part of North America was a great, shallow, inland sea, a warm soup rich in microorganisms that were busily living and dying and slowly accumulating into deep dense chalk beds on the bottom.....

That would be Kansas. Where the latest Monkey Trial is taking place with the anti monkey "Intelligent Design" creationist crowd represented by some of the stupidest people on the planet. After watching them fail, by their own admission, the Hume test (short version, what is the likelihood that this loon knows what he/she is talking about?) they then really quite dismally fail the next test. Does their theory have any aesthetic merit (e.g., richness of content, depth of reflection)? And they fail the next one, the test of can this theory actually deliver any information about ANYthing?

Their "theory" is the guesswork of their sclerotic and uninformed imaginations, and they insist that no one can do any better than that. To stoop to debating evidence with them is to consent to the propostion that there is some kind of equivalence between such wretched ignorance and actually knowing something.

I worked with a tech writer who was a fundamentalist evangelical creationist who loved to try to engage people in debates over evolution. He would trot out all this "evidence" -- he only had evidence that supported his theory. This neat package. He could rattle this stuff off at you without being in any danger of running out of it. It was tedious and annoying. What he could not do was simply describe the world. What damns the creationists is that poverty of imagination: they cannot conceive that the world might be more interesting than their narrow idea of it. They're missing out, well, tough, but when they want to deprive everybody else of the pleasure of discovery, they are just out of order. This whole discussion should not be happening at all.


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