Of Phantom Isles and Mystic Wonders–Or God Works, In You Know, MYSTERIOUS Ways

Tags

cartography, Humor, Sandy Island, south sea islands

Just when I was prepared to finish off my Christmas shopping with a shrewd purchase of a delightful little getaway called Sandy Island, the “scientific” community up and takes it off the map!

I tell ya, is there no certainty in the world at all?

Sandy Island, once off the coast of Australia, in the Coral Sea, is, err was never, no more. Sandy has been defined as a phantom island which is “an island (not really of course) once believed to exist, and accordingly depicted on maps, but of which the existence was later disproved, and its cartographic representation removed.”

Whether twas the phantom of someone’s boozily induced imagination, or a fly stuck fast to the “ahoy matey”  lens of the telescope of some long-forgotten captain of a ship sailin’ the oceans fair, we do not know. But Sandy as I said, was never, and is no longer the object of my affections and Christmas present list.

The map makers call them “infestations” into their pristine world of exactitude, and relish removing them from charts about as much as some scientists enjoyed removing Pluto from the rank of planet to mere “gob of rock” hanging around.

So eager are some young poop deckers to yell out “land ho” or some wanna-be Mr. Christian to name a new land, that you can be sure to waste a lot of time traveling to places that aren’t really there. I would certainly be asking for a refund of my cruise ship ride I can tell ya.

A ship, the Southern Surveyor, went out to take a look, and well, couldn’t find Sandy. Now if you think it was a few feet by a few feet, you would be wrong. It was claimed to be some 45 miles square, so it was a goodly estate of ground.  Nobody seems to know how Sandy came to be, when she was never. Some haul out the old fly trick, only this time putting it on the lens of some scanner. It all sounds a bit fishy to me.

Fishy since the island was marked on maps going back to 1876.

Puzzling? Nefarious? Foul play?

In 2000, a bunch of silly ham radio operators gathered to play some game of remotest location to send a signal from (one must make allowances for ham radio operators. Their “hobby” is rather outdated and frankly most anybody under thirty wouldn’t even know what they are talking about anyway), and discovered that there was NO Sandy, if that is one can be said to “discover” a “not there”.  Nobody paid them no mind for as you might expect, the are after all, just “ham radio nerds”.

Oh look, I DISCOVERED THAT THERE ARE NO DIAMONDS IN MY TOILET! You see my point?

Who first discovered that which was not real? Nobody is really sure, given lack of surety is the point here isn’t it? But hey, even Captain Cook figures in the mystery.

Which all raises the specter of a new and exciting pastime–the hobby of undiscovery!

There is a whole universe out there guys, and no doubt it is full of things that aren’t really there and are waiting just for you to find them not out.

Come to think of it, I think I’ll put in a call to Glenn Beck. This looks like just the sort of grifter scheme he and I can collaborate on to make a few bucks. If you want in, just send me $200 to get in on the ground floor of this new and exciting adventure. Yeah, don’t delay, spots are filling up fast. Be the first on your block. You can un-name your own island and be recorded in history books as the undiscoverer of something of no importance. You will receive a certificate of undiscovery and a commemorative coin, with a very limited printing. Only two to a customer. While supplies last of course. Seriously, send me the money!

Related articles

• Not a Google error? ‘Phantom’ Pacific island Sandy found on 136-year-old maps (telegraph.co.uk)
• The phantom island: Scientists go on 25-day voyage to study island only to find it doesn’t exist (mirror.co.uk)
• ‘Undiscovered’ island twist (smh.com.au)
• Paradise Losst: Island On Google Maps Isn’t Really There (huffingtonpost.com)
• Imaginary island (southofheaven.typepad.com)

She’s Gonna Blow!!

Tags

all the usual players, Election 2012, Humor, Politics

In truth, (and why would I lie), I have never aspired to be a vulcanologist.

No, not a studier of Vulcans, as in Mr. Spock and the planet Vulcan, where live a rather stiff and sober people who preceded Earthlings in all things civilized and learned the error of war and all negative emotions and so live with a tight ass all the time.

No, not them.

And before any of you otherwise anal types starts to send me a comment that I spelled it wrong, I didn’t. It can be spelled either with a U or an O. So there not-so-smarty pants.

No, I am not talking about other inhabited planets in the galaxy let alone the universe which leads to another whole dilemma of travel issues.

No.

I am talking about this kind of Volcanology:

Pretty huh?

Except.

Well.

I spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about Yellowstone.

It is what they call a “super volcano”.

Not a pretty one that just sends up plumbs of pretty fire and lovely play-doughy lava rolling slowly to the ocean. Such can be found in Hawaii, which is nothing but a bunch of volcanoes all in a line.

No Yellowstone is a monster.

It blew up, near as they can tell, about 600,000 years ago. They don’t have the science to determine the loop time, til the next time.

Hence, my dilemma and my worry.

It could go at any moment.

Well not quite any moment.

They have sensors all over the place and they’ll have some warning. A few hours maybe. Maybe more. It’s not very precise.

But when she goes, she’ll (volcanoes are girls) gonna take out a solid 2,000 square miles in one gulp.

I figure that means me.

Now, the scratch-your-head conundrum here is that old Yeller ain’t in the “ring of fire” or what is otherwise known as the “Pacific Rim” wherein most nasty volcanoes lie. (Which brings to mind that the Contrarian always thought that Johnny Cash’s song, “Ring of Fire” would be a fitting little ditty to accompany a Preparation H commercial. Think about it) Anyway, there is a reason for this. It is a super volcano and its neck stretches some 4,000 miles DOWN which means I guess that it connects with the CORE. None of which can be any good.

So I worry.

I hope you are now worrying too.

I hate to worry alone.

Oh, and the Bay of Naples has a similar gigantic underwater bulge of a super duper volcano too. So you guys can worry too.

Ahhh, I feel better somehow now.

Psst: PeaNuts® and other rightwing batshit crazies, continue to keep your useless heads in the sand. This was meant for rational people.

♦

And now just a skip down memory lane. Remember, nostalgia is best experienced within a few hours of the past.

I don’t know about you, but I been holding my breath, and have been exceedingly bored with the “new Newt”.

I love the old Newt.

The snarly belligerent windbag that is all too sure that he’s the smartest human on the planet. He’s my kinda guy.

I can still hear him after his meteoric rise in the polls, “It’s pretty clear that I’m going to be the nominee.”

Yeah, it was pretty clear. And then you kept on talking Newt, and well, we are back to square one. Please do make these  last debates worthwhile. Give ’em hell as only a petulant loser can.

So far, Santorum seems not to be making much headway in New Hampshire.

His pie hole seems obsessed with arguing about gay rights and “social issues” that New Hampshirites seem to reject as “none your business”.

This seems to happen to all my “not Mittens” candidates. They talk.

It ruins their poll numbers.

And it doesn’t appear that Ricky S is gonna do all that well in South Carolina, or North. I get them confused.

Ya see, him and Jimmy DeMint aren’t exactly friendly.

Which is why Ricky P may have stayed in the race.

Meanwhile, Michele (he is too straight) Bachmann retired from the fray.

Actually, she’s getting praise for that, being the only one who apparently can read her numbers. Unlike Ricky P, who just looks sad most of the time like a puppy who has lost his toy.

And did ya hear? Here is coming out AFTER the New Hampshire primary with his endorsement. But it’s gonna be a really different endorsement, so he says.

Perhaps he’s gonna endorse Sarah Palin and himself as VEEP. Oh, I mean Secretary of Defense. Sarah would be happy to do that. She still asks Black folk “does it wash off?”, there not being a lot of darker skinned people in Alaska ya know.

Speaking’ of which I read her last little “analysis” on Foxy Noise. She has a corner on word salad.

Hey, if I’m not mistaken the average sentence of any GOP mouth, mentions “where are the jobs” Obama? And are not these the same folks who when confronted with the OWS protesters, tell them to “go out and get a job!” ? I’m confused.

Maybe Mr. Trump can u confuse me. If he can find his way out of his hair.

What must it be like to be the offspring of such a douche?

See, thinking of things like that, makes your own life seem ever so much better.

Until you start thinking about Yellowstone, that is.

 

 

Related articles

• Santorum Asks for ‘Any Help’ from Palin (crooks and liars.com)
• The Desperation of Little Ricky: Santorum Asks Palin for Help to Stay in the Clown Car (pamshouseblend.firedoglake.com)
• Is a powerful sleeping volcano in Europe getting restless? (ctv.ca)

What’s Up? 06/30/10

Tags

Elena Kagan, GOP, Rand Paul, right wing nuttery, Sarah Palin, SCOTUS, temptations, Thurgood Marshall, will power

I don’t know about you, but opening my reader each day is like opening a Christmas present. I hope for something fantastic, and am usually happily rewarded. Here and there I get a piece of coal-a day where nobody is saying anything interesting to me.

But that seldom happens, and on a glorious day such as today with the sun shining brightly, the birds singing with exuberance, and the breeze so gentle as a adolescent kiss, I open it with anticipation.

Let’s see what we find!

I heard about this days ago. Mostly it was about the open mike and the audience members who made fun of  Sarah (that woman is an idiot) Palinator’s lack of ummm intelligence? But, speaking to a California college assembly (why in God’s earth would anyone invite her?), she gaffed as only our Sarah could. Sarah has a penchant for hiring old high school buds (equally stupid as herself, which goes without saying. Apparently one is her FACT checker.

The lunacy continues with Rand Paul refusing to answer how old the earth is. By refusing of course, he admits that he is crazy as a mop head. Rand, my man, we don’t care if you are off by even a few million  years, reasonable minds may differ. But if you refuse, we suspect you are off by a few billion, and that my dizzy friend makes you a no brainer. Unless of course you are merely trying to fake your way into gaining support from people you don’t really agree with. Sorta like you faked a board certification?

I’m feeling a trip to Washington as in DC is in order. Those GOP senators who are “interrogating” Elena Kagan must be in need of more bullets to shoot themselves in the foot. The constant barrage of “Justice Thurgood Marshall was not a proper judge” at Kagan who clerked for him, is suicidal at best. Well, a worst it is still suicidal. Apparently there will be a sign at all future voting booths–only white people can vote for Republicans. All else, vote for the Dems. I will take that as a good thing.

Temptation! Yikes. We all face it, whether it be food, drugs, booze, men, women, gambling. Whatever the thing that calls to you, beckons with seductive winking, luring you into danger, well we all face it or them. Balance in Me has some good ideas for meeting and beating your temptations.

Enjoy the day and see ya!

Looking at the Bible Anew

Tags

ancient history, bible, fundamentalism, God, Hebrew Scriptures, inspiration, interdisciplinary science, Israelite history, Jericho, Joshua

For anyone who has come face to face with the clear evidence that factually the Bible contains many historical errors, a crisis of sorts must ensue. If one believes, as I do, that there is inherent worth in the book itself as a dispenser of spiritual food, then one must reach some conclusion as to what the word inspired means.

Clearly, as most any biblical scholar will attest to (excluding the strange world of the fundamentalist who engages in a process of no-think) the Bible was not either dictated, nor was it kept from factual error of any kind by God. The record simply cannot support such a conclusion. Yet, we do claim that the sacred scripture is “inspired,” and we must define what we mean by that.

Some claim that inspired refers to the timelessness of the moral teachings that are the heart of each story told within its pages. Some claim that we are informed through the stories of some of the attributes of God. Others suggest the inspiration comes from the unfailing integrity of the writers to set down as clearly and honestly as possible their vision of God’s walk with his people.

We are today a people who depend increasingly on the interplay of numerous disciplines in our quest for knowledge. This of course was not always the case, and particularly so in the case of biblical study. For very long, the bible was examined within its own pages for knowledge. History, slowly at first, and then with the help of various other sciences then began to help us flesh out that knowledge. We saw where it confirmed and where it contradicted.

The linguist consults the anthropologist and archaeologist, the historian, and the astronomer. It is because of this trans-disciplinary interface that we confirm or not the work of each other. Nowadays, an archaeological proposition is subject to biological, geologic, and a host of other disciplinary talents all of which study, test and then confirm or criticize the conclusion of the principal field.

Take for instance the case of Jericho, the Canaanite city that fell to Joshua’s trumpets. The bible tells us this generally in the story from Joshua, chapter six. The problem with this is that Jericho, at the time of the Israelite entrance in the promised land, was long desolate, a pile of rubble, a city no more. The city of Ai, referred to at length in Chapters seven and eight, was reduced to rubble during that time period, and thus may have fallen at the hands of Joshua. Also, Bethel fell similarly, although this is not noted in the bible.

We learn, as we have throughout much of the Hebrew Scriptures, that “history” is often factually wrong. And this was not because of faulty ability to tell the truth, but rather the stories served the greater purpose of establishing a “truth” believed by the people–namely that whatever happened that was God came from God, and whatever bedevilment befell the Israelites was due to their unfaithful behavior.

As I have studied so far up into 1Samuel, I’m discovering that this pattern of telling somewhat incorrect history for a greater purpose of “spiritual truth,” continues. There are double traditions in most of this history. Stories from the Northern Kingdom and the Southern are placed side by side, as if the writer is unable to choose the “correct” one. And later editors, also abhorring the idea of removing theological conclusions they disagree with–rework the traditions to point to their favored beliefs.

The movement from tribal confederacy that developed from the entrance into Canaan until the time of Saul, and the ensuing monarchy, are treated similarly with double traditions. One is demarked the Saul tradition, the other the Samuel. The Saul tradition  suggests the “rightness” of the monarchical movement, the Samuel cautions against it. Indeed, the monarchical period will not go well over time, and a number of the prophets, (Hosea) will rail against it and claim it was a turning away from the true Kingship of Yahweh, the only rightful king of Israel.

I have come to realize that to understand the factual history of Israel from its inception  is to understand the bible. It is to make clear why we tell the same stories usually twice. And why the stories set side by side conflict so often.  We see the factions within the Israelite communities vying for power, attention, and prophetic correctness. Most importantly, we see the conflicting theologies being played out. We truly do see how a  people day to day struggles with this difficult God whom they both look to for protection and yet in some way fear.

It is, as I have said, not a particularly good way to know God, but it certainly eliminates a lot of the grunt work as having already been done by our ancestors. We can move from there, as we have, using the interdisciplinary tools available to us to more completely reconstruct the world of our ancient religious fore bearers.

As believers, all, we share in this tapestry this is still under construction. We learn from it, we grow, we alter, add, subtract, join and sever elements. We match colors and shades, echoes of songs and poetry, epics and sagas, wise and foolish. In the Bible, as in most any sacred scripture founding any faith, we find ourselves–the good, the bad, the beautiful and ugly.

Some suggest that our “job” here is to be authentically human. Surely, the Bible is one of our most honored mechanisms for doing just that. That is plenty of inspiration for me.

He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Bro?

Tags

Africa, biology, climate change, evolution, Homo Sapiens, Ice age, Neanderthals, paleontology

The next time you call your husband a Neanderthal, you might be accurate. Actually not. Just kidding. Genetic testing tends to suggest that in the human genome there is little if any trace of the Neanderthal in us. But that doesn’t negate that he was a close relative albeit now extinct.

Let me explain. Nova has been doing a three part series on what makes us human. It has been fascinating, as all such things are to me. Like any science, there are always questions unanswered, and competing theories around the edges. This is what drives science in general and frankly we cannot expect or want certainty. For then we admit there is nothing more to learn.

In the last several years, questions remain and have been looked at afresh about how we came to be us. Exactly how and why did we evolve away from our chimp and ape cousins? I have spoken on this before, but frankly it has always been something of a mystery what happened to the happless Neanderthal. At least now, we have some good theories.

The amazing thing in the area of paleontology, is that like many other disciplines, there is a lot of overlap. This seems obvious when you think about it, since the planetary development of Earth makes it an organic whole. It stands to reason and would be a serious problem should archaeology, geology, astronomy and so forth, not tend to support  each other in conclusions which touch them both.

And that is where real progress has been made. It seems that Neanderthal was part of that initial migration out of Africa. They settled mostly in the northern European lands and frankly soon were busy fighting the climate. Ice ages came and went, and Neanderthal became adept at living in this harsh environment.

From where came this homo sapien then? Well it seems that climate change in Africa, meant the reduction and almost total elimination of the rain forests. Our remaining ancestors, perhaps down to as few as 800 breeding individuals were forced from the in lands to the sea shores around the continent.

Here they learned new techniques. Their tool making became refined, they clearly turned to eating seafood. They adapted to new conditions. And it appears that genetic changes conducive to such adaptation, worked  to enlarge our brains, at least as to the cognitive parts.

An amazing thing can be done with bones these days. We are actually what we eat. It is exactly true. What we eat is translated into our bones in terms of chemical trails. We can now test Neanderthal bones and determine their diet. It was almost exclusively meat. Although their environment contained both eatable plants and berries, they eschewed such fare in favor of meat.

This may be because of all the food available, meat was by far the most numerous and most plentiful, given the harsh climate. Meat provided the fuel necessary to survive.

What happened when the omnivorous creature, Homo sapien entered the picture, having now decided to explore himself?  No doubt confrontations occurred between the two groups. In the past, theories abounded that Neanderthals were either killed off by superior weaponry or inbred with the sapiens, and thus disappeared.

Such seems not to be the case. No trace of Neanderthal DNA is apparent in the human genome as I said.

Most all the bones of Neanderthals found show multiple fractures. Life was harsh and dangerous for this group. Their weapons were spears and they they were not throwing spears. They got up close and personal with game, and no doubt suffered grievous injuries. Few lived beyond their 30’s.

It is now thought that Neanderthals were basically pushed out of the way, much as American Indians were pushed out of their lands by the white settlers in the US. Finally they were confined to the Rock of Gibraltar, and there they died out. They may have been forced to the extremes of their climate.

Much of this work has been done by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, a premier science institute in paleontology research. There, scientists are working multi-disciplinarily to uncover the rise of humanity.

It seems that the cell deteriorates at a fixed rate, and based on this, we can determine with some clarity when the two, Homo Sapien and Neanderthal had a common ancestor. That appears to be around 200,000 years ago.

Little by little, we are learning why we stood up, how our thumbs became specialized, how our brains grew, and how we adapted to various climate conditions. They are what drove us upward and onward. Near, at one point, to extinction ourselves, we held on, adapted to new conditions, and ultimately flourished. Perhaps we have kind of over did it now, as our very numbers now threaten the well-being of our planet.

But it is easy enough to sit back and look on in amazement. What has God wrought? Apparently quite a lot of humans!

What Hath God Wrought?

Tags

Ardi, creation, evolution, God, hominid, homo sapien, humanoid, Lucy, paleontology, science

A few weeks ago, I made mention of Ardi (Ardipithecus ramidus), a female hominid who was found in the early 90’s in Ethiopia.

Almost immediately, I received links to various creationist sites poo pooing the whole thing and claiming that scientists were having to scramble to rethink everything in light of her. It was like, to them, some major evolutionary catastrophe.

Such happens when people who know very little start trying to find information to support a conclusion they very much want to be the case. It makes for horrid science.

So it was with excitement, that the Contrarian and I sat down to actually watch the Discovery special on her discovery and the immense scientific inquiry that has followed.

Ardi was located in Ethiopia, in the general area where Lucy had been found and where many hominid types have been discovered. Her age was and is pegged at 4.4 million years ago.

The process is argon dating. Argon, like uranium has a known half life. (We are pretty good at this stuff since we build bombs that work based in part on the half life of uranium.) The surrounding rock is melted down, in minute quantities, and the argon gas emitted, is measured, giving very accurate time readings. So Ardi is 4.4 (+ or – 50,000 ) years old.

Her skeleton, what was found at least, was in quite poor shape. It took more than three years just to clean the pieces, which were numerous. Through two different processes, one conducted in Tokyo and the other in California, the skull was reconstructed. Both models were near identical, giving efficacy to the correctness of the model.

Of course, as is always the case today, experts from many far flung disciplines are brought to bear on different aspects of the find, and testing begins. As far as I can tell, no adverse or anomalous results have occurred which contradict other conclusions.

Scientists are jumping for glee at the find as you might expect, for Ardi presents them with something utterly unexpected. She is far older than Lucy, yet she doesn’t exhibit much in the way of chimpanzee structure as they expected. As one expedition leader suggested, “you can’t predict what you could have no way of knowing might exist.”

Ardi does what all good discoveries do, it sets the scientific community awhirl in excitement. Things have come up that were not expected, and an explosion of new ideas and testing is being called for.

What scientists know at this point is this: That Ardi was bipedal. Contrary to the idiot sites (all starting from the premise that evolution is bogus, then searching for anything they can manipulate unscientifically to support their already arrived at conclusion and buffalo their rather dull and uneducated readers), this seems well established through normal examination of pelvic bones.

Yet, her feet are decidedly ape-like, having an extremely large toe suitable for wrapping around small limbs. Her hands are human, and there are not the proper bones one would expect in a knuckle walking ape. Her teeth are also human, the canine having shrunk to the size appropriate to humanoid types.

Since she is so old, and is far back but still before the common ancestor of both apes and humans, the question raging at this point is what evolutionary good was served by bipedalism, which brought this characteristic to the fore so very early on in the development of what would become homo sapiens?

Scientists historically have favored a savanna approach. As the graces overcame the forests as the climate changed, scavenging for food often required “standing” up to look around above the grasses. Now we know that no such savanna existed then. Ardi, by examination of the flora of her time, lived in woods.

Present theories are that Ardi and her kind were bipedal because it allowed use of the hands to carry food longer distances. This freed up females to raise more children ( supported by the  record of increase), while males foraged farther afield for food and could return with sufficient quantities for the wife and kids. (Of course it was also safer that the females and young need not expose themselves to predators on the ground.)

Today, scientists are defining hominids from other ape like creatures simply on the basis of bipedalism. It was the big change, unheard of otherwise in the animal kingdom.

Where Ardi belongs on the family tree, make take a long time to decide. As those of us who dabble in this field know, the tree has been altered more than once over the last couple of hundred years. New discoveries are like that. They often upset the apple cart, and send scientists off to rethink everything again. No doubt, this will not be the last time; it certainly is not the first.

When I look at Ardi, and what specialists who create the “faces” of these creatures, show me of her life, I am given pause. I can imagine God watching little Ardi and her group, laughing with glee at their triumphs and play. One wonders if God stopped and smiled, wondering whether this creature would one day grow to a point where it would look upward and wonder “why, who, what?” God must have been excited to contemplate that moment in time when “first contact” would be made.

The wonder of evolution, the result of God’s (I believe) declaring by his Word, the start of creation, speak eloquently to us. We can imagine in all it’s glory the intricate melding of physical laws, the swirling interplay of matter and law that resulted over time in increasingly complex and more sentient creatures. We have before us today the result of that fine work. Amazing and making us tremble with awe. That through such a process, so elegant and surreal, tens of thousands of fly species could be created, different in minute aspects, of no consequence to anyone, but simply the way things play out in nature. Such a cornucopia of life explodes forth from the simple words, “let there be. . . ” And it was, and God said it was good.

See this site for general information and further links to actual science sites! Although I am aware of the limitations of Wikipedia, the information contained in this article is substantially the same as presented in the Discovery special.

Of Science and Truthiness

Tags

astronomy, evolution, hypotheses, Mars, red planet, religion, science, theories

Mars, you remember Mars right? Fourth planet from the sun, little bro of earth, last best hope for mankind should we trash this place to unlivability? Yeah, that’s the one, red in color.

Red, uhuh, and what caused that? I always figured that God spilt his strawberry kool-aid while poking Jupiter in the “eye.” Failing that, an all out planet paint war game where in the red team won?

Nah. Actually scientists always thought that the rocks were largely iron and that when the planet had a lots of water on it, that it rusted the dang old place, making it the original junk yard.  But, science always trumps itself in revising old theories. The new one is that it wasn’t water at all. They think it was just the usual mix of oxides in the rocks that wore away over gazillions of years through erosion. Yep, good old fashioned erosion.

We owe this new idea to those famous pesky land rovers “Spirit” and “Opportunity” that just wouldn’t say quit and collected enough evidence that there were chemicals present in Martian soil that wouldn’t be there had water covered the land. So the red dust came after water had retreated off the landscape.

That’s what I love about science. It’s one of the only truly honest and honorable forms of human endeavor. Oh, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of personal pet theories on just about anything to go around, and plenty of in-fighting for research grants and publication space. But in fairly short order, good ideas win out over bad. Every now and then somebody holds out a different theory and never lets go, and perhaps once in a huge while on some obscure issue, the minority point is eventually proven true. But it doesn’t happen often, and never on huge issues.

Certainly not on ones that increasing transcend disciplines. This is I suspect a fairly recent phenomenon, this cross disciplining. Archaeologists look to chemists and biologists and geologists and others to come in and work in the same general field. Of course, it wouldn’t work if each of these came to wildly different conclusions, they must fairly clearly support one another, or something would be declared quite radically wrong with some number of the theories.

So, in the end, the conclusions reached today are a good deal more reliable than ones in the past that relied solely on a single disciplines standards and theories. Of course the Genome project did hugely support the evolutionary biologists in their ongoing work. According to some scientists, they thought that it would put to rest any question about the efficacy of the theory. Not so, one can never under estimate the power of a personal need for results to be something other than they really are.

Scientists, it seems to me, are pretty much like other humans. They want recognition, and they want funding for their research, and they want to add to the volume of human knowledge. They would never knowingly or even suspiciously engage in work they knew to be false or suspect, because it would mean their lives would be meaningless, of no  purpose or result.

This is not to say that some pseudo scientists don’t try to pull the wool over the public’s eyes for the short term. But their motives are to secure a windfall quickly and then disappear from the scene when the jig is up.

Real scientists live for that elusive once in a life time discovery. Their research is designed for only that purpose–to make a singularly significant advancement, one that from that moment on directs the rest of the discipline’s energies to  a new set of parameters. This is no different than the doctor who strives to create a new and better treatment for a specific disease, nor the lawyer who writes a brief from a novel point of view, attempting to revision a concept of law.

In other words, scientists don’t waste time on nonsense, and things they know or suspect to be fallacious. In that they are more truthful and honest than most of us. Charlatans may hold sway for a short time, but evidence accumulates and the misleaders, the out right frauds are discovered, ferreted out, and dismissed in utter disdain.

The same cannot be said for politicians surely. They are more than willing to ignore the truth totally in pursuit of personal aims of re-election and power. Preachers and religious proponents have shown themselves more than willing to obscure the truth, fan the flames of untruth, and otherwise distort reality in pursuit of lining their own pockets, their churches, or their personal theology. They can often function in a world of “doing it for the people’s good.”

Perhaps because of the stringent controls in science, the need of replication, and “showing your work” such shenanigans are not prevalent, except in those fringe areas where in fact result is assumed and means are manufactured. And that is where the fringe loses its power. Their fantastical theories cannot hold up for long because they cannot either show the work or replicate by means of experiment their claims.

Science is our most trustworthy ally in discerning truth, simply because truth must prove itself in an objective way. Science doesn’t start with a conclusion and then seek proof to sustain itself. That is the province of the charlatan. Science starts with a hypothesis, and then designs methods by which to TEST the hypothesis. If tests fail to confirm the hypothesis, a new one is constructed. Plain and simple.

Ironically, we have no trouble trusting science when it comes to our expectations at the light switch, the ignition switch, the power button of the computer, the efficacy of medicine to cure our ailments, or any of a thousand other instances of science which are accepted in every day life.

Only when science butts heads with somebody’s personal theology of how things are “supposed to be” do we find the phenomenon of disbelief and argument that science is engaged in a conspiracy of deception. It continues to astound the scientific community, and it continues to astound the rational mind of most thinking humans. Such is life, and so perhaps I’m right, that God spilt his strawberry kool-aid on Mars. I mean it could be true, right?