UCLA Anthropology Professor Joe Manson will speak on how humans are and aren’t unique amongst animals. Prof. Manson’s studies focus on the social behavior of non-human primates and humans.This talk is being held in celebration of Darwin Day!

When: Friday, February 12 from 5:00 to 6:15pm
Where: Royce 156
RSVP on Facebook

]]> http://bruinskeptics.org/2010/02/09/bass-event-are-humans-unique-insights-from-the-social-and-biological-sciences/feed/ 0 http://bruinskeptics.org/2009/11/18/a-day-early-banana-man-and-kirk-cameron/ http://bruinskeptics.org/2009/11/18/a-day-early-banana-man-and-kirk-cameron/#comments Thu, 19 Nov 2009 00:59:59 +0000 Roy Natian http://bruinskeptics.org/?p=658 Ray Comfort’s Living Water Ministry declared months ago it would go to the top 50-100 college campuses in the US and pass out free copies of Darwin’s Origin of Species with a 50 page introduction full of misinformation and lies written by Ray Comfort. They advertised that this would occur on the 19th of November.

Note: If you don’t know who Ray Comfort is, check out this video with him and a banana…it’ll go far in showing you his mental capacity/ignorance/dishonesty.

Well, they changed their mind. They hit campuses all over the US today. Sneaky Ray, very sneaky. This wasn’t unexpected though. BASS saw the possibility of this misinformation campaign occurring on a date other than the advertised one.  BASS members were prepared to pass out printed materials from the NCSE any time this week. Several BASS members handed out flyers and bookmarks with information about evolution.

Surprisingly both Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron were at UCLA today in person. A few BASS members engaged and debated with them on evolution and at least one BASS member was interviewed on camera. Spencer Fern, BASS’s secretary, even got to take a picture with Ray. It’s interesting how Ray is in the same position in the three pictures.

Ray "the Banan Man" Comfort with Spencer Fern.

Spencer coments:

I got him to agree to the photo and he asked one of his acolytes to take the picture, but then I casually revealed I was an atheist.

He kind of pulled away at that, but I had him in a bit of an armlock and he didn’t want to make a scene.

LOL

UPDATE: PZ Myers on Pharyngula linked to BASS and a post written on Spencer’s website about Ray Comfort being at UCLA today.

UPDATE #2: Joe Creason posted some video of Ray Comfort on Youtube.

Meeting minutes!  The following discussion is from last week’s meeting on February, Friday the 13th.  Please note that this week’s meeting is not in the usual room of Ackerman 2408.  Looking carefully, we instead have the room Kerckhoff 152 reserved.

I’ll let you all in a little secret.  If you stick around after meetings, you’ll find that we often have social activities, like eating out and watching movies.  It is a Friday night after all.

Meeting discussion

We began the meeting with a sample from the manifesto of Jim David Adkisson, the guy known for shooting up a Unitarian Universalist Church. Apparently, the Unitarian Universalists are Ultra-Liberals who hate America. They’re all part of a sinister cult of Secularizm [sic]! Hey, wait, I think he might also be talking about us!

Shifting topics, there has been a lot of recent news about the vaccine/autism controversy. If you were not previously aware of this controversy, the story is that autism usually appears in kids around the same age that they get the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine. The scientific evidence tells us that two events are completely unrelated, but there is still a movement which seeks to promote a causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The source of this claim is a 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield which showed a link between the two. The results of the paper have not been replicated by other scientists, and according to recent news, Andrew Wakefield’s research was fraudulent. Also very recently, a US court ruled that there is not sufficient evidence supporting the link between the vaccine and autism.

I would not be surprised, however, if the anti-vaccination movement still survives. This movement even includes the celebrities Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey, because as we all know, actors are whom everyone goes to for medical wisdom. That said, the pro-science side also has actress Amanda Peet among their supporters, and I’m told that she even made a commercial. That’s cool. As Ben noted, if less then about 90% of the population take vaccines, it endangers so-called herd immunity, and thus endangers public health.

Our second topic was nominally Theistic Evolution and Intelligent Design. Theistic Evolution (TE) is the idea that God created the whole process of evolution, rather than tinkering around with the details. Intelligent Designers (ID) tend to dislike TE because, as Ana said, it’s like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. But from a theological standpoint, one could also say that ID is simply insulting to the creator, as if God could not orchestrate such a grand process.

Getting sidetracked into some thought-provoking tangents, we talked about the irreducible complexity argument (favored by ID), which says that there exist complex systems which could not function if they were missing any parts. Spencer talked about the example of blood clotting, which requires a group of proteins. It seems that blood clotting would be nonfunctional if it were missing any of those proteins, but scientists have discovered organisms in water environments which require as little as two proteins.

Matt brought up the question: would we have done all this science if it weren’t for ID? Is ID driving a lot of funding to paleontology to find transitional fossils? Kwame thought that the major benefit was that it drives scientists to be more involved in politics. More science is always good, right? Lest any stone go unturned, Matt started talking about how we need science funding before we get more scientists. Fun times.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again.  If you are a member of BASS, this is your website to use.  If you want to contribute a story about your experiences tabling, or if you just like to share silly science videos, you can do it here.  Just contact us.

Meeting discussion:

We first talked about the inauguration. Reactions were mixed, but several people were very happy with Obama’s mention of “non-believers” as Americans. However, someone cited a quote by George W Bush which also positively mentioned people with out faith (see some quotes here). We were amused by the fact that after the oath got messed up, Obama later redid it without a Bible. Imagine the reaction on Fox News.

Most were unhappy that Rick Warren gave the invocation. His prayer specifically referred to the Christian god and how we would all eventually answer to him. Why did Obama invite this guy again? While the answer might be “to be more inclusive”, BASS members suggested other possibilities as well. Perhaps it was an attempt to symbolically ally with evangelicals, so that he can get away with actions like lifting the abortion gag rule. Perhaps it was in order to put Rick Warren on the defensive; he had to moderate himself because the public eye was focused him.

We also watched the first two and a half minutes of the Daily Show episode.

Shifting gears a bit, we discussed the evolution of altruism. A lot of it is mindless chatter, but the following points came out of my attempted distillation:

• Once we have reputation, altruism leads to evolutionary fitness.
• Because of game theory, a tit for tat strategy often works best.
• Altruism to offspring and relatives is easily explained because they share genes with you.
• If a population has limited resources, evolution should favor altruism so that they minimize the amount of resources wasted on conflict.
• But what if you are the only liar in an honest society?
• Is there an advantage to having an “outgroup”?
• Perhaps at least part of the explanation is memetic rather than genetic. But this doesn’t explain altruism in other species.

From there, we drifted into the topic of the nature of morality. Someone drew a distinction between genetic morality and philosophical morality. Genetic morality explains our predispositions, but we need philosophical morality in order to become comfortable with those predispositions. Just because an action promotes fitness from an evolutionary stand point is not sufficient to make it morally correct.

Anyways, the game is coming out in September this year, but you can already download a free trial of the Creature Creator. Oh, look, I whipped up a creature that looks like the BASS logo. Dear God is it ugly. (below the fold)

I’m pretty sure that that’s not what Tiktaalik actually looked like…

Anyways, this clearly relates to how evolution is perceived by the public. I’m just saying that if, hypothetically, any club vice-presidents were looking for topics in the fall, this might be a good idea.

Contrary what they say, this is pretty obviously not actually evolution. For one thing, Spore has a clear direction towards complexity, which isn’t really how it works. But more obviously there’s a player controlling how the creatures change! I’m not the first one to say this, but if anything, the simulation more resembles Intelligent Design than evolution. Funny how this only happens in fiction. And, hey, it doesn’t necessarily make bad fiction–this game will probably be extremely successful, or so the hype tells me. We’ll see when it comes out.

Come to think of it, the Intelligent Design folks usually don’t consider the possibility that life was created by an entire internet-like community. Doesn’t it make more sense that way? Mosquitoes were obviously created by divine trolls.

On the issues, Jindal fits the ideal for the Christian conservative – he is against abortion in all cases including rape, is opposed to embryonic stem cell research, and has a 100% lifetime rating from the National Right to Life Committee – so it is very likely that he earnestly believes what he is saying rather than trying to pander. On the other hand, being a convert from Hinduism to Christianity, brown-skinned, and having the legal name “Piyush Jindal” may push away some on the far right. In any case, an interesting dynamic…

00:42 – Ben Stein brings up the example of Dr. Richard Sternberg, who didn’t “tow the party line” and agreed to publish an article by IDer Stephen Meyer. Sternberg was subsequently forced to resign.

04:05 – Stein challenges Michael Shermer, using the moniker of “academic freedom” to contest that Stephen Meyer and Sternberg should have been allowed to publish their article without incident, and says that IDer are being persecuted.

05:11 – Dr. Caroline Crocker got fired from George Mason University for simply mentioning – not promoting – intelligent design. She is now blacklisted and is a persecuted individual.

06:35 – Neurosurgeon Michael Egbert asserts that doctors do not need to study evolution, and the Darwinists went on the attack, pressing him to retire or resign.

07:20 – Professor Marsh of Baylor University was forced by academia to shut down his research and return grant money for links to the intelligent design movement.

08:53 – Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University was denied tenure because he claimed in his book the Privileged Planet that the universe had an intelligent designer. All this despite his “stellar research record” – no pun intended.

10:56 – GODWIN’S LAW #1 Far more to come!

15:02 – Discovery Institute President Bruce Chapman claims that the notion of ID masquerading as religion is a “red herring” and that the Discovery Institute relies on scientific evidence and has persons of all religions, “including agnostics”. Intelligent Design is simply the study of patterns in nature that are best explained by an intelligent creator

20:17 – As Newtonian Physics has been supplanted as well, Darwinism is an obsolete 19th century theory that is falling apart in the face of new evidence.

21:50 – Dr. Stephen Meyer states that it’s his job as a scientist to stop “one hand from clapping” and challenge the conventional theory of Darwinism. He claims that for every shred of evidence supporting Darwinism, there is a counterargument that supports ID.

22:54 – Jonathan Wells claims that Darwinists are distorting the evidence and are “harming science”.

25:15 – Mathematician David Berlinski claims that evolution is so vague about so many things that it cannot fit mathematical models like other theories and points to the vague definition of “species” as one of Darwinism’s fallacies.

27:04 – Darwin was arrogant in titling his book “The Origin of Species” rather than “The Origin of Man”, and presumed to know more than he could prove.

28:13 – Ben Stein incredulously points to a “Darwinist” documentary film that states that “perhaps the chemicals in the early Earth’s atmosphere were jump started by lightning”

28:45 – The Miller-Urey experiment, where a chemical composition believed to mimic that of the early Earth’s atmosphere and catalyzed with lightning, failed to produce life.

29:35 – Ben Stein mocks Michael Bruce’s hypothesis that “life was jumpstarted on the backs of crystals”, stating that he would not bet Ben Stein’s Money on it (haha).

31:22 – A cell could not have been the result of Darwinian evolution because it is a machine of at least 250 perfectly ordered proteins, each of which has to work to maintain a lifeform. Therefore there must be an intelligent design to make something this ordered and precise.

35:16 – 3D CGI animation of cell metabolism ripped off from Harvard (which is now suing) and “enhanced” with whoosing noises to maintain the attention of Ben’s hickish audience.

39:02 – Communism!

39:31 – Ben fawns over Capital Hill town idiot Congressman Mark Souder (R-IN), who has proposed a bill preserving “academic freedom” at the Smithsonian in response to Sternberg’s “persecution”. This is just one of many examples of “The Academy”, a shadowy organization dedicated to eliminating God from the science lab.

41:29 – The National Center for Science Education is at the forefront of keeping Darwinism in power. They are one of many watchdog organizations, along with that demonic ACLU, which is in cahoots with The Academy.

43:35 – Darwinism turns goodly, God-fearing Christians into Atheists! Just look at Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers! Beware!

44:18 – Ben uses the example of the Abrams Report on MSNBC (now Verdict w/ Dan Abrams), who absolutely dismantled a lawyer from the Thomas More Law Foundation representing the defendants of the Dover School District Trial to show that the media is firmly in the hands of Big Science.

45:41- Pamela Winnick “refused to take sides” in an article on the evolution-ID debate. But the Darwinists still persecuted her because she refused to show enough deference to evolution.

46:36 – Darwinism has infiltrated the courts in a last-ditch attempt to stop Intelligent Design. Representing the vanguard of the effort is the ACLU.

49:44 - Darwinists have given up on defending their own theory, and have simply resorted to attacking their opponent (religion and intelligent design) like a dirty politician.

53:12 – There have been plenty of religious people who are also scientists like Isaac Newton and Galileo. Darwinists don’t have a monopoly on good science.

57:22 – PZ Myers was not only converted to atheism through Darwinism, but now also actively seeks to marginalize religion, bring it down, and make it irrelevant in the public sphere.

1:00:52 – Hitler’s views on superior races mirrors Darwin’s own theories, and a necessary pre-requisite to Nazism was Darwinism. At the time, many eugenicists used Darwin’s theory to justify the slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and infirms en masse.

1:04:03 – Ben Stein visits a German concentration camp and learns from the museum curator that the mass murderers used Darwin to justify their actions.

1:06:28 - Ben meets with Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler, who further emphasizes the link of eugenicists to both the Nazi Regime and Charles Darwin. Oh yeah, and Margaret Sanger and the abortionists (ie Planned Parenthood) are actually closet eugenicists and were in on the action as well through forced sterilization.

1:11:32 – Some professor (name is not spoken) claims that Darwinism dehumanizes people and allows abortions and euthanasia to happen.

1:13:21 – Stein quotes from Darwin’s book The Descent of Man, and seems to make the claim that Darwin was for weeding out those “undesirables” in society just like Hitler and the Nazis after him.

1:15:57 - Intelligent Design is not a science issue; It’s a freedom of speech issue and it’s disturbing that America are persecuting these people when it’s supposed to be the freest country in the world. The Founding Fathers would be rolling in their graves.

1:22:41 – Ben Stein confronts Richard Dawkins over whether there’s a 99% chance or a 49% chance that God doesn’t exist.

1:25:27 – Richard Dawkins doesn’t know how the first self-replicating molecule (life) came to be. How could the exemplar of Darwinism not know? Surely Intelligent Design has won…

1:25:55 – Dawkins claims that an advanced civilization evolved through Darwinism and then could have “seeded” this planet with life. Dawkins is only against God as an intelligent designer.

1:28:33 – In a speech, Stein says that “America is all about freedom”, and that the freedom to impose intelligent design as a legitimate theory in the scientific community is an essential right of the people!

1:28:53 – Stein basically mirrors his own staged speech with Reagan’s memorable speech at the Berlin Wall.

1:30:38 – The audience of handpicked, paid volunteers spontaneously gives a standing ovation. Cause despite having all the charisma of Lt. Reginald Barclay from Star Trek:TNG, his speech was so awe-inspiring.

1:30:58 - Join me in the fight against big science!

1:31:15 – Fin.

——-

All in all, the directing quality (never mind the content) was on par with Uwe Boll and perhaps even worse than this; Stein resorted to using staid black and white movie clips to try to illustrate his point, but it just came off as propagandistic and disingenuous. In any case, going back to my previous post, here’s how the drinking teams scored:

1ST PLACE: Team Academic Freedom – 00:00 to 15:02, 39:31 to 57:22, 1:15:57 to 1:22:41, 1:28:33 to 1:31:15 = 35:35 total

2ND PLACE: Team Lightning-Hitting-A-Pond – 15:02 to 39:02, 1:22:41 to 1:28:33 = 28:52 total

3RD PLACE: Team Liberal/Communist Conspiracy – 41:29 to 1:00:52, 1:06:28 to 1:13:21 = 26:26 total

4TH PLACE: Team Hitler – 1:00:52 to 1:15:57 = 15:05 total

Yeah, I was disappointed that Team Hitler lost too.

Retarded Fiction #2) Evolution by means of natural selection is not only implausible, but has never actually been proven.

Really, Stein?

Both of these delicious-looking specimens were originally bred from ferocious wolves.

The next time you see any domesticated animal, fruit, or vegetable, remind yourself that practically everything you see in the produce aisle came about through minute genetic changes sustained over thousands of years.

Here are just a few of the tremendous phenotypic changes that can result from a few thousand years of human-guided artificial selection.

Despite their remarkable dissimilarity to each other, broccoli, kohlrabi, black mustard, brussel sprouts, and swedish turnips were all bred from the same wild ancestral species, Brassica Oleracea– each over the course of mere thousands of years .

Human beings have similarly produced all sorts of genetic monstrosities through artificial selection– cows with udders bulging with gallons of surplus milk, dogs that can fit inside designer purses, ponies that a child can easily mount and ride, bananas with easily transplantable parts, seedless watermelons, 300-kg pumpkins, purple carrots, Frankenfood corn, and much, much more.

Similarly, the environment can act as an unconscious selector, simply because it changes constantly over geological time. Due to the Earth’s precession and variations in the Sun’s radiation output, among other factors, the Earth’s climate is constantly changing– sometimes according to regular cycles, such as the Milankovich cycle , but more often due to irregular climatic cycles, each of which drive constant adaptation on the part of Earth’s organisms.

We know from geological evidence and astronomical evidence that the Earth is much, much older than 6,000 years, which is the figure most commonly cited by Young-Earth Creationists . Due to the gradual motion of tectonic plates over the Asthenosphere, the Earth’s continents have broken apart, collided with each other, and rearranged themselves in countless different ways. Hot spots above the mantle are raising new islands from the seafloor as we speak, creating a plethora of new ecological niches for preexisting organisms from other parts of the world to fulfill.

Hawai’ian island forming off a benthic sea floor.

The Earth’s biosphere is not a constant mechanism that was specially created six thousand years ago by a bearded man in the sky. Just like a farmer breeding healthier strains of wheat or corn, the environment is constantly selecting for certain variables among all of Earth’s organisms, thereby creating an undeniable impetus for evolutionary change. The diagram I posted above demonstrates how easily organisms can gradually alter their appearance and biochemical structure due to the differential survival of their offspring. You don’t need to understand anything about genetics to grasp this basic principle. (And not surprisingly, neither did Charles Darwin.)

STOP, STOP! But wait, what you’re describing is microevolution , not macroevolution . Godless atheists and Evolutionists have proven microevolution , true, but they have never proven macroevolution ! Praise Jesus Chraaaahst Almighty! There truly is an intelligent designer!

You precious little retard. You just wait and watch what I’m about to do to your pathetic arguments, you fucking miserable piece of dessicated Theistard offal, you.

Creationists love to create a false dichotomy between “micro evolution” (small changes sustained over short periods of time) and “macro evolution” (large changes sustained over long periods of time), as if one somehow precludes the existence of the other. This is practically the same as agreeing that yes, 1+1 does = 2, but 1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1+… etc. will never = 1,000,000.

Speciation events (which typically confirm the viability of so-called “Macroevolution”) have been observed through laboratory experiments performed on microorganisms, plants, fruit flies of the genus Drosophila , and other organisms with relatively short lifespans. Here is just one example:

Rabe and Haufler (1992) found a naturally occurring diploid sporophyte of maidenhair fern which produced unreduced (2N) spores. These spores resulted from a failure of the paired chromosomes to dissociate during the first division of meiosis. The spores germinated normally and grew into diploid gametophytes. These did not appear to produce antheridia. Nonetheless, a subsequent generation of tetraploid sporophytes was produced. When grown in the lab, the tetraploid sporophytes appear to be less vigorous than the normal diploid sporophytes. The 4N individuals were found near Baldwin City, Kansas.

Here is another, this time referring to an experiment performed on Drosophila fruit flies:

Dobzhansky and Pavlovsky (1971) reported a speciation event that occurred in a laboratory culture of Drosophila paulistorum sometime between 1958 and 1963. The culture was descended from a single inseminated female that was captured in the Llanos of Colombia. In 1958 this strain produced fertile hybrids when crossed with conspecifics of different strains from Orinocan. From 1963 onward crosses with Orinocan strains produced only sterile males. Initially no assortative mating or behavioral isolation was seen between the Llanos strain and the Orinocan strains. Later on Dobzhansky produced assortative mating (Dobzhansky 1972).

Talkorigins.org has some more articles demonstrating proof for “Macroevolution”, which include (but are not limited to) transitional forms between animal species, fossil records, molecular evidence, and laboratory experiments.

Yeah, okay, so a fruit fly turned into another fruit fly and a fern turned into another fern. This is still Microevolution, okay!

Mutations are mostly lethal. Artificial selection can’t increase the amount of genetic material in the cell! What about the different chromosome numbers between all of God’s species? This surely didn’t come about through Satanic “evolution”. Praise the Lawd, Glory Hallelujah!

You tongue-speaking imbecile, polyploidy occurs all the time in plant species. If you had spent your high school years actually reading your biology textbook instead of glossing over dumbed-down Creationist literature, you might have gleaned this simple fact by now. Visit Talkorigins.org, and you’ll soon find that there are quite a few peer-reviewed scientific papers confirming its occurrence in lab experiments. Polyploidy also occurs (to a lesser extent) in animals, and it certainly can result an increase in the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce.

Dr. P.Z. Myers (author of the blog Pharyngula ) recently published an excellent post on how chromosome numbers in organisms change over evolutionary time, complete with diagrams simple enough for even the most reason-deprived Theistard in the reddest red state to comprehend.

The Earth is NOT six thousand years old. No matter how slow evolutionary processes may seem on a human timescale, they will inevitably result in remarkable phenotypic changes over the course of millions of years.

Here are some interesting videos posted by a Neuroscience PhD on youtube, debunking some of the most common Creationist misconceptions about evolution:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nnu-O5x_pRU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDFJviGQth4&feature=related

But my grandpaw did NOT come from a mud puddle!

Now, does the evolutionary theory have anything to say about the origin of life on Earth? Of course it doesn’t, but that’s not what Ben Stein claims throughout his crockumentary, and the awful stench of it all is already starting to disable my olfactory nerves.

(to be continued… Stay tuned for an addendum to Part II of my multi-part series debunking Expelled : No Intelligence Allowed : “My grandpaw did NOT come from a mud puddle!”)

Ray shows that since the banana fits perfectly in the mouth, god exists.

I was visiting the Marketplace, a collection of eateries and stores, in Glendale to pick up some electronic devices. I somehow ended up at Old Navy and bought some really nice colorful shirts. Anyway, walking back to the car I spy a sign that said “Intelligence Test” with a list of questions. Thinking these were Scientologists (as a Scientology center is a few blocks away) I ignored them and continued walking. However, as I walked away I spied their little set up one more time and saw they had changed the sign to a diagram that looked like the evolution of man from apes. This is when my “creationist sense™” started tingling. I could not resist walking back and so I did. I spoke with a guy and he practically repeated Ray Comfort’s evangelism methods verbatim to me (hence my assertion that he was channeling Ray). I even managed (which was rude, I admit) to complete some of his sentences and recite Ray’s “Have you lied? Then you’re a liar. Have you stolen? Then you are a theif. Have you lusted? Blah blah blah, ergo you’re a sinner” schtick back at the guy I was talking to. What was odd was that I asked him if he knew who Ray Comfort was and he said no, and later on when I had to leave he handed me a pamphlet written by Ray Comfort.

I spent about an hour talking with the guy and his posse. Although, I think I might have made some small difference it was overall a waste of time. Those people I met were classic creationists. As I expected, they were claiming evolution was false and God created everything 6,000 to 11,000 years ago. They claimed the bible was inerrant and that if one was to not accept Jesus one would go to hell. They were nice people, but extremely deluded.

What always strikes me as shocking is how these people do NOT know what evolution is. Every creationist I have met makes at least the following two erroneous statements:

• There is no evidence for evolution.
• Evolution tries to explain (and fails) how the universe began.

I spent the bulk of my time telling them that evolution is not what they think it is. And I think this is what is key here. When talking to these people, it is important to stick to one issue. In this case, the most important issue was educating them on what evolution is. First, you don’t have the time to convince them of anything. The goal should be to broaden their minds. Second, if you don’t stick to one issue, the conversation will meander around and get no where. So my advice is stick to one thing and show them they are wrong. Lastly, be nice. As stupid as they sound, as inane as their arguments are, be nice. Be courteous. Do not call them stupid or be negative. It is not productive. If you cannot do this, focus your energies elsewhere. For example, start writing a blog with all your negative thoughts, but don’t do it in person.

Anyway, I managed to get them to agree to check out Talk Origins, an excellent website that will answer all your questions about evolution. I hope they checked it out. Evolution is such a fundamental notion for the understanding of life and the world. It is scary that so many Americans do not accept it.