Showing posts with label evidence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label evidence. Show all posts

Thursday, October 1, 2009

Monkey news

Yo ugly ass momma, evolutionarily speaking

Oldest "Human" Skeleton Found--Disproves "Missing Link"
Scientists today announced the discovery of the oldest fossil skeleton of a humanLucy, the iconic early human ancestor specimen that walked the Earth 3.2 million years ago (interactive time line: how the new discovery changes human evolutionary theory).
...
The fossil puts to rest the notion, popular since Darwin's time, that a chimpanzee-like missing link—resembling something between humans and today's apes—would eventually be found at the root of the human family tree. Indeed, the new evidence suggests that the study of chimpanzee anatomy and behavior—long used to infer the nature of the earliest human ancestors—is largely irrelevant to understanding our beginnings.
I don't want to alarm you, but it seems that God, in conjunction with the baby Jesus, has decided to up his game in regards to providing convincingly plausibly lies to get heretics to believe in evolution and not in the Bible. He's getting serious. Not content just to bury dinosaur bones, God has upped his game: burying evidence He faked that purportedly shows Man's earliest known, 4.4 million year old evolutionary fore-bearer and also scientifically disproves the "missing link" theory, knocking out the notion that we somehow branched off from chimps.

I think we all know what to do now. I'll bury myself in Bible studies, you call Fred Phelps, and we'll go to Tim White and Berhane Asfaw's labs (the two who made the "discovery" and worked out the "science") to laugh at how the scientific community has once again fallen for one of His practical jokes. The punchline is: everyone burns in hell. So believe in your precious fossils, carbon dating, and beloved maths and sciences. We enlightened types know that the earth is 6,000 years old, Jesus rode a Triceratops into Jerusalem, this "evidence" of "evolution" is a hilarious practical joke, and the only good use for math is adding up the ages of everyone in the Bible to provide a timeline of the Earth. Meet me at the creation museum if you want to further discuss how hilarious this is or Kirk Cameron's own scientific work into disproving evolution.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Urban Institute points out a low water mark.

From the Urban Institute comes a study that illuminates the way government has made policy for the past couple of years. The name of the study: Beyond Ideology, Politics, and Guesswork: The Case for Evidence-Based Policy. That's where we are, a public policy organization feels the need to point out the fact that hey, maybe we should start basing programs, laws, and policies around evidence and observable fact.
U.S. public policy has increasingly been conceived, debated, and evaluated through the lenses of politics and ideology. The fundamental question—Will the policy work?—too often gets short shrift or even ignored. A remedy is evidence-based policy—a rigourous approach that draws on careful data collection, experimentation, and both quantitative and qualitative analysis to determine what the problem is, which ways it can be addressed, and the probable impacts of each of these ways. Examples of how evidence informs good policy and lack of evidence can invite bad include health insurance coverage, education, sentencing policy, and redress for housing discrimination.
It's crazy, but I think it might work. It might even gain traction within our esteemed collection of teetotalers, horse fondlers, stagecoach tippers, money fuckers, spineless turtles, flag eaters, and country molesters known as the US Congress. That is if the Urban Institute will spend the necessary lobbying millions and fly a few of our more crooked lawmakers out for a symposium in whatever country it is where you can bang an ungulate, drink moonshine, and watch monkey boxing you can also gamble on. Then maybe it'll happen. Until then it's bridges to nowhere, wars in Iraq, offshore drilling, and corn ethanol.

So remember: evidence and fact make better policy. Hopefully they can pass this out to lawmakers and hit them on the head with it.