Science Jokes

Glossary I

A-F

Abiogenesis: The hypothetical origin of life from non-living matter. Or, as we prefer, "the magical process where biological complexity spontaneously appears, conveniently sidestepping everything we know about information theory."

Adaptation: The process by which organisms adjust to their environment. In our lexicon, "the preferred explanation for intricate biological features since the word 'design' has been exiled from scientific vocabulary."

Big Bang: The cosmological theory about the universe's origin. Also known as "that perfectly calibrated explosion that produced exquisitely fine-tuned physical constants while leaving the pesky 'where did it come from?' question unanswered."

Catastrophism: The theory that Earth was shaped by sudden catastrophic events. Or "the geological theory that makes uniformitarians uncomfortable at conferences and quietly accumulates support with each new discovery."

Entropy: A measure of a system's disorder. In our view, "the fundamental principle of physics that apparently took a sabbatical during life's formation, allowing complexity to increase without intelligent direction."

Fine-tuning: The concept that universal constants appear precisely calibrated to permit life. In our terms, "those inconvenient cosmological parameters so astronomically improbable they send naturalists diving for the multiverse hypothesis faster than you can say 'design implication.'"

Geological Layer: A rock stratum representing a time period. Or "those pages in Earth's history book that frequently appear out of order, missing, or filled with surprises that challenge conventional dating methods."

Genetic Code: The system translating DNA information into proteins. Or "the sophisticated biological programming language that supposedly wrote itself without a programmer – a miracle no software engineer has ever witnessed."