George Carlin: 'Save the Trees'

I try to keep up with the stuff that Melodysheep cranks out, but somehow I missed this one, which was uploaded for Earth Day 2011.

I like the juxtaposition of Carlin's curmudgeonly views on environmentalism with the amazing visuals of life on Earth.

How Evolution Works, in Comic Form: So Easy a Caveman Could Understand It

Until my dream of an IMAX 3D evolution documentary is realized, we have accessible, educational, and imaginative works by artists like Darryl Cunningham

Evolution is probably the most misunderstood concept on the planet. I still have some misconceptions to this day, I'm sure. I was an English major who grew up in Southeastern US public schools. I have no recollection of evolution being taught, and have been playing catch-up for quite some time.

I never really doubted evolution, for some reason, but I just didn't totally 'get it.'  When it finally clicked for me, after a devouring a handful of well-written primers on the subject, it was as if I'd unlocked a whole new way of looking at everything. Which I had. When you fully understand that every living thing shares an ancestor with every other living thing, it has a profound effect on how you view those things.  And when you understand how biological complexity arises in nature, you start to see examples of more complex, and less complex, mechanisms all around you.  You begin to see that many of the concepts and mechanisms found in evolution also have applications in non-biological areas, such as technology, religion, language, art, etc.

A recent Gallup poll shows that 4 in 10 of Americans do not accept evolution.  Granted, most of those who deny evolution do so because of their literal readings of scripture.  But, I do believe that, in addition, part of the problem is that people have misconceptions and misunderstandings about evolution.  They either have been willfully given misinformation by an opponent of evolution, or they have been the victim of oversimplifications, or flat-out wrong assumptions, such as the much-repeated fallacy that humans evolved from monkeys.

I've often thought that evolution could really use a boost from CGI.  I realize that there have been some short, and minor uses of CGI to demonstrate aspects of evolution on television documentaries, but I would love to see either a full-length documentary or a mini-series that really plunges in depth, leaving no stone unturned.

I imagine this thought experiment passage from Richard Dawkins' The Greatest Show on Earth done in CGI -- IMAX 3D, even.  Picture it:

I’ll call it the hairpin thought experiment. Take a rabbit, any female rabbit (arbitrarily stick to females, for convenience: it makes no difference to the argument). Place her mother next to her. Now place the grandmother next to the mother and so on back in time, back, back, back through the mega years, a seemingly endless line of female rabbits, each one sandwiched between her daughter and her mother. We walk along the line of rabbits, backwards in time, examining them carefully like an inspecting general. As we pace the line, we’ll eventually notice that the ancient rabbits we are passing are just a little bit different from the modern rabbits we are used to. But the rate of change will be so slow that we shan’t notice the trend from generation to generation, just as we can’t see the motion of the hour hand on our watches – and just as we can’t see a child growing, we can only see later that she has become a teenager, and later still an adult. An additional reason why we don’t notice the change in rabbits from one generation to another is that, in any one century, the variation within the current population will normally be greater than the variation between mothers and daughters. So if we try to discern the movement of the ‘hour hand’ by comparing mothers with daughters, or indeed grandmothers with granddaughters, such slight differences as we may see will be swamped by the differences among the rabbits’ friends and relations gambolling in the meadows round about.

Nevertheless, steadily and imperceptibly, as we retreat through time, we shall reach ancestors that look less and less like a rabbit and more and more like a shrew (and not very like either). One of these creatures I’ll call the hairpin bend, for reasons that will become apparent. This animal is the most recent common ancestor (in the female line, but that is not important) that rabbits share with leopards. We don’t know exactly what it looked like, but it follows from the evolutionary view that it definitely had to exist.

Like all animals, it was a member of the same species as its daughters and its mother. We now continue our walk, except that we have turned the bend in the hairpin and are walking forwards in time, aiming towards the leopards (among the hairpin’s many and diverse descendants, for we shall continually meet forks in the line, where we consistently choose the fork that will eventually lead to leopards). Each shrewlike animal along our forward walk is now followed by her daughter. Slowly, by imperceptible degrees, the shrew-like animals will change, through intermediates that might not resemble any modern animal much but strongly resemble each other, perhaps passing through vaguely stoat-like intermediates, until eventually, without ever noticing an abrupt change of any kind, we arrive at a leopard.

Various things must be said about this thought experiment. First, we happen to have chosen to walk from rabbit to leopard, but I repeat that we could have chosen porcupine to dolphin, wallaby to giraffe or human to haddock. The point is that for any two animals there has to be a hairpin path linking them, for the simple reason that every species shares an ancestor with every other species: all we have to do is walk backwards from one species to the shared ancestor, then turn through a hairpin bend and walk forwards to the other species.

Fortunately, Dawkins' thought experiment is so elegantly written that we really don't need CGI to grasp it, but then again, we have the pesky problem of how to get that 40% of Americans to pick up a Dawkins book.

There are some other really wonderful (and accessible) books by less-controversial figures, such as Jerry Coyne, Sloane Wilson, and many others.

We also have a rising number of graphic artists serving up some pretty amazing works. There's Jay Hosler's Evolution: The Story of Life on Earth and Michael Keller and Nicole Rager Fuller's Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation.

And then we have Darryl Cunningham's forthcoming book, Science Stories, which will feature a version of an amazing comic strip about Evolution (he says the version on his blog is a beta version).

What I love about Cunningham's comic is his approach from the perspective of two people who are discussing evolution. One doesn't understand it, or does not accept it, and the other is very comfortable addressing these questions (all very common questions that we see time and time again). Cunningham allows us to learn about evolution through doubt, which is really how it works in real life for so many Americans.

I hope that Cunningham's strip receives a lot of attention, and hopefully reaches a much wider audience. At least until we have that CGI IMAX 3D movie I've been dreaming about.

Here are a few frames to enjoy. They are excerpted from the middle of the piece, to demonstrate his approach. Please visit his blog for the evolution comic from start to finish:

Again, I urge you to check out the entire piece.

Prince: 'It's Fun Being in Islamic Countries'

The Purple One, who once sang the praises of a woman masturbating with a magazine in a hotel lobby is now singing the praises of women who are forced to wear burqas.

From his exclusive interview with The Guardian:

"It's fun being in Islamic countries, to know there's only one religion. There's order. You wear a burqa. There's no choice. People are happy with that." When asked about the fate of those unhappy with having no choice, he replied:  "There are people who are unhappy with everything. There's a dark side to everything."

Prince began embracing religion around 2001, when he became a Jehovah's Witness (a move that many fans think ruined his music).

"I was anti-authoritarian but at the same time I was a loving tyrant," he told the Guardian. "You can't be both. I had to learn what authority was. That's what the Bible teaches. The Bible is a study guide for social interaction.

"If I go to a place where I don't feel stressed and there's no car alarms and airplanes overhead, then you understand what noise pollution is. Noise is a society that has no God, that has no glue. We can't do what we want to do all the time. If you don't have boundaries, what then?"

The full interview will appear on The Guardian's Film and Music section on Friday.

Miss USA - The Evolution Monologues

As you may have heard by now, the winner of the Miss USA Pageant, Alyssa Campanella (Miss California), was one of only two out of 51 contestants who fully affirmed their belief in evolution and that it should be taught in schools (Alida D’Angona, Miss Massachusetts was the other).

Via HuffPo:

The rest either confused the question with evolution of species (versus the intelligent design debate), or stated that they thought both should be taught in school, according to Scientific American.

Campanella and Alida D’Angona from Massachusetts were the only two contestants to state that they fully believed in evolution.

There had been concern, leading up to the pageant, that questions about evolution were too controversial and caused undue anxiety.

For those of you who are interested in the pre-recorded answers provided by each of the 51 delegates, the video has been released for your viewing pleasure.

You may wish to encase your skull in foam before watching. Some answers may lead to banging head on desk.

Ten Insane Things About Rick Perry

"Hi, I'm Rick Perry and I'm insane."

1. He goes jogging in the morning packing a Ruger .380 with laser sights and loaded with hollow point bullets.

2. He wears a pair of cowboy boots emblazoned with the words "Freedom" and "Liberty."

3. He believes the economic crisis is happening for a purpose; so that the nation will return to biblical principles and free us from our slavery to the government.

4. As the gulf oil spill, which Perry stated was an "act of God," entered its third month, he issued a proclamation calling on his constituents to pray to "ask [God] for his merciful intervention...in this time of crisis." Dear God, please stop the leak that you started. Amen.

5. He stated,  "Homosexuality is about sex. Do you agree?...Well, then why don’t they call it something else?" apparently forgetting that heterosexuality also contains 'sex,' and that in both cases 'sex' is referring to gender, and not 'doing it.'

6.  When asked to provide some statistics that show abstinence works, he replied, “I’m just going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” apparently forgetting that his abstinence-focused sex-ed state ranks ranks third in the number of teen pregnancies and first in repeat teen pregnancies.

7. He stated that Intelligent Design was a "valid scientific theory."

8. In April, as Texas fought several wildfires, Perry issued a proclamation for a 3-day "Prayer For Rain." As Native American writer Sherman Alexie said, "Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained."

9. His 'Response' prayer rally, which he describes as "a non-denominational, apolitical Christian prayer meeting," is powered by politically active Religious Right individuals and groups who are hell-bent on injecting their extremist religious views, including degrading views of non-Christians and the LGBT population, into American politics.

10. He's a hair-petter:

Ali G's 'Science Rap'

From the mind that brought us the wonderful Symphony of Science mash-ups, featuring Carl Sagan, Stephen Hawking, and many other great minds, comes Ali G's 'The Science Rap.' Not quite as wise as Hawking and Sagan, Ali G nonetheless shares their curiosity about the world around him.

Spirits and Souls

The latest Calamities of Nature comic dovetails nicely with Sean M. Carroll's recent comments on the soul and the afterlife.