Genesis Revisited: A Scientific Creation Story By Micheal Shermer
To the Citizens of Kansas (along with those from Ohio, Georgia, Michigan, and a dozen other states contemplating the teaching of “Intelligent Design” creationism as a “balance” to the theory of evolution in public school science classes), I present you with a small literary sampling of how the opening chapters of Genesis will have to be revised to accommodate modern scientific theories and data. I call it Genesis Revisited.
In the beginning — specifically on October 23, 4004 B.C., at noon — out of quantum foam fluctuation God created the Big Bang. The bang was followed by cosmological inflation. God saw that the Big Bang was very big, too big for creatures that could worship him, so He created the earth. And darkness was upon the face of the deep, so He commanded hydrogen atoms (which He created out of Quarks and other subatomic goodies) to fuse and become helium atoms and in the process release energy in the form of light. And the light maker he called the sun, and the process He called fusion. And He saw the light was good because now He could see what he was doing. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be lots of fusion light makers in the sky. Some of these fusion makers appear to be more than 4,004 light years from Earth. In fact, some of the fusion makers He grouped into collections He called galaxies, and these appeared to be millions and even billions of light years from Earth, so He created “tired light” — light that slows down through space — so that the 4004 B.C. creation myth might be preserved. And created He many wondrous splendors, including Red Giants, White Dwarfs, Quasars, Pulsars, Nova and Supernova, Worm Holes, and even Black Holes out of which nothing can escape. But since God cannot be constrained by nothing (can God make a planet so big that he could not lift it?), He created Hawking radiation through which information can escape from Black Holes. This made God even more tired than tired light, and the evening and the morning were the second day.
And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the continents drift apart by plate tectonics. He decreed sea floor spreading would create zones of emergence, and He caused subduction zones to build mountains and cause earthquakes. In weak points in the crust God created volcanic islands, where the next day He would place organisms that were similar to but different from their relatives on the continents, so that still later created creatures called humans would mistake them for evolved descendants. And in the land God placed fossil fuels, natural gas, and other natural resources for humans to exploit, but not until after Day Six. And the evening and the morning were the third day.
And God saw that the land was lonely, so He created animals bearing their own kind, declaring Thou shalt not evolve into new species, and thy equilibrium shall not be punctuated. And God placed into the land’s strata, fossils that appeared older than 4004 B.C. And the sequence resembled descent with modification. And the evening and morning were the fourth day.
And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life, the fishes. And God created great whales whose skeletal structure and physiology were homologous with the land mammals he would create later that day. Since this caused confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt God brought forth abundantly all creatures, great and small, declaring that microevolution was permitted, but not macroevolution. And God said, “Natura non facit saltum” — Nature shall not make leaps. And the evening and morning were the fifth day.
And God created the pongidids and hominids with 98 percent genetic similarity, naming two of them Adam and Eve, who were anatomically fully modern humans. In the book in which God explained how He did all this, in chapter one He said he created Adam and Eve together out of the dust at the same time, but in chapter two He said He created Adam first, then later created Eve out of one of Adam’s ribs. This caused further confusion in the valley of the shadow of doubt, so God created Bible scholars and theologians to argue the point.
And in the ground placed He in abundance teeth, jaws, skulls, and pelvises of transitional fossils from pre-Adamite creatures. One he chose as his special creation He named Lucy. And God realized this was confusing, so he created paleoanthropologists to sort it out. And just as He was finishing up the loose ends of the creation God realized that Adam’s immediate descendants who lived as farmers and herders would not understand inflationary cosmology, global general relativity, quantum mechanics, astrophysics, biochemistry, paleontology, population genetics, and evolutionary theory, so He created creation myths. But there were so many creation stories throughout the land that God realized this too was confusing, so he created anthropologists, folklorists, and mythologists to settle the issue.
By now the valley of the shadow of doubt was overrunneth with skepticism, so God became angry, so angry that God lost His temper and cursed the first humans, telling them to go forth and multiply (but not in those words). They took God literally and 6,000 years later there are six billion humans. And the evening and morning were the sixth day.
By now God was tired, so God said, “Thank me its Friday,” and He made the weekend. It was a good idea.
Amazing new discovery!
(Credits to CV, http://epiktetos13.blogspot.com/2006/10/amazing-new-discovery.html)
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Think You're Money Management Technique Works?
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http://rapidshare.com/files/74693771/Money_Management_Experiment.xls(Due credits to the original source mentioned in the excel sheet)
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Good luck
The Evolution of a Math Problem (Let's lighten up a bit)
1950:
A lumberjack sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price. What is his profit?
1960 (traditional math):
A lumberjack sells a truckload of lumber for $100. His cost of production is 4/5 of this price, or in other words $80. What is his profit?
1970 (new math):
A lumberjack exchanges a set L of lumber for a set M of money. The cardinality of set M is 100, and each element is worth $1. Make 100 dots representing the elements of set M. The set C is a subset of set M, of cardinality 80. What is the cardinality of the set P of profits, if P is the difference set M\C?
1980 (equal opportunity math):
A lumberjack sells a truckload of wood for $100. His or her cost of production is $80, and his or her profit is $20. Your assignment: Underline the number 20.
1990 (outcome based education):
By cutting down beautiful forest trees, a lumberperson makes $20. What do you think of his way of making a living? In your group, discuss how the forest birds and squirrels feel, and write an essay about it.
1995 (entrepreneurial math):
By laying off 402 of its lumberjacks, a company improves its stock price from $80 to $100. How much capital gain per share does the CEO make by exercising his stock options at $80? Assume capital gains are no longer taxed, because this encourages investment.
1998 (motivational math):
A logging company exports its wood-finishing jobs to its Indonesian subsidiary and lays off the corresponding half of its US workers (the higher-paid half). It clear-cuts 95% of the forest, leaving the rest for the spotted owl, and lays off all its remaining US workers. It tells the workers that the spotted owl is responsible for the absence of fellable trees and lobbies Congress for exemption from the Endangered Species Act. Congress instead exempts the company from all federal
regulation. What is the return on investment of the lobbying?
A New Beginning?
The Ten Statistical Commandments
1) Thou shalt log thy data! We live in a multiplicative world, which means our data live in a log world. Always log any data with a lower zero bound, unless there's also an upper bound, in which case that shalt perform a logit transformation. Log until proven linear, and be holy.
2) Thou shalt run non-parametric tests! If the parametric and non-parametric tests come out the same, thou hast lost nothing. If they don't, the data are non-normal, the parametric test is wrong, and thou shalt use the non-parametric result. Spearman, Mann-Whitney, and Kolmogorov-Smirnov are the Holy Trinity (or Quintinity, or whatever). Worship them!
3) Thou shalt disdain p-values! p = 0.05 is a heathen idol, and ANOVAs are for those who have not yet seen the light, still dwelling in the darkness of obsessive frequentist hypothesis testing. Remember, if thou hast enough data anything will turn significant, no matter how small the difference. And the "significance level" is whatever thou choosest it to be, not what someone tells thee it should be. So, describe data, don't just test data. Don't merely ask whether there's a significant difference, ask what is the difference, why is there a difference, and have I confidence in that difference?
4) Thou shalt worship the almighty power! Despite the preceding commandment, accepting the null hypothesis is a vile, ungodly thing. Always make sure thou hast the statistical power and a small enough difference relative to what thou carest about to argue that a difference doesn't matter (not just that it isn't "significant"). When in doubt, find a power calculator on the web and do a proper power analysis.
5) Thou shalt abhor tiny little time series! All too often people are seduced by "trends" of two or three data points, damning themselves to eternal hellfire. The two-tailed probability of a flawless "trend" with six points is 0.0625 (!). "Before" and "after" comparisons are no better than a single coin flip, unless the points in each category have significantly different averages. Coincidences are often coincidences: if (say) the biggest extinction happened in the same interval as the biggest climate change, and there are ten intervals, well, p = 0.10. So, demand that a time series analysis include a healthy number of data points, at least a dozen or a score or a cubit.
6) Thou shalt difference thy data! Time series data are almost always autocorrelated (and thou shalt test for that). Still, people insist on interpreting "trends" shared by pairs of time series as meaningful cross-correlations, even though autocorrelation makes finding these demonic things the null hypothesis! Even random walks produce such patterns! FEAR YE SINNERS! The easiest and most powerful way to remove the autocorrelation is to take first differences. So, the next time thou wantest to correlate population growth with the rate of sea-floor spreading - and people will - difference thy !@#$% data.
7) Thou shalt not play with PCA! Principal components analysis assumes linear responses of observed variables to underlying variables, but most ecological data show modal responses. Vain mortal, what power grants thee the right to assume linearity? Correspondence analysis can handle both kinds of responses and works wonderfully on modal data (we won't mention that nasty little arch effect...).
8) Thou shalt not cluster shamelessly! The world is full of fuzziness and apostasy, not cool, clean Platonic categories. But cluster analysis imposes categories on data regardless of whether they're gradiential. If the clusters are really there, thou shalt see them as a ray of divine light in the shadowy purgatory of a multivariate ordination space. So why bother?
9) Thou shalt stand awe-struck before the shining brilliance of the G-test! Chi-square this, chi-square that. The G is easier to compute, it doesn't blow up as easily because of small values, it depends on the awesome power of the log transform, it stands for "GOD," and most importantly it's a maximum likelihood ratio...
10) Thou shalt sing the praises of likelihood, not "fit"! Anyone can design another fit statistic. Why minimize the sum of squares instead of the sum of cubes or just the sum of differences? None of this has a theoretical basis without a notion of probability, and specifically of likelihood. After all, that's what the divine theologian Popper said.
Original Source: http://www.nceas.ucsb.edu/~alroy/JA_commandments.html
