Billion Year Hammer

Our minds are simply incapable of understanding ideas like million or billion. My son said, "I'm gonna count to a million. One, two, a million". Counting at one per second, eight hours per day, it would take over a month to count that much. Counting to a billion would take a lifetime.

It's almost like our minds shut down. You see "millions and millions", or "billions and billions" and you say, "well, I guess anything could happen". It is completely outside of our experience, our framework for living.

When you allow for billions of years in history, huge gaps seem like minor cracks.

There is no recorded history more than 6,000 years old. There are some claims the Babylonians started slightly earlier, but then there are big gaps where, seemingly, nothing happened.

One billion years is 166,000 times longer than that. That's like 30 times all of recorded history every year for all of recorded history.

Science News tells us that there was a gap of one billion years in history where nothing happened.

That's twice as long as the time it is supposed to have taken simple one celled organisms to turn into people who can travel in space.

Everett Dirksen is attributed with the quote, "A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money". I see some parallelism...

Analyzing DNA

An informative article at Ars Technica on DNA sequencing.

It is important to remember that DNA cannot be read like the files on your hard drive. There is a lot of work and messy chemistry that goes into it.

Blasphemy Day

The "New Atheists" have a real image problem. They are seen as immature whiners.

Blasphemy Day only strengthens that image.

Albert Mohler has some excellent commentary.

The irony is that Blasphemy Day is largely aimed at Christians, who (again, largely) make no claims that blasphemy should be illegal or punished (it was in the past, but few argue the laws should remain).

Of course, in a Muslim nation, no one would dare do such a thing...

Yet Blasphemy Day claims to be against all religions.

At the same time, it is a Christian notion of rights and equality which makes it even possible.

Biological Parents

Weird news from Insight Scoop.

The reporting is really quite terrible.

The journalist writes: "The couple decided not to have an abortion because of their religious beliefs, and have met the other couple and arranged a handover."

While a caption reads: "Carolyn Savage will have to give birth to the boy and then hand him over to his biological parents"

Another says: "The couple are now hoping to give their remaining embryos to another carrier"

A quick google search turns up some other news: AOL: "They were told they could either terminate the pregnancy, which wasn't something they wanted to do because of their religious beliefs, or carry the fetus to term and then give him to his biological parents."

So, it appears to be a legal issue. Is biological parenthood that major? More important than nurturing and feeding a child?

This doesn't seem right.

PVS and Learning

(Persistent Vegetative State)

We previously examined the "persistent" in PVS (Albert Mohler's review of news of people waking up).

Now, growing evidence questioning the "vegetative" (which I previously filed under "persistent").

From Science Daily:
"Individuals In Vegetative States Can Learn"

Disappearing Downs

I tagged an article on Science Daily for review. While it was in the queue, Albert Mohler beat me to the punch!

Mohler strikes right to the heart:

"Knowing this, health care providers have historically operated under the assumption that if a woman consents to prenatal screening or diagnosing, she must believe that having a child with DS would be an undesired outcome and wish to terminate her pregnancy if such a diagnosis were made prenatally"

Their reasoning is logical. There is nothing that can be done for Downs syndrome, currently. The only reason to test would be to decide for abortion. Assuming patients have thought this through is probably presumptive...

And:

"Skotko's research indicating that 92 percent of women who learn they are carrying a baby with Down syndrome choose to abort the pregnancy."

I would argue this shows society has already made its decision. Life is about enjoyment and feeling fulfilled. Anyone who can not live up to this standard will have a very short life indeed.

Evolutionary Evidence

An informative article at Science Daily. I don't want to focus too much on the specifics, because science reporting tends to favor the new and the controversial, and often leaves out important things.

Main points:

1. "the remains of two molars" - That's the evidence behind the old theory.
2. "some nearly complete mandibles" - That's the new theory.