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Hello all you fans of evolution. I just thought I'd interject a few random thoughts on the mis-use of evolution in the mass media. Who managed to sit all the way through Sunday night's Simpsons episode?  Imagine my surprise to see the character Stephen Jay Gould as the intrepid scientist, who, by the way, doesn't bother to do any testing on the angel fossil.  At first I thought the writers of the Simpsons were poking fun at SJG, but no, there he was in the credits as a guest voice.  Hmmm... Besides doing a good job of poking fun at both sides of science vs. religion (more poking fun at religion, but Simpsons writers have a definite liberal bent), we were witness to yet another Neanderthal man reference.  Sigh...evolutionary myths are so hard to kill. I did find the suggestion of fish biting a Neanderthal was hilarious though.  The two fish swallowing the poor sod's arms, making it look like wings .  Heh...although I still can't figure out why SJG is doing guest voices for the Simpsons...oh well.  If it's any consolation, I found the bits that poked fun of the religous folks rather funny in the way they portrayed the extreme viewpoints of some well-meaning religious folks. Besides that, did anyone catch the Beakman's World comic strip in Sunday's paper?  Question: What are feathers made of? Well, besides giving a nice de_script_ion of how feathers work and all, good old Jok Church (is that a real name?) decided to grace us all with yet another evolution myth.  Guess what?  Despite all the recent evidence to the contrary, Archaeopteryx can fly!  Jok said so, so it must be true!  And millions of kids reading the Sunday funnies are now clued in on this amazing non-scientific fact .  Sigh again.   Pop science strikes again, at the most un-discerning audience this time, our children.  And yes, there it is in black and white ...it's thought of as a transitional creature - the _link_ between dinosaurs and modern birds such as turkeys.  Whatever.  Hey!  There's even a picture of one!  Looks like a flying, feathered dinosaur/bird to me! Must be true. What I wonder is, why does the topic of feathers summon up the topic of Archaeopteryx?  What's Jok trying to prove anyways?  That he knows big words?  I say stick to making volcanoes out of baking soda and vinegar if you can't even get your facts straight. How a transitional species can come millions of years *after* an even earlier, even more bird like species, protoavis texensis, is beyond me.  But science wouldn't lie, so... And I mentioned in another post the recent cartoon, maybe Quigley's World ?  A neanderthal woman in a department store, the clerk asking if the beast's hair is a cashmere sweater.  The neanderthal is depicted in the classically wrong image of the stooped over, small brained freak.  Complete with stooped over, small brained child. One recent comic strip did strike me as particularly funny though. Readers of Drabble would have come across a Sunday funny from a couple weeks ago.  Normal Drabble, known to be particulary dim-witted, is digging in his back yard and comes across a beef rib and a chicken bone.  While in the background, a dog suspiciously buries more bones, Norman reaches the conclusion that their front yard was roamed by a big cow-like chicken!  Sounds silly, but not much sillier than Richard Leakey, for instance, finding bits of bones in a pile and assuming they all go together somehow.  Piltdown man, the admitted fraud, stumped scientists for years, and it was just such a mish-mash of bones.  If such obvious errors are undetected for so long, what about the less obvious mistakes that are undoubtedly made by less-than-perfect people? So there you have it, some recent examples of the way evolution is being sadly represented by the mass-media.  And all that is only in the past week or so.

While in the background, a dog suspiciously buries more bones, Norman reaches the conclusion that their front yard was roamed by a big cow-like chicken!  Sounds silly, but not much sillier than Richard Leakey, for instance, finding bits of bones in a pile and assuming they all go together somehow. Did you have a specific instance in mind, or is this just a general slander? Sheesh.  What are you meant to assume when the bits *fit together*?  Duhhh.

Who managed to sit all the way through Sunday night's Simpsons episode?   I did

While in the background, a dog suspiciously buries more bones, Norman reaches the conclusion that their front yard was roamed by a big cow-like chicken!  Sounds silly, but not much sillier than Richard Leakey, for instance, finding bits of bones in a pile and assuming they all go together somehow. Did you have a specific instance in mind, or is this just a general slander? Sheesh.  What are you meant to assume when the bits *fit together*?  Duhhh. Since when does an apparent fit mean anything?  I suspect the leg of a human might fit reasonably well in the hip socket of a bear or an ape of similar size, but that doesn't mean much, now does it?  Likewise, I imagine that there are many bones among us quadrupeds and bipeds that would fit together pretty well, if you didn't know any better that they didn't actually belong to each other. Besides, how can you trust any science where an extinct peccary is mistaken for an early human _base_d on a tooth alone?  I call such science ludicrous along with those who defend such shaky scientific methods. Sure, science has corrected itself in the past and will do so in the future.  Besides leaving one plenty of room to imagine what facts now will become fiction later, one also is led to wonder about all the facts that may be wrong but are considered so beyond question that they will never be examined fully. Evolution as a theory is one such example.  It's considered by many to be so beyond question that any who dare question it are immediately labeled heretics and loons.  If you consider it proper to mock those who question the widely held beliefs of many, folks like Copernicus and Galileo would be spinning in their graves. I seriously doubt any of you would accept the challenge of reading Robert Anton Wilson's book The New Inquisition , but if you did, you might learn a few things about our so called science. Now Wilson pokes fun of religion just as much as science, but I read it and found his points extremely valid.  If you're so darn confident that science will always give the right answers, what does it hurt to question it, test it now and then?  Read Wilson's book and then tell us all what you think.

Now Wilson pokes fun of religion just as much as science, but I read it and found his points extremely valid.  If you're so darn confident that science will always give the right answers, what does it hurt to question it, test it now and then?  Read Wilson's book and then tell us all what you think.  It doesn't hurt.  But once it shows something beyond a reasonable doubt, and ignorami continue to gargle ... we get pissed. Greg.