The Atheist Blogger

A week ago PZ Myers asked everyone to email the president of UCF to complain / voice concerns over the handling of students Webster Cook and Benjamin Collard. I sent a short email, along with a few other hundred people. Today I received this response:

Thank you for your e-mail.

Laws regarding student privacy prevent us from commenting about
individual UCF students. But, in general terms, when a student allegedly
violates student rules of conduct, his or her student account is placed
on hold.

The student is notified of this action and informed that the hold will
not prevent registration for classes. A student is allowed to register
after making a request to release the hold. The Office of Student
Conduct follows this procedure for any student who is referred to it.

More information about the entire Golden Rule and the student conduct
process is available on our Web site, www.ucf.edu. Please be assured
that UCF is committed to following its standard procedures to ensure
fair outcomes in all student conduct review cases.

Additionally, it is the university’s policy to treat all people with
dignity and respect, without regard to race, creed, color, national
origin, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, sexual
orientation, veteran status, or political opinions and affiliations.

Amy J. Barnickel
Senior Executive Assistant to the President

From Promise to Prominence:
Celebrating 40 Years

Of course its the standard copy/paste response that was probably sent to everyone, but it’s the last paragraph that confuses me. Firstly I’m happy that Cook and Collard are not going to suffer any setbacks in their education because of this, but the so called “policy” outlined in the last paragraph clearly states

“without regard to race, creed, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, disability, marital status, sexual orientation, veteran status, or political opinions and affiliations.”

Clearly the university is going against its own policy by regarding the religion of others over the individual. If the policy actually counted for anything, this whole issue would have been brushed aside as “free expression”, the same as any political statement or opinion. The UCF need to stop bowing to demands of evil religious organisations and start thinking of their students.

Who says atheists cannot organize themselves? A group of atheist bloggers who debunk everything Ray Comfort says (Raytractors) have organized a strike of his blog. I’ve joined their group as a contributor, so hopefully there will be some posts debunking Ray from me as well, after all I have done them in the past.

Ray Comfort rules his blog like a dictator. Every comment goes through a moderation phase before being displayed, and any comment that contains vulgar language or doesn’t capitalize “god” and “jesus” is removed. Repeat offenders are blocked. He calls his website “Atheist Central”

Due to this behaviour, and Ray’s continual ignorance in science, Raytractors has declared a strike for all atheist commentators of the blog. The aim of the strike is to see what happens to the blog when it is pretty much devoid of all life, since it is evident that Ray has more atheist “followers” than theist ones, mainly because of the absurdities of his beliefs. The rules of the strike are quite simple. You can visit Ray’s blog as many times as you want, but you cannot post a comment. Instead, why not write your comment as a blog post if you have a blog, or send in your comment to an atheist blog you read. I would be willing to post any comments you want to make about Ray Comfort right here.

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Popular atheist biology professor turned blogger PZ Myers has written a response to a question put to him in an email:

How did life evolve from one (I suspect) chromosome to… 64 in horses, or whatever organism you want to pick. How is it possible for a sexually reproducing population of organisms to change chromosome numbers over time?

Firstly: there would have to be some benefit to the replication probability of the organisms which carry the chromosomes. I don’t see how this would work. How is having more chromosomes of any extra benefit to an organism’s replicative success? Yes, perhaps if those chromosomes were full of useful information… but the chances of that happening are non existent and fly in the face of ’small adaptations over time’.

Secondly, the extra chromosomes need to come from somewhere. I’m not sure about this, but I believe chromosome number are not determined by genes, are they? There isn’t a set of genes which determines the number of chromosomes an organism has. So the number is fixed, determined by the sexually reproducing parents. Which leads me to believe that if the number does change, and by chance the organism is still alive and capable of sexual reproduction, that the number will start swinging back and forward, by 1 or 2, every generation, and never stabilising. The chances of this happening are also very very slim.

It’s an important question, and a lot of people (myself included) have wondered about it. I’ve often searched for a answer online but found nothing, so I’m glad PZ has swooped in with an easy to understand (albeit lengthy and descriptive) answer.

If you thought you knew a lot about Evolution, prepare to be amazed…

Basics: How can chromosome numbers change?