Is America ready for a creationist president?

That's a rhetorical question, as it looks like the answer is going to be no!

But anyone comforted by the fact that neither presidential candidate is a creationist, should think again. The Lancet has just published this letter by John Alam in which he calculates the risk of McCain dying during each year of his four-year term of office from a recurrence of his melanoma as 6%, i.e. 24% overall. The figure has been contested--see this posting on Wired Science (which oddly seems to have the figure as 22%, even from Alam). But then the Wired author Brandon Keim points out that a man of McCain's age stands around a 11% chance of dying within four years even without melanoma.

So what all this means is that a McCain victory would bring a 11-24% chance of a creationist president (i.e. Sarah Palin), a risk that is too high for any sane person*. So, let's just hope the polls are right and we are looking forward to an Obama landslide!

*some will argue that America already has a creationist president, but my understanding is that Bush's official position is teach the controversy fence-sitting.

Icons of evolution: McCain as missing link

My first thought when I saw the image at the top of this entry, which is in all the papers and all over the Internet is just how reminiscent it is of the "March of Progress", the famous drawing that shows a sequence of primates walking from left to right, starting with a small knuckle-walking ape on the left, progressing through a series of apemen, and finishing with a modern human male on the right (which according to the conventions of our racist culture inevitably has to be a full-bloodied white European male).

The original version was drawn by Rudy Zallinger and published in the Time-Life book Early Man in 1970. Carl Zimmer and others have gone looking for it on the web, but apparently it is nowhere to be found. However given that has spawned many humorous variants and even a tattoo.

Plus it was misused by Jonathan Wells in his book Icons of Evolution (see discussion here on Talk.Origins) 

Well, here is another humorous variant to add to the list, and for a change, this time the white European male does not feature as the pinnacle of evolution, but as a decidedly dodgy missing link!