The Red Notebook

The newly relocated Friends of Charles Darwin website is riddled with junk DNA.

During the migration exercise from the old domain, I had to convert an awful lot of program code and data. Much of this I managed to automate, but I still ended up having to make a lot of changes by hand. Entire chunks of code were removed, others were inserted. I tried to rationalise and simplify wherever possible.

The result is, quite frankly, a bit of a mess. Yes, the new site seems to work reasonably OK, but the programs behind it contain literally dozens of snippets of code which I’m pretty sure are redundant. There are conditional statements whose conditions can never be met, declared variables which are never used, functions which are never called, and entire scripts which are never run. Or at least I think there are. It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether it’s safe to remove a piece of code, so I tended to err on the side of caution and leave the stuff in: code which is never run can’t do much harm—inefficient and messy though it is.

To be honest, I take a perverse pleasure in the Friends of Charles Darwin’s website containing so much junk code. It seems rather appropriate.

Not much sign of intelligent design around here!

Guardian: Half of Britons reject evolution, survey finds

Half of British adults do not believe in evolution, with at least 22% preferring the theories of creationism or intelligent design to explain how the world came about, according to a survey.

Very depressing in the land that gave the world Charles Darwin. It speaks volumes about our education system and, as far as I’m concerned, the general dumbing-down of science in the media. It’s a good job that scientific truth isn’t subject to the popular vote.

Looking on the bright side (no pun intended), however, perhaps the Guardian’s headline could have had a slightly more positive spin:

78% of Britons reject creationism, survey finds

It’s still a depressingly small number, but it should at least knock some of the wind out of creationists’ sails.

As it’s Sunday, how about a dollop of biblical literalism?

King James Bible: Genesis I (v. 3–4)

And God said, Let there be light: and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good…

In other words, God created light and only realised after the event that it was good.

So much for ‘Intelligent Design’!

As I report in more detail on my other weblog, while I was in the Liverpool branch of Waterstone’s bookshop last Thursday, I took it upon myself to move Michael Behe‘s creationist book Darwin’s Black Box out of the science section and to place it in the religion and spirituality section where it rightly belongs.

It turns out I am not the first to do this.

An interesting example of convergent evolution, perhaps.

Ga! Sometimes my self-imposed ban on dignifying Intelligent Design with any sort of response can be so hard!

Times: Creationism gains foothold in schools

The [UK] government has cleared the way for a form of creationism to be taught in Britain’s schools as part of the religious syllabus.

Lord Adonis, an education minister, is to issue guidelines within two months for the teaching of “intelligent design” (ID), a theory being promoted by the religious right in America.

Until now the government has not approved the teaching of the controversial theory, which contradicts Darwinian evolutionary theory, the basis of modern biology.

…so I’ll limit myself to just two words:

Arse wank!

(I hope that’s dignified enough for you.)

I promised myself I wasn’t going to waste any time getting embroiled in the evolution v creationism non-debate on this website, but…

Guardian: Pope prepares to embrace theory of intelligent design

Philosophers, scientists and other intellectuals close to Pope Benedict will gather at his summer palace outside Rome this week for intensive discussions that could herald a fundamental shift in the Vatican’s view of evolution.

There have been growing signs the Pope is considering aligning his church more closely with the theory of “intelligent design” taught in some US states. Advocates of the theory argue that some features of the universe and nature are so complex that they must have been designed by a higher intelligence. Critics say it is a disguise for creationism.

Just for the record, what a total tosser!

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