- Great moments in science writing: The alpha cavewoman fiasco – “If a news story about human evolution mentions Raquel Welch orOne Million Years B.C. in the lead paragraphs, you should lower your expectations for the rest because it is shallow and hackneyed.”
- Lingerie ads lead to deviant sexual behavior warns prison – “The South Carolina jail is accused of banning publications that contained pictures of Botticelli’s Venus, and an edition of the Washington Post because it contained a Bloomingdale’s advertisement for lingerie.” From cerberus40.
- FHM names Andrej Pejic one of the 100 sexiest women, then rescinds – As you may recall from Rebecca’s post on Barnes & Noble’s reaction to Pejic, he is an androgynous looking male model who is often styled in a feminine way. Of course, FHM couldn’t just say “no homo” and move along when they realized that Pejic is male, they had to use some grossly transphobic language. From pseudomorph.
- Quebec parents challenge no-religion rule for day care – “Quebec’s effort to oust God from daycare is facing a court challenge from a group of parents, who say the plan is forcing educators to do everything from rewrite nursery tunes to ban angels from Christmas trees.”
The Mail was wrong about something?
.
.
In outher news, the Pope…
still Catholic…
and he shits in the woods, no wait.
Oh, daycare pingpong. It will start as “We can’t have religion in daycare” then “I can’t find daycare without religion”. It’s a lot harder to unteach a fairy tale.
“The Berkeley County Detention Center has no library, Matthews pointed out, meaning prisoners are deprived of access to reading material, other than the Bible, for extended periods of time.” So, cool with depictions of deity sanctioned rape and incest…got it.
BTW, if they mean what I think they mean about ‘deviant behavior’, I’m pretty sure that makes almost all of humanity ‘deviants’.
I don’t know enough about the Canadian legal system and its stance on separation on church and state to know how appropriate this for Montreal. But based my American bias, I fully agree with Montreal. I strongly believe you can’t really have a a freedom of religion, or freedom to have no religion, if it is taught in public schools and subsidized by the state.
I don’t have a problem with people wanting to include religion in their daycare, in a private setting. I send both my kids to a religious preschool. But I also pay a good deal of money for it. And if the religious institutions are worried they will loose students to the secular system, they can choose to subsidize their offerings.
@Mark Hall it is not difficult to “unteach a fair tale” if you are teaching your kids to think critically. If your not, well then the kids have a bigger issue, regardless.
Unlike the US, Canada doesn’t have a firm wall of separation between church and state. What it does have is a commitment to multiculturalism (in the Charter), which means that the government can’t promote one religion at the expense of others. This isn’t as strong a protection against state-funded religious schools as the US’s First Amendment, but it does help. You can only have both multiculturalism and publicly-funded religious schools if you either have a school for every religion, or only schools that are neutral on religion.
Section two of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states:
“Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:
(a) freedom of conscience and religion;”
The Supreme Court ruled in 1985 that this also encompasses the right to freedom from religious requirements. There is separation of church and state in Canada, albeit not exactly how it’s practiced in the US.
It strikes me that the wider range of human females is consistent with more recent DNA findings. The conclusion from the recent findings is that men pass land to their sons, and marry off daughters to distant tribes, to encourage peaceful relations. So that women traveled more widely over their lifetimes in the distant past does not imply that they dominated men at that time.
And I have to agree that mentioning Raquel Welch’s role in “One Million Years B.C.” at the start of an article does not bode well for its scientific accuracy.
This is millions of years before agriculture. However your point still stands – the most obvious explanation is that neighbouring tribes would get together every so often and exchange daughters – i.e. australopithecines (or at least these particular ones) were exogamous and patrilocal.
It does still allow the stereotype picture however – the men of one tribe bop the men of another tribe over the head with bulbous wooden clubs and drag the women by their long hair back home with the club resting on their shoulder.