As an aside, I have been wondering why creationism seems more popular in the US than in other nations (dont get me wrong, it is on the increase globally, but the US is leading the way). I have an idea which I might try to formulate into a post soon, but comments / opinions welcome.

As to the science and arithmetic passed of as probabilities, science standards in the US must be horrifyingly bad. The “logic” is even worse. The problem is that creationism, and no evolution at all, was taught in many high schools until the Supreme overturned the Scopes result (1987).

Incidentally, though, cells do ‘commit suicide’ — it’s called apoptosis and it is a finely-tuned, programmed component of normal cellular activity. Necrotic cell death is simple to understand, but apoptosis is modulated by a number of molecules and structures. When the nutter talks of a baby’s hand, I think they must be referring to the apoptotic cell death that removes tissue from between the digits — without apoptosis, we’d all have webbed hands and toes.

I know nothing about engineering, and I know that I know nothing about engineering, so I don’t presume to tell engineers their business. The USian problem seems to be that they do not even know how little they know, and they have been so coddled that they believe that mere opinion is a valid substitute for knowledge. The educational system is geared to protect students from any *awareness* of how very little they know.

The purpose of this lowering of the bar is promotion of self-esteem. The problem is that those without a decent education will eventually run up against the fact that they know very little, and this is harmful to self-esteem. At this point, individual can either decide to remedy the problem, or, more often, they decide to denigrate all knowledge and all experts.

Don’t worry, it is not you who is mad, TW!