Commentary on the Endless Dispute Between Evolution and Creationism
Jason Rosenhouse received his PhD in mathematics from Dartmouth College in 2000. He subsequently spent three years as a post-doc at Kansas State University. Observing the machinations of the Kansas Board of Education led to his unhealthy obsession with issues related to evolution and creationism. Currently he is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at James Madison University, in Harrisonburg, VA.
September 29, 2006
Category: Chess
That's the headline in The New York Times. I'm not kidding. Game five of the big reunification match for the World Chess Championship was supposed to be today. This was the match that was going to restore harmony to the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:41 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 28, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
Michael Shermer answers yes in his latest column for Scientific American. He conveniently organizes his arguments in a series of bullet points, and we will consider that momentarily. Shermer gave me my big break in the evolution biz by publishing...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:57 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Have a look at this article from the current New Yorker. It focuses on the recent anti-string theory books from Lee Smolin and Peter Woit. The article provides a decent summary of Smolin's and Woit's views, but it is seriously...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:38 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 27, 2006
Category: Chess
The big chess match continues apace. Topalov pressed hard with the white pieces in game four. He developed some advantage but was never really close to winning. Kramnik's tough-as-nails defense did not permit any breakthroughs, and Topalov had to settle...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:13 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Over at the utlra-right-wing website World Net Daily, Jonathan Wells has posted a characteristically ignorant and dishonest essay entitled “Why Darwinism is Doomed.” Yawn. P. Z. Myers takes care of business with this smackdown. Worth reading both for the joy...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:06 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 26, 2006
Category: Chess
Veselin Topalov finally managed to get on the board in the third game of his match with Vladimir Kramnik. On the black side of another Catalan Topalov made a draw in 38 moves. This was no grandmaster draw, however. Topalov...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 4:12 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 25, 2006
Category: Chess
Two games down in the big World Chess Championship and two wins for Kramnik. But that doesn't tell the whole story. Game One saw the quiet Catalan Defense from Kramnik, an ultra-solid opening fitting Kramnik's style. He obtained a small...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 22, 2006
Category: Chess
Omigod, omigod, omigod! Ask me how excited I am. Go ahead, ask me. Answer: Very excited. Why? Because the match for the World Chess Championship begins tomorrow, as you would know if our miserable press corps would get around to...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:19 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 21, 2006
Category: Religion
In Tuesday's post I commented that Christopher Hitchens is always reliable when writing about religion. As if to prove my point, the new issue of Free Inquiry turned up in my mailbox that night. It features an essay by Hitchens...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 9:45 PM • 59 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 20, 2006
Category: Evolution
The Washington Post reports the latest fossil hominid discovered in Africa: Fossil hunters have unearthed the fossil skeleton of a baby who died 3.3 million years ago, marking the first time scientists have discovered the nearly complete remains of a...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:34 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 19, 2006
Category: Evolution
Lee Alan Dugatkin's new book The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness was sitting on my doorstep a few days ago (too big to fit in the mailbox). Dugatkin is a biologist at the University of...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 2:53 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
When Christopher Hitchens writes about religion, he is always reliable. Over at Slate he offers his thoughts on the Pope's recent dust-up with the Muslim community: Attempting to revive his moribund church on a visit to Germany, where the Roman...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 12:44 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 18, 2006
Category: Politics
According to this brief from The Washington Post, Al Gore will be publishing a book next year entitled The Assault on Reason: That is when Gore is scheduled to publish his next book. With no fanfare, he signed a few...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:43 PM • 30 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 15, 2006
Category: Science
In an incomprehensible display of poor editorial judgment, Slate recently published this unusually bad article on the merits of string theory, by Gregg Easterbrook. It's a familiar name to connoisseurs of bad science writing. Easterbrook has previously come out in...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:55 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 14, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
Have to blog and run today. I get to spend three hours this afternoon trying to persuade skeptical calculus students that “related rate” problems aren't so bad. A forlorn quest, I know. Anyway, how about I just point you towards...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:50 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 13, 2006
Category: Science
One of the nice things about being a big shot science blogger is that publishers frequently send you free books to review. In fact, lately they've been arriving a lot faster than I can read them. One book that turned...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:18 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 12, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
It all started when Pat Hayes, of Red State Rabble, posted this blog entry describing a recent talk given by Ken Miller at the University of Kansas. Miller, you will recall, is the author of Finding Darwin's God. The first...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:13 PM • 53 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 11, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
From the Connelsville Daily Courier, a Pennsylvania newspaper, comes this blunt assessment of the merits of evolution. The essay is by guest columnist Rosemary Fike: The United States of America no longer can be called a Christian nation. In fact,...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:01 AM • 42 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 8, 2006
Category: Religion
Another point made in the Newsweek article mentioned in the previous post is that Harris et al are as hard on religious moderates as they are on the fundamentalists: It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:07 PM • 45 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Via Afarensis, I came across this Newsweek article about atheism. It focuses mainly on Sam Harris, RIchard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Overall I think it's a pretty good article. Here are a few highlights: This was not a message most...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 12:00 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 7, 2006
Category: Religion
It seems the big evolution confab in Rome has ended. The verdict? No change: A participant at the Pope's closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church's teaching...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:53 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Jerry Coyne has a review of the new book The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, by David Mindell, in the current issue of Nature. The ID folks are crowing over this remark: To some extent these excesses are not...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:37 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 6, 2006
Category: Mathematics
The August 28 issue of The New Yorker features this magisterial article about the Poincare conjecture. The focus of the article is on the priority dispute between Grigory Perelman on the one hand, and a team of Chinese mathematicians led...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:00 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers these worthy thoughts on the subject of creationist arguments based on probability theory: But there's another contributing factor to this opposition to evolution that I'd like to discuss here. It is the concerted attempt by...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 10:56 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 5, 2006
Category: Evolution
In this entry from last week I mentioned Joan Roughgarden's recent book Evolution and Christian Faith, and praised her firm dismissal of ID. Sadly, there are many other parts of her brief book where I believe she has missed the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 2:46 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 4, 2006
Category: Evolution
The New York Times reports on the big evolution meeting in Rome: They meet every year, the eminent German professor and his old doctoral students, for a weekend of high-minded talk on a chosen topic. For years it was nothing...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:01 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
I was watching Steve Irwin before it was cool. I discovered him by accident, channel surfing. Commercial, commercial, Law & Order, infomercial, holy crap is that guy picking up snakes by the tail?! As I recall, it was a show...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 10:57 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
