Possibly creationism's best ever attempt to explain feathered dinosaurs

Almost every creationist argument is based on the assumption that Genesis is an account of actual events, and that the bible is the word of God and therefore the only truth. This is one of the main reasons why all their attempts at science have failed, because they only look for 'evidence' which is remotely compatible with their own assumptions. Alternatively they look for 'evidence' (a term we should use very loosely in this case) that contradicts their own grotesque caricature of the theory of evolution, often based on misunderstanding, deliberate misinformation, and complete ignorance of reality.

The idea of dinosaurs with plumage has often ruffled the feathers of the creationist movement. They've never really tried to explain why dinosaurs have feathers at all. All previous attempts by creationists to explain can be summarised by at least one of these points :

• In Genesis- birds were made on the 5th day, but God filled the land with animals on the 6th so birds must have come before dinosaurs. Look, it's in the Bible - which is the word of God because it says so in the Bible- therefore it's true.
• When I don't inspect it closely, it looks more like a bird than a dinosaur. It's a bird.
• Evolution is only a theory.
• I don't know much about the natural world at all.

 However, after searching through answersingenesis.org I finally found an attempt at an explanation that tickled me.
Dinosaurs ate Birds. Birds have feathers. Dinosaurs therefore ate feathers. If you completely ignore every piece of scientific evidence which suggests that dinosaurs had feathers and completely ignore the context in which these these sort of observations should be made- it makes perfect sense.

If you want to know more about evolution, two books I'd highly recommend are Evolution: What the Fossils Say and Why It Matters and Why Evolution Is True.

Homeopathy: Declared unfit for animals, yet still the perfect prescription for gullability.

Homeopathy has been declared unfit for use on animals in the UK because of a complete lack of proven efficacy, but this late-18th century German fruitloopery is still available for those who suffer from gullibility or deliberately mimic the symptoms of complete and utter stupidity. Harsh words? Not really when you think that more common sense is being applied to veterinary medicine than our own.

The concept of homeopathy is that diluting  a substance which produces similar effects to the symptoms of a known illness and diluting it again and again (until it is basically indistinguishable from water ) actually increases its potency to cure that illness. Scientists have pointed out time and time again that the little success from homeopathy (supported only by anecdotal evidence) is due to the placebo effect.  One of homeopathy's main arguments against this claim has been that the placebo effect does not occur in animals (a very debatable point) so successful homeopathic remedies in veterinary medicine prove that it works. Recently, vets seem to have been asking "What success?".  In December 2010 the Veterinary Medicines Directorate (VMD) made clear that remedies could only be classed as medicines, and therefore be prescribed by vets, if they could scientifically demonstrate their efficacy- and that homeopathic remedies do not meet these requirements by any standard. The VMD Director of Operations, John FitzGerald, said:

“Some of these products are claiming to be effective and safe when no scientific evidence has been presented to us to show they are.

“Animal owners have a right to know if a product does what it claims. The products claim to treat diseases which can cause serious welfare problems and in some circumstances kill animals if not properly treated. So in some cases owners are giving remedies to their pets which don’t treat the problem.”

Other examples of unproven quack-shite under the axe of the VMD include:

• Animal food supplements – known as neutraceuticals, which claim to treat diseases or bring extra health benefits such as improved mental ability in pet animals.
• Herbal liquids, powders and pellets – sold as herbal wormers – claiming to irritate and repel parasitic worms from the guts of horses, livestock, and pets.

So why are homeopathic medicines still being funded by the NHS despite the fact that they're unsuitable as medicine for animals? The reason is simply because the government believes that it is very important to give people the choice to take alternative medicines rather than treatments which have been scientifically proven to work. It is yet another example of how confused the government is about the scientific evidence concerning particular substances and treatments and the moral implications of giving people the choice the use of them or endanger their lives.

Why is it that the government seemed reluctant to permit the use of marijuana for medicinal purposes (the benefits of which have been scientifically proven), yet is fine with the use of alternative medicines which have no proven medicinal benefit or may even exacerbate the problem. It also  supports giving people the choice to endanger their lives by ignoring medical advice and taking ineffectual preventative remedies when travelling to areas of the world stricken by malaria and polio - yet at the same time wastes millions and millions of pounds a year trying to stop people from choosing to use substances that they have made illegal for reasons which are contradictory to current scientific evidence.

They obviously can't decide whether patient health is more important than patient choice. In the Guardian, Drevan Harris explained the faulty reasoning behind the confusion:
"The Labour government of the day, in their evidence, defended the use of homeopathy on the NHS on the basis of "patient choice" and the fact that because some doctors swore by it, the efficacy question was not settled.
Some science teachers swear by creationism, but that does not mean that evolution is an unsettled question and that school science lessons should offer creationism as an alternative to their choosy consumers."

 The government's chief scientific adviser, Professor John Beddington, also agrees that the the NHS should not fund homeopathy. The last labour government ignored him and now the new coalition government has issued an equally pathetic response based on the same wishy-washy 'patient choice' nonsense. I wonder how long a government which claims that severe cuts are needed everywhere can keep funding an alternative medicine based on scientific nonsense despite the fact it costs them "only a few million pounds" each year.

The other problem is a very, very misinformed idea that old traditional medicines are better for you. Old traditional medicines that have been proven to work are known as... medicine. Those that doesn't work are known as alternative medicine or new age quack-shite. For example the demand for traditional Chinese medicine is growing in western Europe. Remember that this area of medicine includes grinding up phallic like parts of endangered animals to cure problems like erectile dysfunction and infertility. Yet at the same time, these parts of the world have taken to western medicine with open arms. In Africa, they're dying (literally) for western medical aid because their traditional remedies don't work at all, yet 'new age' members of the middle class over here reckon they can cure all their illnesses by chanting ancient languages or touching 'magic crystals' which produce 'resonant frequencies' or 'energy'  and various other idiotically vague terms.

Personally I think that because the principles of homeopathy state that a substance becomes more potent the less it is used, the best way to use homeopathy is not to use it at all.

Recommended Reading

In his brilliant book Bad Science, Ben Goldacre explains and destroys pseudo-scientific nonsense such as homeopathy, aqua detox and advice from 'nutritionist' Gillian McKeith who claimed to have a PhD (one of a number of qualifications she basically bought on the Internet including a professional membership to the American Association of Nutritional Consultants which Ben Goldacre's dead cat, Hettie, is now also part of for a mere $60).

What is Homeopathy?

Homeopathy is a form of alternative medicine, which involves  treating illnesses with severely  diluted remedies (and common sense), first proposed by Samuel Hahnemann in the late 18th Century. Hahenemann observed that ingesting cinchona bark produced side effects similar to the symptoms of malaria and therefore prescribed it as a treatment for malaria. He then found that there are many other natural substances which produced side effects similar to the symptoms of known illnesses, so he conjured up the "Law of Similars" and decided that like must cure like. He believed that diseases were merely disturbances in a hypothetical "Vital Force" or "Life Force", and that mimicking the symptoms would stimulate the Vital force into expelling the original disease. These assertions have no basis in reality and  would still have the same credibility if he had claimed that they were based on instructions written in unicorn blood on an invisible piece of parchment written by Jesus Christ reincarnated as a chameleonic Hypno-Toad. 

The lack of common sense did not end there. He then decided that a normal dose would produce artificial symptoms but that a heavily diluted would actually cure it. He then created the Centesimal scale (C) to describe how much a substance should be diluted by a factor of 100. For example:

A 2C dilution requires a substance to be diluted to one part in one hundred, and then some of that diluted solution diluted by a further factor of one hundred. This works out to one part of the original substance in 10,000 parts of the solution. A 6C dilution is 1 part of the original solution per 1,000,000,000 parts of water. By this point, the remedy is almost indistinguishable from water, yet it is apparently more potent than the remedy. A 30C dilution (prescribed for many illnesses) is only one part of the original substance per  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 parts water. The homeopathic remedies for flue like illnesses can be 200C dilutions!

There is no scientific evidence for the purported efficacy of homeopathy. The only thing supporting ridiculous claims made this deranged form of alternative medicine is a whole host of anecdotal 'evidence' (a term I prefer to use rather loosely in this case).

This absurdity of homeopathy is highlighted in this Mitchell and Webb sketch - Homeopathic A&E.

Pastor publicly executes elf in protest against Satan's minions at Christmas

John Knudsen, a Danish pastor at the Løkken Free Church in Vendsyssel, has dealt the first blow against an enemy that he believes to be one of greatest threat to Christmas. It is, of course, the Elf.

Many people imagine elves as Santa's little helpers making toys for children or magical folk from Germanic and Norse Folklore, but not John Knudsen. He believes that they are "poltergeists that come from the devil and make children sick" and that the decorating of elves at Christmas is "comparable to decorating with Nazi flags."

Since Mr. Knudson is a reasonable man, he decided to hang an elf by the neck outside of his church. Accompanying the elf was a sign reading "we reject Satan and all his works and all his empty promises”, a reference to the Christian baptism rite. The protest against Satan and his elvish minions has also been supported by his parish and some members of the town.

Since the pastor was unable to catch a real elf, the mock execution was only performed on an effigy of a Christmas elf. However, many people have asked, even threatened him to take the elf down. His decision to ignore these requests has not gone unnoticed by the "elves", as Knudson claims they have been sending him threatening letters. He also reported the mysterious appearance of a dozen or so metre-high gnomes outside of his home.

Refusing to give up the fight, the pastor set up a night watch to prevent the elf from being stolen before it's scheduled removal on Sunday. However, one resident managed to take the elf down in broad daylight on Monday and also left behind a note to reassure the pastor that it would be "kept safe until after the New Year".

Knudson, obviously worried about elven poltergeists infecting the children his beloved town, reported the theft to the police. Despite a confession from the thief, the police refused to press charges on the grounds that their "caseload was too heavy to make investigating theft of a stuffed toy elf a priority".

With thanks to the Copenhagen Post

UK Government continues to ignore scientific advice on drugs

Downgrading the Importance of Scientific Advice

A new plan has been announced that will allow the UK government to make new policies on drugs without consulting expert doctors and scientists, effectively allowing them to change the law on controlled substances for reasons which are not supported by any evidence. The decision will come at the cost of a greatly reduced quality of scientific advice in government and a huge dent in the relationship between the government and scientists.
 
The changes are new amendments to the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which requires the government to seek advice from the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) when making decisions to ban drugs and potentially criminalise large numbers of people. The ACMD is required to have at least 20 members, among them representatives of the practices of medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine and pharmacy, the pharmaceutical industry, and chemistry (other than pharmaceutical chemistry); and members who have a wide and relevant experience of social problems connected with the misuse of drugs. All are unpaid and have active careers in their area of expertise. The new plans are to remove the requirements for advisers from these professions.

The crime prevention minister James Brokenshire, on behalf of the government, said today:

"Removing the requirement on the home secretary to appoint to the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs at least one person with experience in six specific areas will allow us greater flexibility in the expertise we are able to draw on."

I wonder though,  in what scenario wouldn't you want a medical doctor or pharmacist to give scientific advice on the misuse of drugs?



The Government do have a right not to take on board the advice from the ACMD, which they have exercised almost to its full potential over the last few years. On the Advice of the ACMD, Home Secretary David Blunkett downgraded cannabis from Class B to Class C in 2004. However, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith returned it to Class B in 2009. In February of the same year, the ACMD advised the government  to downgrade ecstasy from a Class A to a Class B drug. The ACMD's report on ecstasy, based on a 12 month study of 4,000 academic papers, concluded that it was nowhere near as dangerous as other Class A drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine. Once again, Jaqui Smith didn't listen to the advice.


Background: The Sacking of David Nutt

Senior Advisor to the ACMD, David Nutt, publicly condemned the UK government for ignoring scientific advice when making it's decisions. He believed that drugs should be classified according the the evidence of how harmful they are to the individual and to society. Nutt pointed out that alcohol and tobacco caused more harm than LSD, ecstasy and cannabis.

He also published a paper which showed that whilst there is one instance of acute harm for every 350 exposures to horse riding, there is only one instance of acute harm for every 10'000 exposures to ecstasy. His point was that the classification of drugs is obviously not based on how harmful they are but on an attitude fuelled by "scare stories" over the years. He backed up his claim for this distorted media attitude with a study of drug related news paper reports over a period of 10 years:

"the likelihood of a newspaper reporting a death from paracetamol was in per 250 deaths, for diazepam it was 1 in 50, whereas for amphetamine it was 1 in 3 and for ecstasy every associated death was reported."

Jaqui Smith received an enormous amount of criticism from the scientific community for bullying Professor Nutt into apologising for implying that horse riding was more dangerous than taking ecstasy, despite the fact he was doing his job as a scientist to set out the facts and that the paper was published outside of his ACMD role. Her successor, Alan Johnson, sacked David  Nutt, adding:

"It is important that the government's messages on drugs are clear and as an advisor you do nothing to undermine public understanding of them. I cannot have public confusion between scientific advice and policy and have therefore lost confidence in your ability to advise me as Chair of the ACMD."

However, he was never clear on how David Nutt had broken any guidelines or codes of practice.


David Nutt claimed that it was almost as if the ACMD was expected to find evidence to support the government's stance on drugs and that, in the end, they didn't like what real scientists were saying. His sacking delivered quite a blow to the relationship between scientists and the government and was followed by the resignation of many more scientific advisers on the ACMD. Many have also criticised the 'War on Drugs' for causing more harm than the drugs themselves.

"Science Opposing 'War on Drugs' is Overwhelming"

These are the words from  Dr. Evan Wood, the director of the urban health research initiative at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS. He is also the co-author of the Vienna Declaration, which calls on the world’s politicians to let scientific evidence guide their policies on illicit drugs.  Vienna was chosen as the site for the 2010 conference because it is home to the United Nations commission on narcotic drugs and a crossroads for Westerners to Eastern Europe and Central Asia, where HIV infections from dirty needles are skyrocketing.

He believes that the war on drugs, waged by many governments worldwide, continues to ignore the health and social harms cased by their antiquated policies and described it as a "global catastrophe. Up until now, the scientific community hasn’t really been outspoken about it,” he said.

“Scientists have been attacked by groups seeking to maintain the status quo. I have been in a leadership position involved with the evaluation of the supervised injecting facility in Vancouver and have experienced first-hand how scientists promoting the notion that addiction is a public-health problem and a medical problem can be attacked for those views.” 

"One in 100 adults in Russia is already HIV-infected because of heroin use,” said Wood, chair of the committee that wrote the declaration. His main concern is the negative role the War on Drugs has played in the fight against AIDS, “It’s an injection-drug-related epidemic. Needle exchange is illegal.” He pointed out that methadone, one of the best substitutes for heroin to combat addiction, is illegal there, even if prescribed.

Wood points out the declaration stresses gang violence in cities such as Vancouver is directly related to drug prohibition.“When these drugs are made illegal, organized crime groups are enriched by that,” he said. "They fight one another to maintain those profits.”

He also stated that the money spent on combating drug related crime could be better spent elsewhere. “In California, they spend more on incarceration than they do on post-secondary education. It’s estimated that one in nine African-American males between the ages of 25 and 35 are in prison on any given day in the U.S.”

The World Health Organisation and Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS have also strongly endorsed the call for drug-policy reforms.

Public Opinion

The reception to the evidence from the experts has been met with mixed feelings. This is largely due to the fact that many haven't heard about the evidence  and don't seem to understand that people like David Nutt and Dr. Wood aren't just spouting out their innermost thoughts based on biases concerning drugs, the media and government. They're doing their job, which is to represent the facts in the best way possible and tell us what those facts are. It seems that people don't like what they're now being told. Many people seem to be against drugs, not because the facts tell them to be but because of some moral obligation to oppose them.

The main problem is, it's hard to shake off what we've been told for so long about drugs. And that is probably the main reasons that the government is not willing to change the laws on drugs because they think it will send people the wrong message: that on the subject of drugs, they didn't know what they were talking about.

Researchers say societal values must be considered in endangered species decisions

Researchers argue that, when making decisions on whether a species need protection from extinction, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has excluded significant research findings about human threats to protected species, even though the law governing the agencies action requires all decisions to be based “solely on the basis of the best scientific and commercial data available.”

A group of scientists, led by Jeremy Bruskotter of Ohio State University, argue in the December issue of the journal BioScience that research about societal values should be considered along with biological and ecological data in listing decisions. The researchers refer to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2009 decision to remove grey wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains from endangered species protections to demonstrate their point.

In it's decision to remove Grey Wolves from the endangered species list in 2009, the Fish and Wildlife Service acknowledged  that “human-caused mortality” pushed them dangerously close to extinction in the 1930s, but then claim that “attitudes toward wolves have improved greatly over the past 30 years.”

The Fish and Wildlife Service cited only a single study from 2002 to support this claim. Bruskotter said, “This is not for a lack of literature on the topic.”  He stated that there were plenty of studies on the attitudes towards wolves dating back to the 1970's. Bruskotter and his colleagues discovered that attitudes towards wolves had actually remained "stable over the last 30 years" and that there was no indication of improvement. In addition, the researchers found that attitudes have become more negative between 1999 and 2008, especially in the northern Rocky Mountains.

In it's decision to delist the Grey Wolves, the Fish and Wildlife Service also argued that state management of wolves will foster local support of wolves and wolf recovery; and existing state regulatory mechanisms will “balance negative attitudes” and ensure recovery. However an Idaho survey cited by Bruskotter suggests that powerful stakeholders in the state  (mainly big game hunters and livestock producers) “are motivated to kill as many wolves as possible without returning wolves to federal protections.”

The researchers also questioned the ability of state regulator mechanisms to "balance negative attitudes" towards wolves by citing several legislative actions from states in the Northern Rockies which call for the removal of wolves.

“Risks that relate to humans range from direct killing of animals to a municipality encouraging development in areas where species are sensitive,” Bruskotter said. “The Fish and Wildlife Service will look at direct impacts, or the proximate cause of species decline. They don’t often step back and consider what lies behind those causes. And that’s one of the things we’re saying they need to do.”

He also sympathised with the organisation, saying the Fish and Wildlife Service is “hammered from every angle. This is not a condemnation of their action. It’s meant to be forward thinking — to provide a roadmap for how to incorporate social science information into future endangered species decisions.

The researchers concluded that "It is time for the Fish and Wildlife Service to expand its view of what constitutes ‘science’ and fully incorporate the social sciences into listing decisions.”

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PETA use Pope's comments in campaign to neuter dogs and cats

Many people have misunderstood the comments made by the Pope as a relaxed stance on condoms. However, unfortunately for those westerners who chose to live by the words of a senial pontiff- nothing has changed unless abstaining from using a condom could be a matter of life and death. Nonetheless, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) has used the recent media flurry surrounding the Pope's comments in their newest international campaign.


The campaign poster shows the pope waving to crowds with a condom in his hand. Below the picture are the words "DOGS AND CATS CAN'T USE CONDOMS." The poster aims to draw attention to "an unholy animal overpopulation crisis" which leads to the euthanizing of millions of healthy pets each year and urges people to spay or neuter their dogs and cats to help reduce the problem. The "Pope Condom" campaign was launched outside the vatican this week and will soon be hitting Cathedrals and Churches across America.

It's possible that PETA may have created for themselves some uneccessary obstacles by potentially narrowing it's audience down to christians, particularly catholics. However, any complaints about the imagery from the the vatican or the likes of Bill Donohue from the Catholic League could actually prove more helpful for the international success of the project. It's quite conceivable that provocation is the honest aim of PETA's message.