While on a twilight bike run on a lonely highway near Elko, Nevada back in 1979, myself and three other saddle tramps began seeing a semi-stationary formation of odd red lights in the clear, moonlit sky ahead. As we neared, we all watched as the bright lights (five in total) hovered in a quasi-triangular pattern over a small valley at the base of the Ruby Mountains.

Always looking for an excuse to crack a beer anyway, we stopped on the side of the road, pulled out a few not-so-cold-ones, rolled a couple, and then sat back and watched the sky; mesmerized by the lights as they seemed to perform a sort of coordinated, zigzagged dance right before us. The graceful movement of the lights against the backdrop of the pitch-black sky gave the scene a sort of scifi movie-surreality. From time to time the lights fully disappeared behind the mountain range, only to pop back out again a few seconds later, still in rigid formation.

The show lasted nearly a full hour until, suddenly -- with the lights still locked in the odd geometric pattern -- the ground shook and the entire formation shot clean out of sight overhead; the abruptness of which startling me so much I almost fell off my bike reaching for the beer that just dropped like a lead weight from my hand.

Via the Carpetbagger report, a computer programmer is using a computer program to try to determine whether evolution led to spiritual beliefs:

The model assumes that a small number of people have a genetic predisposition to communicate unverifiable information to others. They passed on that trait to their children, but they also interacted with people who didn’t spread unreal information. The model looks at the reproductive success of the two sorts of people — those who pass on real information, and those who pass on unreal information.

Under most scenarios, "believers in the unreal" went extinct. But when [James Dow, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan] included the assumption that non-believers would be attracted to religious people because of some clear, but arbitrary, signal, religion flourished.

"Somehow the communicators of unreal information are attracting others to communicate real information to them," Dow says, speculating that perhaps the non-believers are touched by the faith of the religious.

UPDATE: I finished some edits at 1:08, so if you read this post right away, you may want to check it out again.

Crossposted at CollegeFreedom.

Okay, I can't resist: Can anyone save Ben Stein from looking like an idiot in his new pro-creationist documentary, Expelled? Anyone? Anyone?

Yes, the actor who became famous by portraying a rather stupid teacher in Ferris Bueller's Day Off is back on the big screen, but this time his stupidity isn't an act. "No Intelligence Allowed" is the ironic subtitle of the movie, which begins with stock footage of the Berlin Wall. Is the reluctance of scientists to embrace a crackpot theory the equivalent of an evil totalitarian regime? According to Stein, yes. That’s only the beginning of the absurdly inappropriate analogies to be found in Expelled.

There's news on the intelligent design front. Ben Stein has written and narrates Expelled, a "documentary" coming out mid-April (maybe--it's been postponed before) about academics who propound ID and are expelled (get it?) from universities because academia is biased in favor of evolution and natural selection (like that’s a bad thing).

Think all people of faith are anti-science? Think again. "Evolution Weekend" was observed two weekends ago in communities of faith all over the country.

Hundreds of US churches and many thousands of religious believers defied the stereotype that American Christianity is a cipher for anti-science creationism last week, as they marked Evolution Weekend with sermons and seminars on the consonance of spiritual and scientific exploration.

On Dec 25, I was listening to Carl Sagan's old Cosmos series on Discovery Science.  

Sadly, it reminds us how much of the concept of science and respect for the scientific method has been lost to the current right wing assault on science.

A remastered version of the series will air on Tuesdays beginning January 8, 2008 at 9 pm (check your listings).

It is as awe inspiring now as it was when it first aired in 1980.

Misunderstanding what a theory is in the science disciplines confuses understanding of science for many.  It is used to confuse the "debate" of evolution v creationism.

SOME SAY that if we withdraw from Iraq, it will collapse in a bloody religious sectarian tribal genocide, and become a failed Taliban/Al Quaeda state.

SOME SAY that Iraq will self-stabilize if we withdraw, and turn against Al-Qaeda and drive all foreign elements out of the country in a paroxysm of newly found national pride.

The guarantee behind both statements seems to be certainty that the behavior of religion in an overstressed society is predictable. I find that a foolish notion.

However, I can see some good in all this, on a planetary scale. If there is a huge massacre, it will occur amongst the religious, whose accidental rendings of the   precious fabric of society are getting very annoying and dangerous to world peace.