God Demands Evolution

Darren Brown said about this video:
PLEASE – do yourself a favour and turn the sound OFF – NOW. I’m almost willing to throw the towel in admit that creationists are right when I hear it. However the video is just brilliant (if you ignore the silly text as well)... Here’s 500 generations every SECOND backed up by actual fossil evidence – shoved in to a computer and animated together. It’s fantastic to watch.

And here's the video that is linked from the "god demands evolution" link in the previous vid.


I wonder if they'll be convinced?

Dawkins on Darwin (with Q&A)

Professor Richard Dawkins delivered this year's Open University lecture at the Natural History Museum on Tuesday 17th March 2009. Dawkins presented to an invited audience and investigated if Darwin was the most revolutionary scientist ever, and examined the evolutionary theories of his contemporaries. Dawkins suggests that there are four "bridges to evolutionary understanding" and illustrates this with four claimants to the evolution of natural selection: Edward Blyth, Patrick Matthew, Alfred Wallace and Charles Darwin. The fifth bridge of evolutionary understanding is identified as modern genetics which he terms digital Darwinism.



Via Atheist Media Blog

The webs are full of fruit!

Just going through my webcomics rss feeds and there was quite a few good ones this week.

Here's a taste

A Dawkins/Darwin double-dose delight!

The first video is Richard Dawkins in an interview on Belgian TV. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Antwerp.

The voice-over is not in English, but the interview is.




The second video is "Darwin: The Legacy BBC 1998 Documentary about the historical and future influence of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection on human behaviour, society and culture. Contributors include evolutionary biologists Edward O. Wilson, Richard Dawkins and John Maynard Smith."

Videos to help with learnding

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Darwin's Dangerous Idea Pt3. Life and Death

This is the third installment of the series, also see part 1 and part 2

5 under 5

Here's 5 interesting videos, each under 5 minutes in length, to get your week off to a running start.

Darwin's Dangerous Idea Part 2

(From youtube) Andrew Marr discovers something surprising about his own evolutionary history as this epic series continues with an exploration of Darwin's impact on politics and society. Under the banner of Survival of the Fittest, Darwin's theory of natural selection has been used to justify imperial expansion and the oppression of indigenous peoples; to inform the science of eugenics - the selective breeding of humans which was implemented in the United States in the early 20th century; and to provide a veneer of scientific respectability to Nazi plans to create an Aryan master race. It was also used quite explicitly to explain the twisted logic of the final solution. But Andrew Marr also finds a kind of redemption for Darwin's theory of evolution. After the Second World War, it was a founding idea behind the democratic, anti-racist values of the United Nations. More recently, it has also been used to help eliminate a fatal genetic disease from the Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn. Marr goes on to consider the difficult social and political choices presented by predictive DNA testing - the final frontier of Darwin's Dangerous Idea.

Dan Dennett: Sweet, Sexy, Cute Funny.

How Psychology evolves to change our perception of the world.

It's not that the external stimuli evolved to become attractive to us, it's that our perception of stimuli witch are beneficial to us has been made gradually more favorable over time until we got to where we now are.

My favorite quote is "Chocolate cake is a supernormal stimulus"

Jared Diamond on the Evolution of Religions

At the time of posting this, I haven't had a chance to watch it, but knowing how good Jared Diamond usually is, this is bound to be pretty good.

Regulatin' Genes

This bizzle's the shizzle!

Bringin' on some evo-dizzle to explizzle some gene replicizzle to douchebizzles who belivvle in inteligent desizzle.

Respectizzle!

Darwin's Dangerous Idea

In the first episode of the three-part series, Andrew Marr explores how Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has taken on a life of its own far beyond the world of science.

He argues that Darwin's theory has transformed our understanding of what it means to be human. Over the last 150 years, Darwin's ideas have challenged the need for a creator, undermined religious authority, and provided new ways of looking at the origins of human morality.

Marr's journey begins following Darwin's footsteps in Tierra del Fuego at the southernmost tip of South America where Darwin first encountered an 'uncivilised' native tribe. This began to raise questions in his mind about the origins of the human race. The answers to these questions would emerge over the next 30 years, culminating in the publication of On The Origin of Species in 1859.

Marr then traces the development of Darwin's idea in the years since then and finds a range of influences that Darwin could never have imagined: from the existential philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche to the battlefields of the First World War; from the Freudian psychoanalyst's couch to the Vatican; and from the genetic logic of kindness to an Islamic creationist's claim that Darwin is to blame for modern terrorism. Darwin's dangerous idea is as influential and challenging today as it was 150 years ago.

Evolution. It works, bitches!

McDarwin's

Charles Darwin Tagged You in a Note on Facebook

For all you Facebook loving, chain letter writing, friend tagging addicts, the evolutionary roots of Facebooks "25 Things" craze.

http://www.slate.com/id/2211068/

Jesus and Mo. Micro vs Macro

More Jesus and Mo here

Misconceptions of Evolution

This is a great little video that is a basic introduction to the theory of evolution, and addresses many of the misconceptions that we continually hear time and time again.

Dawkins Does Darwin

Haven't read 'On the Origins of Species?' why not have it read to you by Richard Dawkins?

Richard Dawkins Interviews Father George Coyne

This is the full uncut interview with Father George Coyne which was omitted from Richard Dawkins' television program "The Genius of Charles Darwin" for Channel 4 in the UK.

The Richard Dawkins Foundation will be releasing many more uncut interviews from "The Genius of Charles Darwin" on DVD soon through http://RichardDawkins.net/Store

Intertoob Interview

The clips of the 'Faith Off' have now been put up in youtube,



enjoy