Everything you see online is the unvarnished truth. As evidence, I present the Endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus.
Now, while the plight of the Tree Octopus is a well-known and well-documented case of Undisputable Fact, there are those who doubt it. And even use it to slander today’s schoolkids!
Tree octopus exposes internet illiteracy
Researchers asked students to find out information about the endangered Pacific Northwest tree octopus. Students had no problem locating a Web site dedicated to the cause, http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/ “but insisted on the existence of the made-up story, even after researchers explained the information on the website was completely fabricated,” according to a press release.
Most students “simply have very little in the way of critical evaluation skills,” Leu said. “They may tell you they don’t believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do.”
Pfff. Come now, people aren’t that gullible. By the way, Jesus called and said you are supposed to send me all your spare cash.
Sarcasm mode OFF.
It’s fair to point to the interwebs as an obvious nexus of gullibility. But the fact is, people’s lack of critical evaluation skills are hardly limited to the Web, and hardly began with it. Schools seem to do an extremely poor job of even trying to teach the whole concept of critical thinking or skepticism. Hell, “skeptic” is far too often used as a negative, to connote not a reasoned desire to weight the evidence, but instead as another word for “cranky curmudgeon.”
Lack of critical thinking leads to people buying into things like spaghetti trees, being sent to the medical supply room for a pack of fallopian tubes, getting sent into the hangar for a bucket of prop wash, believing that the Apollo missions never happened, that the WTC collapse was caused by thermite bombs planted by US government agents, that bananas are proof of Godly Creationism, that raising taxes is a good thing, that the solutiuon to crime is to disarm the law abiding, that the Holocaust was a hoax, that magic is real (especially the execrable “magick”), that any politician elected to anything higher than county-wide office actually wants to Help The Common Man, that America would be better off with more laws, that God (whatever “god”) crammed into law would be both good and Constitutional, that nukes are bad. Too often the way things are taught is not “determine what events would follow from Action X,” but instead, “how would you feel about implementing Action X.”
Sigh.
In any event, I see that, once again, the elitists focus on the fashionable, hipster-infested Pacific Northwest and it’s Tree Octopus, but completely ignored the North Georgia Mountain Squid.
4 Responses to “Save the Tree Octopus!”
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How do bananas demonstrate creationism? You need to send something to that website so that they’ll know about the North Georgia Mountain Squid; I didn’t see it mentioned.
I just finished eight years in university classrooms, so I know the new kids can’t analyze anything. What struck me was this: “They may tell you they don’t believe everything they read on the Internet, but they do.” I want to hear the kids explain why they accept it all.
Thanks for this one. I’ve passed it on to my teacher friends.
>How do bananas demonstrate creationism?
Jeez how could you have missed out on *that*? A few years ago, evangelists Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron (yes, *that* one) put out a video that showed that the shape and utility of the banana proved that they were created by God specifically for human consumption:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2z-OLG0KyR4
There was of course a small problem: it’s bullcrap. The banana as created by God ™ is very unlike the banana that was created by Man. The wild banana has to be cooked, has seeds all over inside it, is shaped very differently, cannot be easily peeled. The modern yellow bananer ya pick up at the Safeway is the result of humans breeding the things, and a few (historically recent) lucky mutations.
Comfort, after getting mocked mercilessly for this, later appologized and claimed to not have known that the banana was the result of hybridization and selective breeding. But he had been doing his banana schtick for *years.* It stretches credulity to believe that in all that time he’d never once stumbled across the facts.
But perhapos he had stumbeld across the facts. As with so many people who marry a lack of critical thinking skills with a deeply ingrained ideology, facts simply don’t sink in. This was displayed in recent years most clearly by the 9/11 Truthers. The facts of the WTC collapse have been clearly demonstrated, yet the Truthers refuse to accept them. Popular Mechanics and one of the cable channel ran a documentary that brought Truthers on board, and ran actual physical experiments, experiments the Truthers agreed to in advance. When the experiments went against the Truther dogma, they simply refused to accept them. This is not just a lack of critical thinking, this is a *refusal* to think critically.
There’s all too much of that.
I missed the banana thing. Completely. I grew up with a father who read the Bible daily, taught Sunday School, and just knew that everyone believed exactly what he believed. I dated a couple of girls who were classic Jesus freaks (I didn’t know that until they felt comfortable with me, which suggested to me that they weren’t completely comfortable with themselves). So if there’s been anything from the world of pentecostal evangelical fundamentalist Christians, I’m as likely to know that as I am to know about the various sects of Islam. Less likely, actually: I’ve been avoiding those Christians and learning a bit about the Muslims — in self defense, in both cases.
That refusal to think is what the guy noted in the sentence I quoted. Even if they can do it, they have no incentive to analyze. They’ve been trained well.
Barking Spiders?
Those are real; I’ve heard their haunting call…OMG! They _are_ real!:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barking_spider
The Platypus proves the existence of God, and that God has a sick sense of humor…as there is no other rational explanation for how something that screwed-up can exist.
It’s on the cover of Volume One of my textbook series discussing Ignorant Design as an alternative to evolution.
The book also deals with our American Museum Of Unnatural History’s recent expedition to the fossil nest of of the largest of the Sillisaurs, the Supergigantoultrasaurus, in Arizona.
Until recently, this has been mistaken for a meteor crater, in much the way that its fossilized bowel movement was mistaken for a petrified forest.