Posts Tagged ‘creationism’
“24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence?”*…
Social distancing makes a soul thirsty– and as the Journal of the American Medical Association reports, that has had consequences…
Alcohol consumption has substantially increased during the COVID-19 pandemic… We examined national changes in waiting list registration and liver transplantation for ALD and the association with alcohol sales during the COVID-19 pandemic. We hypothesized that waiting list registrations and deceased donor liver transplants (DDLTs) for alcoholic hepatitis (AH), which can develop after a short period of alcohol misuse, would disproportionately rise…
This cross-sectional study found that waiting list registrations and DDLTs for AH increased significantly during COVID-19, exceeding the volumes forecasted by pre–COVID-19 trends by more than 50%, whereas trends for AC and non-ALD remained unchanged. While we cannot confirm causality, this disproportionate increase in association with increasing alcohol sales may indicate a relationship with known increases in alcohol misuse during COVID-19. Since less than 6% of patients with severe AH are listed for transplantation, increasing waiting list volume during COVID-19 represents a small fraction of the increase in AH, a preventable disease with 6-month mortality up to 70%.
Pandemic drinking is up– way up. So, it turns out, is serious liver disease: “Association of COVID-19 With New Waiting List Registrations and Liver Transplantation for Alcoholic Hepatitis in the United States.”
And lest we think think that waning COVID-19 pressure will be the end of all of this, a warning: “The Coming Age of Climate Trauma.”
[Image above: source]
* Steven Wright
###
As we muse on moderation, we might recall that it was on this date in 2012 that Charles Darwin received about 4,000 write-in votes in the election in Georgia’s 10th Congressional District. Republican Paul Broun, an M.D. who was running unopposed for re-election, had given (the September before) a campaign speech at the Liberty Baptist Church Sportsman’s Banquet in which he said “All that stuff I was taught about evolution and embryology and the Big Bang Theory, all that is lies straight from the pit of Hell.”
In response, radio talk show host Neil Boortz and University of Georgia plant biology professor Jim Leebens-Mack spearheaded a campaign to run the English naturalist and evolutionary theorist against Broun, a young earth creationist. They had no expectation of unseating him (and indeed, Broun carried his district handily) but hoped to draw attention to these comments from the scientific community and to have Broun removed from his post on the House Science Committee– at which they also failed.
Lower head, insert into sand…
Exhibit at the Creation Museum: humans and dinosaurs existing together peacefully…
From Talking Points Memo:
[In a vote in Congress last week] thirty-one Republicans on the House Energy And Commerce Committee — the entire Republican contingent on the panel — declined on Tuesday to vote in support of the very idea that climate change exists.
Democrats on the panel had suggested three amendments that said climate change is a real thing, is caused by humans and has potentially dire consequences for the future. The amendments came on a Republican bill to block the EPA from offering regulations to mitigate the results of global climate shifts. The global scientific community is in near unanimous agreement that climate change is real, and that humans contribute to it…
One appreciates that the dialectic machinery of partisan politics was at work here; still…
Read the full report, including the “offending” language in the proposed amendments, here.
As we prepare for an(other) epic flood, we might recall that it was on this date in 1827 that Charles Darwin made his earliest scientific discovery, at age 18. He dissected some specimens of a barnacle-like marine organism, the polyzoan Flustra… Thus beginning what became a lifelong commitment to natural history.
Young Darwin (source)
It’s positively evolutionary!…
Since 1982, the Gallup polling organization has been asking Americans about their beliefs as to the origin of our species. The latest results are in; and while a plurality of those queried still believe that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time in the last ten thousand years or so,” a growing minority professes belief in some form of evolution:
There’s been no revolutionary change of beliefs over the last three decades, but one can detect a shift that’s… well, positively evolutionary.
As we begin at the beginning, we might wish a happy birthday to Isaak Yudovich Ozimov– aka Isaac Asimov– who was born on this date in 1920. A biochemistry professor, he is better remembered as an author– more specifically, as one one of the greatest science fiction authors of his time (imaginer of “The Foundation,” coiner of the term “robotics,” and author of “The Three Laws of Robotics”). But Asimov was extraordinarily prolific; he published over 500 books– including (in addition to sci fi) mysteries, a great deal of popular science, even a worthy volume on Shakespeare– and wrote an estimated 9,000 letters and postcards.
Inheriting the Wind*…
From DetentionSlip.com (“your daily cheat sheet for education news”), a sobering infographic on the state of education in the U.S., “Creationism vs. Darwinism in the U.S.”; an excerpt:
Click here to see the infographic in full (and then again on the image there, to enlarge).
* Inherit the Wind, the play (then movies) that fictionalized the Scopes trial, took it’s title from Proverbs 11:29, which (in the King James version) reads:
He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind:
and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.
As we own up to ontology, we might might recall that it was on this date in 1950 that T.S. Eliot, then 62, observed that “the years between 50 and 70 are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet are not decrepit enough to turn them down.” Among those nagging tasks: picking up his Nobel Prize for literature two years earlier.
Signs are taken for wonders. “We would see a sign!”
The word within a word, unable to speak a word,
Swaddled with darkness.
– “Gerontion”
If food be the music of love, play on…
Vanessa Dualib is a Sao Paulo-based “daydreamer, pseudo-photographer, wanna-be astronaut and untrained intellectual who tends to find inspiration specially in fruits and veggies.” That inspiration found form in her book Playing With Food.
Happily for us, she’s graciously shared the photos that animate her book; they’re available as a photo set, “Playing With My Food” on Flickr.
As we brave the broccoli forest, we might recall that it was on this date in 4004 BC that all creation began… at least according to what is known as the Ussher Chronology. Developed in the 17th century by James Ussher, the Anglican Archbishop of Armagh (in what is now Northern Ireland), it held that the first day of creation began at nightfall, Sunday, October 23, 4004 BC. Ussher’s conclusions were published in 1650 in his Annales veteris testamenti, a prima mundi origine deducti (Annals of the Old Testament, deduced from the first origins of the world).
Ussher’s specific choice of starting year may have been influenced by the then-widely-held belief that the Earth’s likely “life-span” was 6,000 years (4,000 before the birth of Christ and 2,000 after), corresponding to the six days of Creation, on the grounds that “one day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day” (2 Peter 3:8). In any case, his conclusion varied a bit from other Biblically-based estimates, like those of Bede (3952 BC), Ussher’s near-contemporary Scaliger (3949 BC), Johannes Kepler (3992 BC) and Sir Isaac Newton (c. 4000 BC).
Ironically, it was on this date in 1977 that paleontologist Elso Barghoorn announced the discovery of the oldest life-forms on earth: 3.4-billion-year-old one-celled fossils.
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