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.
December 30, 2006
Category: Mathematics
Next week I'll be travelling to New Orleans to participate in the big Joint Mathematics Meetings. The “Joint” refers to the fact that it is cosponsored by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (no Life of...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 12:57 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 29, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
Update: December 30, 2006: Somehow it slipped past me that P.Z. Myers had already shredded the Hitchens piece. Sorry about that. By all means have a look at his eloquent demolition as well. Here's Peter Hitchens weighing in on the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:59 PM • 37 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Philosophy
Raymond Smullyan is name that is probably familiar to a lot of readers of this blog. In addition to being a mathematician and philosopher, he is known for being a master of using brainteasers and other puzzles to illuminate sometimes...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:25 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
One of my projects for the winter break has been to read some of the Iraq War books that keep showing up in the local Barnes and Noble. First up: Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq by Thomas Ricks,...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 8:49 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 28, 2006
Category: Mathematics
The response to Tuesday's post, currently at 97 comments, has been very interesting. Since some of the commenters appear to be growing restless, I will put off until tomorrow my epic Iraq war post (based on my having recently waded...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 11:04 PM • 60 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
And speaking of internal Seed business, take a moment to go say hi to the newest member of the great SB combine: Developing Intelligence. As Bruce Willis once said, “Welcome to the party, pal!”...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 8:04 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Miscellaneous
Reminiscent of Mrs. McCave, who had twenty-three sons and named them all Dave, it seems that The Seed Mothership is having trouble making distinctions among her progeny. This is EvolutionBlog, folks. evolgen offers a different flavor of delectable bloggy goodness....
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:51 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 27, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
The New Republic's Jonathan Chait doesn't like Delaware: Last night I drove home from northern New Jersey to Washington and it went smoothly enough except that, as customarily happens on such journeys, we hit a wall of traffic halfway through....
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 8:14 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Have a look at at this interesting article, from The New Yorker, about the boom in Bible publishing: The familiar observation that the Bible is the best-selling book of all time obscures a more startling fact: the Bible is the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:13 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Commenter Sastra, replying to my previous post on this subject, offers what I thnk is a perfect characterization of much of the response to Dawkins' book: From what I can tell, most of the sophisticated critics of Dawkins feel that...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:31 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
Yesterday I linked to P.Z. Myers discussion of a common anti-Dawkins meme. Specifically, that Dawkins' arguments in The God Delusion are hopelessly superficial, and that his failure to ponder seriously various works of academic theology render his book incomplete at...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 4:27 PM • 214 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 26, 2006
Category: Mathematics
Speaking of the Monty Hall problem, I recently came across this terrific essay (PDF format), by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto. Rosenthal discusses several variants of the Monty Hall problem, and...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 3:23 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science
Actually, many of the questions Marilyn vos Savant got asked in her column are positively ingenious. They also provide a lot of food for thought. Here are a few that caught my eye. As always, feel free to hash them...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 3:03 PM • 29 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Mathematics
Many of you are familiar with the old Monty Hall problem. You might also be aware that it rose to prominence as a result of a column in Parade magazine by Marilyn vos Savant. After Savant's initial discussion of the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:59 PM • 100 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
In my post about H. Allen Orr's review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, I commented that Orr begins with a standard anti-Dawkins argument: that he doesn't give adequate consideration to all of the internecine philosophical and theological disputes that surround...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 1:37 PM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 22, 2006
Category: Religion
Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 10:04 PM • 99 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 19, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
Winter break is the time to complete all of those annoying chores you've been putting off during the term. For example, yesterday my car passed its inspection. Woo hoo! And today, Isaac and Emily passed their inspection. By which I...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:56 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
John Lynch has an excellent summary of what a rotten year it's been for ID: January Dembski: Just as a tree that has been “rimmed” (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:26 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
In other news, the Cobb County sticker kerfuffle has now been settled. You might recall that this was the case where a small Georgia school district decided to paste warning labels inside their high school biology textbooks. The labels asserted...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:50 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
In the course of his lengthy discussion of the report on the Sternberg affair, mentioned in the previous post, Ed Brayton links to this discussion of the ID paper that started all the controversy in the first place. The discussion...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:44 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Ed Brayton has the must-read post of the day. Remember Richard Sternberg? He's the former editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A while back he published a pro-ID paper in the journal. Sternberg was a...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:58 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 18, 2006
Category: Administrative
A while back we Science Bloggers were asked to provide personal photographs to Seed CentCom. This is what they did with them. I'm the strikingly handsome fellow directly behind Shelley's owl. Go have a look!...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Religion
The New York Times has has this remarkable article about the high school teacher in New Jersey who was using his class as a mission field: Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:35 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 15, 2006
Category: Religion
Writing for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby offers a typically muddled argument against atheism. The column's title: “Atheism's Bleak Alternative”. Most of the column describes various atrocities perpetrated by secularists against religious people, particularly in England. But it's the last...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:47 PM • 31 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 14, 2006
Category: Miscellaneous
From the BBC: The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner. The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million....
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:20 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging. Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:08 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
There was a remarkable exchange on the MSNBC show Hardball yesterday, between host Chris Matthews, and commentators Roger Simon and Chris Cillizza:...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:39 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 13, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
Time for another installment of, “How bad have things gotten for the ID folks?” It is now almost a year since the big ruling in the Dover case. As I'm sure you recall, that's the one where the ID folks...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:50 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
New Scientist has this article about the latest attempt by ID proponents to pretend they care about science: This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:42 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 12, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
Larry Moran has an excellent review of Francis Collins' silly book The Language of God. You don't really appreciate Ken Miller until you have contemplated the far daffier arguments made by Collins. Moran writes: The second persuasive argument is the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 8:40 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Be sure to have a look at Sahotra Sarkar's essay at The American Prospect. He describes the recent shift of emphasis on the ID side away from biology and towards physics instead. Sarkar writes: Initially largely unnoticed by their critics,...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:53 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 11, 2006
Category: Administrative
The all encompassing Science Blogs Combine has gobbled up two more members. Go say hello to Orli over at Neruontic and to the group over at Integrity of Science. As if I didn't have enough to read!...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:29 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Chess
Chess Life is reporting that David Bronstein has died of unknown cuases at the age of 82. Bronstein resides on a short list of players, along with Paul Keres and Viktor Korchnoi, who can vie for the title of Greatest...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:13 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
From The New York Times: Holocaust deniers and skeptics from around the world gathered at a government-sponsored conference here today to discuss their theories about whether six million Jews were indeed killed by the Nazis during World War II and...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:28 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Administrative
According to the Site Meter, I've received over 13,000 hits today. I assume that means some large fish in the blog pond has linked to me. So, thanks for the link! Anyone want to fess up?...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:13 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 8, 2006
Category: Mathematics
If you made it through that last post and thought about it for a while, you might think that I pulled a fast one. At a few places I commented that if x is any element of an arbitrary ring,...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:29 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Mathematics
Some of the commenters to yesterday's post raised some interesting questions on the subject of dividing by zero. So interesting, in fact, that I felt the subject deserved another post. My SciBling, revere, of Effect Measure: writes the following:...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:10 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 7, 2006
Category: Mathematics
As mentioned in the previous post, the BBC article contains video of Dr. Anderson explaining how his work allows us to evaluate the expression 00. I'll save you the trouble of having to watch it. Here it is: We define...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:55 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Mathematics
Mark Chu-Carroll beat me to this BBC story about a computer science professor in England claiming to have resolved a twelve-hundred year old problem. The story begins: Dr James Anderson, from the University of Reading's computer science department, says his...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 7:18 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 6, 2006
Category: Anti-Creationism
Remember the ISCID? That's the International Society for Complexity, Information and Design. From their website: he International Society for Complexity, Information, and Design (ISCID) is a cross-disciplinary professional society that investigates complex systems apart from external programmatic constraints like materialism,...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:31 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 5, 2006
Category: Chess
Vladimir Kramnik lost the sixth game of his match against the computer prgoram Deep Fritz today. He thereby lost the match by a score of 4-2. The finla game saw the super sharp Najdorf Variation of the Sicilian Defense. This...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:18 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
Here's Bill O'Reilly pretending to be outraged by Jim Webb's lack of respect for the presidency (see yesterday's post for the details): Now that was rude on Webb's part. The president, knowing Webb's anti-war sentiments, went out of his way...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 6:09 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Politics
I'm a big government kind of guy, but this is insane: The New York City Board of Health voted today to ban artificial trans fats in the city's eateries, establishing more rigorous limits than any other American city on an...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 5:52 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 4, 2006
Category: Politics
I was more than a little surprised when Jim Webb defeated incumbent George Allen in the recent Virginia Senate election. I voted for him happily, but didn't rate his chances very high. My confidence in him has only soared in...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 10:17 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anti-Creationism
Larry Moran has replied to my previous post criticizing his treatment of Ken Miller's views on science and religion. I'll let him have the last word, except for the quick comment that I still think he's misinterpreting Miller's intent. Certainly...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 9:41 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 1, 2006
Category: Politics
Timothy Noah of Slate has noted the same phenomenon I commented upon in yesterday's post. Namely, that many former war supporters now want to blame the Iraqis for the chaos in their country. Here's Noah nailing Charles Krauthammer: In the...
Posted by Jason Rosenhouse at 3:58 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
