Sorry I'm late; busy week of grant-writing and deadline-beating, then sleep-compensating and dust-clearing. And I did get the Reasons To Believe posts done. Allan Harvey is a chemical engineer (Ph.D.) who regularly posts to the ASA listserv, and he has prepared some highly recommended materials on "Science and Nature in Christian Perspective" that he has used in adult education in his church in Boulder, Colorado.

That's Tom de Kay, editor of the Home & Garden section of the New York Times. Last week Thursday, that section ran a story, "A Refugee from Gangland," describing the life of Margaret B. Jones, the author of a just-released "heart-wrenching memoir" set in gangland L.A. The Times piece is fascinating, and the memoir probably is too. One little problem: the memoir has just been revealed to be a fraud. It was wholly fabricated.

Can you tell which of the authors quoted above won a Pulitzer? Heh. Back to the big lie about "junk DNA" as told by anti-evolution propagandists. The first theme in this cesspool of creationist folk science, as I described in the first installment of this series on "junk DNA", is this: that "junk DNA" is functional and therefore that evolutionary claims regarding its origin are mistaken.

Now this is interesting. I can think of plenty of interesting Shakespearean scenes involving conflict and disputation. [Takes a bow] But I couldn't recall the word 'disagree' anywhere in, say, Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet, or even Macbeth.

It's snowing again. Cycling seems like a childhood memory. You'd think this would give me more opportunities to work on blog posts. Gah. My friends and colleagues, Debbie and Loren Haarsma, were the subject of a nice local news story, focusing on their work as scientists and Christians. They have a superb new book out, which I've promised to review here sometime soon. Is evolution too difficult or complicated for secondary students to grasp?

I'd go here. I'm sure I could trade my time machine for a ticket. An error occurred. Unable to execute JavaScript. Sometimes these guys make me cry. It's all I can do.

I recently recommended a very nice new blog by Mike Beidler called The Creation of an Evolutionist. It's subtitled "My journey from young earth creationism to evolutionary creationism," and it's downright fun to read. Mike is engaging and bright. He writes with enthusiasm and joy, so it's hard to imagine that his journey might have been difficult in places. But I'm sure it was.

I still owe you a summary of Howard Van Till's address at the Grand Dialogue and something about Richard Colling's talk at Calvin. Plus I'm barely halfway through the "junk DNA" series, and I haven't gotten to the part where I show you just how irresponsible Hugh Ross and Reasons to Believe really are. Sorry about that;

Two excellent new carnivals have gone up in the last day or so. Yesterday it was Encephalon at SharpBrains. Encephalon is a neuroscience and psychology carnival that had been in hibernation for some months, and it's nice to see it back. My post on endocannabinoids is included in yesterday's edition. And just posted on Greg Laden's Blog is Tangled Bank #99. It's loaded, as usual, with excellent and varied contributions.

Hide your valuables: my good friend and colleague Kevin Corcoran has invaded the blogosphere. His new blog is Holy Skin and Bone, and he's already out of the closet on evolution. Check out this post on the idiotic Darwin fish wars, and read his profile.

We interrupt this series on "junk DNA" and rampant folk science to bring you a months-overdue Journal Club. I wonder how many of my readers remember this little tidbit of American genius: I remember some very funny spoofs, mostly on T-shirts. (Back then, I think the Internet was still a toy for geeks at the NCSA.) "This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain on drugs with a side of bacon.