New Darwin Video: I Have a Stethoscope and You Don't!

Click here for a new Darwin video in which I explain how some doctors and scientists, whether legitimate or not, use images rather than facts to enhance their credibility. It relates to chapter 14 of my book Scientifically Thinking: How to Liberate Your Mind, Solve the World's Problems, and Embrace the Beauty of Science.

New Video: Darwin kicks!

You always knew that Darwin was a sh*tkicker, but here is the proof! Charles Darwin helps persimmon seeds, previously transported by a raccoon, to disperse. See this link to the Darwin YouTube channel.

New video!

See the video in which Darwin visits Ashfall Beds State Park in Nebraska, a huge pile of mammal skeletons--all the bones still in place--from 12 million years ago!

Resource Spaces of (Bestial) Competition

Wherever there is a resource space, entities capable of reproduction will inhabit it and begin fighting one another. This can be bacteria in a broth, humans fighting over territory, ideas competing with one another for attention in the collective human mind. I have witnessed competition and outright war in a place I would never have expected it, in a resource space that I created. I refer to the comments on my YouTube channel.

Yes, I created a resource space when I started my YouTube channel in 2010. On this channel, I pretend to be Charles Darwin, and I take an often humorous look at bite-sized evolutionary concepts. I try very hard to do outrageous and funny things, often drawing the humor upon myself. You know, things like falling off of a cliff or into a river. Like most channels it got a slow start, but it quickly built up to have over five hundred followers. I have to date had over 34,000 views. Check it out. It’s fun and you’ll learn a lot.

Viewers post comments on this as on most other YouTube channels. Sometimes, the comments are pretty insulting to me. Some are insulting to the guests I interview. But this is pretty rare. I more commonly get appreciative comments. What really surprised me recently is that the people have started posting comments about one another, making some pretty brutal statements not against me but against other viewers. In effect, I have created a resource space in which people, hidden in anonymity, can wage war on one another, with few rules of decency.

It is awesome. And awful, too. I marvel at it. For a while, there was a war between someone named Atheist Rex and someone named Raining Fire, who was (or pretended to be; one cannot know) a fundamentalist. They wished death upon one another; Raining Fire fervently desired that God would rain fire down out of heaven on Atheist Rex and kill his or her children. For a while, I began to wonder if I should report this activity to Homeland Security. But, they probably know about it already. Anyway, they might just be playing. No language is off limits, for either the atheists or the Christians.

Usually the arguments are just name-calling and counter-name-calling (you’re-so-stupid-all-you-can-do-is-name-calling etc.) Sometimes the arguments can take an interesting turn. Somehow the topic of abortion came up—a topic I never remember mentioning online. Prepare yourselves for some interesting mind-expanding concepts here. A woman (unless the photo is fake) accused Atheist Rex of supporting the mass genocide of babies in abortion clinics. Atheist Rex responded that God one time commanded the killing of all the babies in the world: at the time of Noah’s Flood. Good point. Then the woman responded that the babies were not really human, because demons had sex with human women and produced satanic spawn who needed to be killed in the Flood. That’s a pretty creative idea—one that, incidentally, is not in the Bible. So far they have not discussed the fact that, according to the book of Joshua, God commanded the killing of entire populations, including the children—and these were humans, not half-satanic creatures. Anyway, it was the first time I ever opened my inbox and found 45 comments only slightly connected with my video. The video was about the dinosaur tracks in the bed of the Paluxy River in Texas. A similar flurry of activity has continued since this original flare-up.

I’ll just mention that I refuse to take responsibility for any of this craziness. I am like a man who purchased land and built a school on it, with a playground. The man is not responsible for the bullies fighting one another on the playground.

And I will just sit back and see what happens next. Thank God they cannot track one another down. I hope.

New video

I just posted a new Darwin video. I have corrected the flawed link. Darwin visits a prairie dog town and thinks about what we can learn from prairie dogs: first, the evolution of altruism; second, the effects of animals on their habitats.

New video: Cats and natural selection

Just posted on my YouTube channel! If it has not yet shown up on the list of videos, the direct link is here. Cats and natural selection! I hope lots of people watch it. I put in "kitty," "cute," and "kitten" in the tags just in case.

New video

I posted a new video on the StanEvolve channel: Barbecue with Wranglin’ Rich. It presents Richard Wrangham's cooking hypothesis of human evolution. And it has the approval of Wranglin' Rich himself. His email from Harvard noted, "Dear Stanley: I love it! Thank you for sending the link, and for promoting the cooking hypothesis. I will proudly share with my family. Actually I have a question. You cited an article from Life Magazine from the 1960s, but I don't think I know it. Can you give me a citation? It sounds like something that Carleton Coon might have said. I looked at some of your other productions. Great stuff! Appreciatively, Richard." I told him what I could of the article. Hope y'all enjoy the new video.

A New YouTube Channel

I have just started a new YouTube channel, http://www.youtube.com/darwinandthebible. On this channel, Charles Darwin goes through the Bible and comments on it. I did not want to clutter up my science-based YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/StanEvolve) with religion, so I created this new channel. I also limit the religious content of this blog. My other blog is where I usually put the religious content.

The purpose of the new Youtube channel is to explore what we can learn from the Bible not by reading it as a devotional, the way conventional religious people do, or by attacking it, as anti-religious people often do. The Bible is a collection of books in which many people over the course of a millennium have struggled with the big issues (where did we come from, where are we going, what are we doing here, and why do bad things happen). They came up with many different answers (thus contradicting one another). But maybe we can have our own minds challenged by the stories they came up with to express their thoughts.

So if this sounds interesting to you, check it out. If not, just keep coming here and to the StanEvolve channel on YouTube. But I expect that some of the things you will see on the darwinandthebible channel will be ideas, some of them possibly outrageous, that you have probably not heard before. Among the topics already posted:

1. The Bible is not a book. It is a collection of contradictory books written over a millennium. The Bible contains no list of books that are supposed to be in the Bible.
2. Genesis 1 is not a history of the Earth, either correct or incorrect, but a portrait of "creation."
3. You can think of Genesis 1 as a song in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
4. You can even think of Genesis 1 as a description of life colonizing a volcanic island. I realize that this interpretation is wrong, but hey, it works as well as other interpretations, and better than most.

See you there. Or, I'll just keep seeing you here.

Two YouTube videos

I just posted a new YouTube video on the Darwin Channel in which Darwin explains the symbiogenetic origin of complex cells using sushi as a visual example. The direct link is here.


Another useful video is one that I posted a long time ago and it has gotten buried under dozens of others. It is called "Darwin eats a hamburger" and it ties several crucial themes in biology together: nutrition (the dangers of eating too much fat), global warming (raising cattle releases a lot of greenhouse gas), and evolution (why we crave fat). In this video, Emma Darwin also speaks from behind the camera. The direct link is here.