#29720: Jeff Fecke — 06/24  at  06:50 PM
Now, I'm not the biology mind that...well, most of the commenters here are. But isn't she basically saying that the entire biosphere is the work of Satan? I don't think our world would hang together very long without insects.

And how do you get lobsters in "home" without spiders?

Not to mention butterflies! No insects means no butterflies. And I'll be damned if I go to a Heaven with no butterflies.

#29721: — 06/24  at  07:01 PM
I wonder if there are any problems in Home with the "living things" that are symbiotes with arthropods. Flowering plants, for starters.

Apparently, mollusks and echinoderms are in, though. They must pray to the invertebrate Jesus, or something.

#29722: PZ Myers — 06/24  at  07:06 PM
She's an idiot who can't tell the difference between an insect and an arachnid, so who knows what she thinks is missing? She probably just lumps slugs and bugs and other weird critters into Phylum Yucky.

#29724: Virge — 06/24  at  07:12 PM
Scene: Heaven

Cockroach 1: Hey! Liek dude! Wot's dat big-assed wall for?
Cockroach 2: All the vert-ee-brates is on th'other side, man. They think they're the only ones here!

#29725: — 06/24  at  07:14 PM
A kind description of Miss Browne is, she is a fabulist.

#29727: Radagast — 06/24  at  07:26 PM
So I guess all the parasitic flatworms make it in, eh? I've always imagined heaven as teeming with blood flukes and tapeworms.

#29728: coturnix — 06/24  at  07:32 PM
How is honey going to flow there without any bees?

#29731: Ken Cope — 06/24  at  08:43 PM
No gods in Sylvia Browne's heaven either. They've all been reincarnated as insects; where else are you going to keep all those dead gods?

Don’t step on an ant
In the middle of a pant
He may want to but he can’t the way I do, with you

(segue)

We're bringing the war back home
Where it ought to have been before!
We'll kill all the bees
And spiders and flies
And we wont play in iceboxes lying on their sides
We'll wash our hands after wee-wee.
And if we're girl, before!
And we'll march, march, march, etcetera!
'Til we never do march no more!
(All together, now, boys!)
We're bringing the war back home
Where it ought to have been before!

#29732: — 06/24  at  08:47 PM
If sylvia brown is such a fraud, then how can she solve all those crimes? She is a very special lady and has helped over 100 million people.

#29734: John M. Price — 06/24  at  09:54 PM
Last I looked, no psychic at all has ever been validated as actually providing key evidence in any crime.

#29736: — 06/24  at  10:18 PM

She is a very special lady and has helped over 100 million people.

100 million people? Camon. She's a fraud, plain and simple. She's nuts. Crazy. Disolusioned. I'm still not sure if she actually believes the stuff she says, or if she says it to sell.

I used to like Maury until they brought her on, Maurys educational rating just nose dived.

#29743: — 06/25  at  12:06 AM
"She probably just lumps slugs and bugs and other weird critters into Phylum Yucky."

You know, this denunciation would carry a lot more weight with me if you hadn't just disparaged the unspeakably awesome slow loris. What's with the poison sebum hang-up?

(And also: if Heaven doesn't have fireflies, I'm glad I'm not going there.)

#29744: Joseph ODonnell — 06/25  at  12:07 AM
My opposition to creationism actually comes from a similar statement made to me by a YEC in my first year of university:

"Insects are not alive and do not have a soul, so they were not important to take on the arc".

That's when I realised what a load of bunk it all was (as well as reading Darwins Black Box, well after it had been refuted). Insects are the most important, beautiful and interesting part of all life on earth. To say that God (who seemed to have an unusual love of beetles) would not have insects in heaven is a bit absurd to me.

He's clearly a fan of the invertebrates (seeing as there are so many of them).

#29745: — 06/25  at  02:32 AM
So no lucky ladybirds (for the germans) in that heaven then. How sad for those of my unbaptised larvae who never even made it into shiny adulthood (eg through having been eaten by a sibling! - though perhaps they get to play the martyr card for admission).

The slugs and worms may not have got in either. It's just that she failed to think about them enough even to notice they weren't there (in her imaginary world).

#29747: — 06/25  at  02:48 AM
But what do the anteaters eat in heaven?

And I think at the very least, Charlotte the spider and Marcus the ant should be in heaven.

#29748: — 06/25  at  03:06 AM
The slugs and worms may not have got in either. It's just that she failed to think about them enough even to notice they weren't there (in her imaginary world).

No, not really. She's just trying to act like she knows some interesting and unusual facts about the supernatural world. She's a big chain-smoking fake.

#29749: — 06/25  at  03:06 AM

If sylvia brown is such a fraud, then how can she solve all those crimes?

Please state one crime that Brown has helped solve - and please refer us to an official crediting her with solving it, not just her own site.

#29750: — 06/25  at  03:08 AM

animals that have existed throughout the history of the world are there as well, such as dinosaurs, unicorns, griffins, and other species...

I love the fact that there are fictional animals, but no "insects" (whatever that means to that moron).

#29752: — 06/25  at  03:22 AM
Where did Linnaeus first group arachnids in his taxonomy? If I remember correctly he only had two invertebrate classes, insecta and vermes.

#29754: — 06/25  at  03:50 AM
P.T. Barnum had us pegged. I suppose people who believe people like her, and all religions (including the political ones) and give them money and power are truly proof of "inteligent" design. What the hell else could explain the survival of such inconsequent, illogical ignorance?

#29757: — 06/25  at  04:15 AM
She denies that she ever had ants in her pants, or butterflies in her stomach?

It really isn't credible
that anyone who's edible
could be quite so oblivious
to creatures so ubiquitous.

She's merely lying.

#29758: — 06/25  at  05:20 AM

explain the survival of such inconsequent, illogical ignorance

It's the evolution of social behaviour to an extent which exceeds its immediate utility. Individuals who are largely a waste of space are nonetheless protected by the rest of the tribe (via a conceptualised sense of sympathy). On some occasions, other individuals perceived as worthless can have value. Eg aged non-hunters may be repositories of knowledge which hasn't been needed and thus refreshed by the tribe in intervening generations. Babies are expected to have value later. All ages are possible starvation food or canon fodder or gullible marks for creating a faction (and then retaining ignorance is exceptionally valuable if you need an unthinking group of followers for some activity).

#29759: — 06/25  at  07:09 AM
Uh, I think we have to set the threshold of our irony meters lower for the psotas- he's pulling our collective leg. I know him from elseblogger.

Maybe Sylvia Browne is channeling CS Lewis- in the last Narnia book, The Last Battle, the good guys are enjoying some excellent fruit in Heaven, "and there were no wasps". That line sums up for me the vain hope of creationists, that the world may be neatly divided between good and evil.

#29762: — 06/25  at  08:14 AM
Although spiders and other arachnids are not insects sensu stricto ("in the strict sense"), they might be treated as insects sensu lato ("in the broad sense"), on account of their insectlike overall appearance (general arthropod features, living on land, relatively few walking limbs, limbless hind segments).

However, insects s.l. are clearly polyphyletic; insects s.s. are closest to crustaceans, with arachnids being more distant; the similarities of those two groups is due to convergence. Something that is readily apparent when one considers such details as which segment is specialized as what.

According to A palaeontological solution to the arthropod head problem, different arthropods are specialized:

Early-Cambrian arthropod Fortiforceps

#1: Frontal appendage
-- Mouth
#2: Antenniform appendage
#3: Walking limbs 1
#4: Walking limbs 2
#5: Walking limbs 3

Chelicerates (horseshoe crabs, arachnids, etc.)

#1: Labrum
#2: Chelicerae (fangs)
-- Mouth
#3: Pedipalps
#4: Walking limbs 1
#5: Walking limbs 2
#6: Walking limbs 3
#7: Walking limbs 4

Crustaceans (including insects)
#1: Labrum
#2: Antennae 1
#3: Antennae 2 (insects: absent)
-- Mouth
#4: Mandibles
#5: Maxillae 1
#6: Maxillae 2 (insects: labium)
#7: Walking limbs 1
#8: Walking limbs 2
#9: Walking limbs 3

(the labrum, when present, gets moved to the mouth; it is apparently the successor of the frontal "great appendage" that is common among Cambrian arthropods, like Fortiforceps and Anomalocaris).

And notice that spiders walk on limbs that insects use as mouthparts.

#29763: — 06/25  at  08:45 AM
Ms. Brown’s assertions about Heaven lack scientific validation, but what is the basis for your emotional denouncement of her? The scientific response to spiritual questions is agnosticism, not denial. You charge her with lying and child abuse, yet for all you know she could be right in all her claims, since the points in question can be neither proved nor disproved by science. It’s one thing to fight the imposition of religion on secular life (I applaud your work to keep Creationism out of public schools), but is it your position that ANY claims about spiritual matters are inherently irresponsible and reprehensible? Or, if you permit some legitimate role for religion or spiritual beliefs, which particular claims are permitted and which must be censured? And do you really want the government interfering in religious debate to the extent of charging a citizen with criminal abuse for making particular assertions about the nature of Heaven? If you are going to get so abusive when you have no more empirical evidence on your side than she does, you’ve departed the sphere of science and pursuit of knowledge and descended to schoolyard name-calling.