If you believe God created the world, it's reasonable to ask, How did he do it? What were the forces and mechanisms he used? Why not look to science and see that he started with the big bang, the force of gravity, inflationary cosmology, quarks and natural selection. Those were his tools. To that extent, science is not a threat, it's your best friend. It's the best tool you have for illuminating the grandeur of creation.

Salon interview with Michael Shermer on evolution, religion and belief. He is sharp as ever, but more respectful and gracious than usual.

The natural inclination in all humans is to posit a force, a spirit, outside of us. That tendency toward superstitious magical thinking is just built into our nature. What's more, it doesn't cost anything to have a false positive, to assume there's a force behind the lightning or a spirit in the rock. In the ancestral environment, when we evolved, we might think spinning around three times is going to bring rain. Well, once in a while it works and makes everybody happy. And it doesn't cost much to keep doing it. It doesn't take you out of the gene pool.

Salon: Shermer, Darwin and Belief

As a psychology graduate working in animal- behaviour labs, Seligman discovered "learned helplessness" and became a big name. Dogs who experience electric shocks that they cannot avoid by their actions simply give up trying. They will passively endure later shocks that they could easily escape. Seligman went on to apply this to humans, with "learned helplessness" as a model for depression. People who feel battered by unsolvable problems learn to be helpless; they become passive, slower to learn, anxious and sad. This idea revolutionised behavioural psychology and therapy by suggesting the need to challenge depressed people's beliefs and thought patterns, not just their behaviour.

Now Seligman is famous again, this time for creating the field of positive psychology. In 1997 the professor was seeking a theme for his presidency of the American Psychological Association. The idea came while gardening with his daughter Nikki. She was throwing weeds around and he was shouting. She reminded him that she used to be a whiner but had stopped on her fifth birthday. "And if I can stop whining, you can stop being a grouch."

Seligman describes this as an "epiphany". He vowed to change his own outlook, but more importantly recognised a strength — social intelligence — in his daughter that could be nurtured to help her withstand the vicissitudes of life. Looking back on "learned helplessness", he reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.

"What is it about some people that imparts buffering strength, making them invulnerable to helplessness?" Seligman asked himself — and now he's made it his mission to find out.

Excellent article on controlling your own reality.

So what do you have to do to find happiness?

] Scientists now believe that there is an intrinsic logic
] to our reality, that there are absolutes, laws of nature.
] Much remains a mystery, and as one question is answered,
] many others arise. The question now facing Pennsylvania's
] Dover School District is whether or not the imposition of
] one creation belief on a multi-ethnic, secular student
] body is in keeping with the law that prohibits the
] creation of a state religion. If they allow one belief
] system to be taught, surely they must also teach others?
]
]
] To help out with this dilemma, LiveScience presents a
] list of those Creation Myths that helped define
] civilizations both past and present.

I figured you'd get a kick out of this.

The Top 10 Intelligent Designs (or Creation Myths)

This is so cool!

The Periodic Table like you have NEVER seen

Imagine two people standing about 500 feet from a car that is against wall around a bend. One is holding binoculars, the other a piece of paper. One looks through his binoculars at the car and says, "Someone was driving that car too fast, skidded out, and slammed into the wall."

The other person says, "I don't believe that, the police report says that it was placed there by God."

"I know that the report says that, but I can pretty clearly see skid marks on the road, the car is smashed, the windows shattered, and there is broken glass on the road."

"I don't necessarily agree. I see what you mean about the marks, but they don't look that clear to me. I am also not sure that the stuff on the road is glass. To me it looks like it could be water. Besides, I believe Officer Joe, he is a good man."

"I know that Officer Joe is honest, but I think he is mistaken. Through my binoculars it looks pretty clear that the car was driven into the wall. It looks like a man drove it there, the skid marks are clear, that is definitely say that the stuff on the road is broken glass and not water. I also think I see the man's head leaning against the steering column. It looks to me like an accident."

"That is fine. It is just your opinion though. I believe the report that God put it there. You know, binoculars often produce optical distortions, there is no such thing as a perfectly accurate lens. In addition, you aren't entirely sure about the man's head, it may not be that there is a man in the car, you said that you aren't sure. If there is not a man in the car, then how could it have gotten there? The police report says it was placed there by God, and if no one was driving it..."

"Ok, ok, I know about distortions and all, but I use these binoculars all the time and I know what is and is not a distortion. Besides, to say that the car was put there by God just sounds a little..."

"A little what?"

"I mean, come on. The car was driven into the wall. This is a stupid argument. I can see that..."

"Can you see the driver?"

"Well I can sort of make out..."

"No, you can't say for sure. But you are calling me stupid. Why can't you admit that you have your opinion and that I have mine?"

------------------------------

If you are a scientist, this is what the creationist argument looks like. The scientist isn't smarter or better than the other person, he just has a set of mathematical and instrumental tools, the binoculars, that he is skilled at using with knowledge of their limitations.

With the techniques of modern biology, the evolution argument is about that obvious. The scientist sees an incredible amount of evidence that people descended from primates. Just like in the metaphor, the creationist seems to be lacking binoculars. The only difference is that in reality the toolset is differential equations, statistics, technology, chemistry, and complex instrumentation. Unfortunately, this i... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Evolution in Education

Scientists have discovered a new and tiny species of human that lived in Indonesia at the same time our own ancestors were colonising the world.

The new species - dubbed "the Hobbit" due to its small size - lived on Flores island until at least 12,000 years ago.

'Hobbit' joins human family tree

Not quite a live stream, but it does have images that are updated every 5 minutes. According to the webpage, this USGS cam is the closest-operating camera to the volcano, which means about 4 miles away. There was a closer one at the Johnston Ridge Observatory, but since the Level III alert went out earlier today, that facility has been evacuated.

Mount St. Helens VolcanoCam