Sorry, Stockie

Fundies have been all a-dither and a-shriek the last few days over the "discovery" of dinosaur and human footprints embedded in a slab of limestone in Texas. Rock-solid proof that man walked with the dinosaurs!

"A slab of North Texas limestone is on track to rock the world, with its two imbedded footprints poised to make a huge impression in scientific and religious circles." [...]

The limestone contains two distinct prints – one of a human footprint and one belonging to a dinosaur. The significance of the cement-hard fossil is that it shows the dinosaur print partially over and intersecting the human print.

In other words, the stone’s impressions indicate that the human stepped first, the dinosaur second. If proven genuine, the artifact would provide evidence that man and dinosaur roamed the Earth at the same time, according to those associated with the find and with its safekeeping. It could potentially toss out the window many commonly held scientific theories on evolution and the history of the world."

Um yeah, sure. But what do the experts say? I knew just where to go to get the straight goods on the story:

"It's supposed to be a human footprint with that of an Acrocanthosaurus on top of it, showing that dinosaurs walked the earth after human beings.Unfortunately, they both look ridiculously fake. The human print has toes like tubes and a wierdly dug-in big toe, and looks ridiculously fake. The dino print is even worse — it's basically a three-pronged flat plate, looking like it was modeled after the smooth bottoms of a plastic dinosaur toy."

D'oh!

Speaking of the Nobel Prize

This is probably old news, but since I've never heard it before and I've got nothing else right now, here ya go. The Father of Modern Genetics, Francis Crick, was apparently wrecked on acid when he made the Nobel Prize-winning discovery of the Secret of Life in the double helix structure of DNA. Later he told a fellow scientist that he often used small doses of LSD to boost his "Powers of Thought", and believed it helped him unravel the mystery of the double helix.

He sounds like my kind of guy:

"Crick refused to meet the queen when she visited Cambridge’s new Laboratory of Molecular Biology because he disapproved of royalty, and he declined a knighthood. He deeply disliked religion, saying once that Christianity was all right between consenting adults but should not be taught to children." [...]

"Desire to undercut religious obscurantism was a cogent motive in Crick’s scientific career, shaping his choice first of the gene and later of consciousness as problems that, if cracked, would destroy the last refuges of vitalism.

“Throughout, he stayed true to himself: ebullient, loquacious, charming, skeptical, tenacious,” Mr. Ridley writes in an eloquent coda. “He would have liked to find the seat of consciousness and to see the retreat of religion. He had to settle for explaining life.”

LSD... ya think??!!?