1. Genesis and the origin of the Origin of the species

Comment #239629 by Marcus Hill on August 30, 2008 at 4:30 am

Anyone who tries to apply Godel's Theorems to any field outside of formal mathematical proof doesn't have the first clue about what they say.

2. Praying for health

Comment #225695 by Marcus Hill on August 7, 2008 at 8:18 am

I'm astonished that the lowest number of religions per country is 3. Isn't the Vatican technically a country? Surely there's only one religion there!

3. Flatfish Fossils Fill In Evolutionary Missing Link

Comment #208572 by Marcus Hill on July 11, 2008 at 3:34 am

On a purely speculative note...

Many fish are flat and swim oriented vertically. It's fairly easy to see how, if such fish were normally found near the bottom, it would be an evolutionary advantage to develop colouration similar to the bottom and a tendency to lie flat on the bottom when trying to avoid predators, and this is behaviour that has a clear gradual line to it. As the new finds demonstrate, some such fish started drifting the downward eye gradually around - it's possible such a gradual drift confers the advantage that when starting to move from a flat position, the fish whose eye has drifted a little will spot a predator it didn't see with its "up" eye alone faster than the fish whose eye has not drifted at all.

4. Evangelical Christians sign up to a 'Church within a Church'

Comment #203450 by Marcus Hill on July 3, 2008 at 12:37 am

I think this is great news for two reasons:

1) Schisms are always good news, if only because it helps us to "divide and conquer" as the more extreme branches of theism paint targets on themselves for ease of early elimination by an increasingly clued up set of societal norms.

2) I get to meet up with my uncle, whom I don't see nearly often enough. He's got some standing in the C of E and is gay, so he's making a trip over from Canada for the Lambeth conference because of this issue.

5. The $10,000-a-Month Psychic

Comment #201636 by Marcus Hill on June 30, 2008 at 1:02 am

"quick insights into the poor coordination between the company's research and marketing teams"

You've got to respect anyone with the gall to demand $10k a month to give insights gleaned from reading Dilbert.

6. Fossil of most primitive 4-legged creature found

Comment #199556 by Marcus Hill on June 26, 2008 at 1:10 am

Why is it particularly surprising that it seems "out of sequence" in terms of how advanced it is? Surely we all know that intensity of selective pressure affects the rate of evolutionary change, so if these animals were in a more abundant environment than the ones that evolved into the extant tetrapods, we would expect them to have features which are more "primitive" than their contemporaries.

7. Fossil reveals oldest live birth

Comment #186264 by Marcus Hill on May 30, 2008 at 3:09 am

I think we're missing the point. This has caused evilutionists to change their minds by "200 million years" - not that there ever was such a timescale. Clearly, the fact that they have to make such huge changes in their so-called "theory" demonstrated that it's all wrong.

8. Cult leader Pyotr Kuznetsov tries suicide after realising he was wrong about doomsday

Comment #155147 by Marcus Hill on April 4, 2008 at 7:47 am

It occurs to me that giving them a cow missed a serious diagnostic opportunity. They should have been given food and other aid only in heavily barcoded packaging. The ones who would rather starve than take barcoded nourishment are clearly mentally ill, and should be given treatment. The ones who give in and eat have taken a step in their own recovery and can probably be allowed to mix with sane people.


Oh, and "Orthodox Christians, not cult members"? How can an object be an element of set A and not set B when A is a subset of B?

9. Cult leader Pyotr Kuznetsov tries suicide after realising he was wrong about doomsday

Comment #154917 by Marcus Hill on April 4, 2008 at 1:15 am

It's entirely possible to laugh at an inherently absurd situation and simultaneously be sympathetic for people affected by its tragic elements. I know it's an old cliche, but the saying "someday we'll look back on this and laugh" is, in my experience, frequently true. When we are already detached from the situation, we don't even need the additional distance of time before we can laugh at the comic elements of a tragic situation. It doesn't make us bad people.

10. Darwin told us so: Researcher shows natural selection speeds up speciation

Comment #154319 by Marcus Hill on April 3, 2008 at 5:19 am

If you think this is ammunition against the IDiot "micro" vs. "macro" evolution argument, you're sadly mistaken. They don't accept speciation as the benchmark of what counts as "macro" evolution, they'll claim what you've got is still a bunch of stick insects and when you've seen them evolve into a cow they'll accept that "macro" evolution has occurred. If they're not trying to hide their religious predispositions, they'll even say that what you have is still within its own "kind".

I've tried to get these people to give me a clear dividing line beyond which they would accept that "macro" evolution has happened, somewhere between the many speciation events which have been observed (which they deny as being "macro" evolution) and the ridicuously long-term goal of observing a population undergo gigantic morphological changes to the extent that a crocodile's descendant looks like a duck. Oddly enough, they never give a straight answer. However, it always seems to me that the actual answer is "macroevolution is evolution to a degree beyond that which has been observed or is likely to be in the near future". As we observe more and more evolutionary change in the lab and in nature, they just keep shifting those goalposts.

11. Faith healing church parents charged over toddler's death

Comment #153784 by Marcus Hill on April 2, 2008 at 4:37 am

The case in question is manslaughter, not murder. To be murder, there has to be an intention to kill or seriously injure the victim. Regardless of their utter stupidity, the parents in this case were acting in a way that they honestly believed would help the child.

12. Are they running for President or Pastor-in-Chief?

Comment #134533 by Marcus Hill on February 28, 2008 at 12:35 am

In any civilised nation, someone asking candidates in a political debate what their favourite Bible verse was would be laughed at. Americans aren't only restricted in their choice of political stance of candidates (Far Right or Further Right), they have the politicians' religion thrust into the spotlight - and there's even less to differentiate between candidates on that front.

13. Atheists An Increasingly Outspoken Minority

Comment #129315 by Marcus Hill on February 19, 2008 at 1:27 am

"I am confident that the trend will continue, but it's still going to be a long time, if ever, before America catches up with Western Europe."

If the trend continues, it will eventually catch up or get close enough to be indistiguishable, if only due to the mathematical fact that the percentage of atheists in a population has an upper limit.

14. Machines 'to match man by 2029'

Comment #128849 by Marcus Hill on February 18, 2008 at 5:09 am

Whilst it is one possible goal to have a machine that passes the Turing test, I'm not entirely sure that this is necessarily what the aim of AI research should be.

We want to create an intelligence that is versatile, creative, problem-solving etc., but why should it be human-like? Surely we want an intelligence that shares all the positive aspects of human thought but lacks its drawbacks - imperfect memory, an inability to perform mathematics as quickly and accurately as the simplest computer, an inability to differentiate objective and subjective judgements, the list goes on.

Of course, once you dissociate "intelligent" from "human-like", the question of "when" becomes harder still, since there isn't an objective measure whereby we can say a nonhuman entity is "as intelligent" as a human being - not only can we not predict when this will occur, we won't even be able reliably to say when it has occurred.

15. Banks are helping sharia make a back-door entrance

Comment #116981 by Marcus Hill on January 28, 2008 at 12:33 am

My wife is a chartered management accountant. A couple of weeks ago, the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants sent her a leaflet about a new qualification they're offering - in Islamic Finance (or some similarly named thing, we've recycled the leaflet).

All of these things are not, in any way, "steps towards the introduction of Sharia law". They're merely the market reacting to demand. Trying to suppress the symptoms - the rise of Islamic financial products - will merely foster a greater sense of alienation and prosecution among Muslims. Addressing the cause - by reducing the spread and depth of religious (in this case, Islamic) belief - will mean the symptoms will go away by themselves as people no longer want these products.

16. US 'doomed' if creationist president elected: scientists

Comment #108973 by Marcus Hill on January 8, 2008 at 4:04 am

Whilst Yorkshire does have a good number of fine breweries, this does not detract from the undeniable fact that it is geographically disadvantaged by being on the wrong side of the Pennines.

As for the US elections, as I think I may have mentioned, I feel great pity for a country where you only have a choice between two parties, Far Right and Further Right.

17. This Is Not a Test

Comment #99952 by Marcus Hill on December 18, 2007 at 12:25 am

Once again I'm glad I don't live in the US, where there are only two political parties: Far Right and Further Right...

18. Believe it or not

Comment #97368 by Marcus Hill on December 12, 2007 at 1:23 am

I don't think we should be backing down from any fights. On the other hand, we should be picking the order in which we fight them. Fighting unpopular fights and being seen as "anti-Christmas" killjoys when we object to nativity scenes can harm prospects of winning otherwise easier victories. Justice and politics are administered by human beings, so public perception does make a very real difference. At the risk of sounding like a Creationist with a wedge strategy, a more sensible option would be to start with the less controversial victories and use them as precedents when fighting the harder cases.

I'll put this idea forward at the next monthly meeting of the Global Atheist Conspiracy Coordination Cabal.

19. Is Infant Male Circumcision An Abuse Of The Rights Of The Child?

Comment #96154 by Marcus Hill on December 10, 2007 at 4:49 am

I think a big reason for the continued prevalence of infant circumcision in the US is the natural desire for people to think of themselves as good parents.

Many people have their kids circumcised either unthinkingly or because they buy the bogus justifications of hygiene or cultural normality. Once they have done this, even if they would rationally accept that they were mistaken or misled when given the real facts, these people have a deep emotional attachment to the "rightness" of circumcision. After all, admitting their error is an admission that they have abused their children. The pro-circumcision argument therefore gains from this inertia, since getting anyone to act on the fact that infant circumcision is unjustified relies on informing them of this fact before the birth of their firstborn son.

It would be interesting to see statistics on the relative proportions of sons of cut and intact men who are themselves circumcised.

20. Judgement Day: Intelligent Design on Trial

Comment #88631 by Marcus Hill on November 18, 2007 at 5:17 am

chuckgoecke: "I think some viruses can go into cells, insert themselves into the genome or snip and cut chromosomes apart, and re-assemble them, naturally doing what genetic engineers are doing now. Like most mutations these huge changes are almost always fatal, but occasionally... A really big non-fatal and favorable change might occur ..."

You're thinking of Endogenous Retroviruses (ERVs). Much more frequent than any beneficial changes from them are neutral changes which can propagate on the back of unrelated beneficial changes or randomly. ERVs actually provide some really good evidence for evolution in the form of the "twin nested hierarchies", since they leave evidence not only with their presence but with where they have inserted themselves in the genome. If you use the fossil record to determine where various branches of the tree of life split off, you can make predictions that ERVs found in the genes of living species would follow that pattern. For instance, since chimps split from the human line more recently than gorillas, you'd expect every ERV shared by humans and gorillas to also be present in chimps. This has turned out to be the case, with the tree constructed from the fossil record closely matching the one constructed by analysis of ERVs.

This is evidence that should be pushed as hard as Chromosome 2, IMO. Unless the "designer" was being deliberately deceptive, what possible reason would there be for putting these useless bits of DNA in such a precise pattern as to indicate common descent?

21. Hello Again, Michael Behe!

Comment #86327 by Marcus Hill on November 9, 2007 at 1:50 am

I'm glad to have other people acknowledge that I'm an authority on everything. I've got the Mathematics PhD to prove it!

22. Brief Regarding the California Same-Sex Marriage Case

Comment #82516 by Marcus Hill on October 26, 2007 at 2:25 pm

The brief does need to go on about the Establishment Clause. There are still plenty of religious litigants who try to argue that it's OK to favour religion over nonreligion.

I also don't think there's a need to go into greater depth about the fact that the reasoning behind the ban is religious. There is enough in the brief to argue that it should be clear, and thus the burden of proof rests with those who favour the ban. In fact, the brief addresses the possibility that this isn't the case, asking the court to put the case of whether the reasoning behind the ban has any separable secular reasoning back into an evidentiary court rather than uphold the appeal if it isn't certain the case has been made.