Greg Laden's Blog

Wilberforce vs. Darwin; A disgusting Display; Pew Report on Religion; Science in the schools.

Laelaps has a post on Soapy Sam Wilberforce vs. Darwin.

On June 30, 1860, T.H. ("Darwin's Bulldog") Huxley and Samuel ("Soapy Sam") Wilberforce met at Oxford to debate the concepts put forward in Charles Darwin's recently published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, an encounter that is often celebrated even though the details of the event are lost to history. The famous debate was not the first time that Wilberforce publicly aired his criticisms of Darwin, though, as Wilberforce penned a detailed review of Darwin's famous book that raised a number of objections to evolution still heard from the creationist camp today.

And Tangled up in Blue Guy takes on the Discovery Institute.

Uncommon Descent is a pool of wankers in the corner, I don't even know why people pay attention to it. It must be the entertainment value. The producers of the movie Expelled have moved the date of release to the weekend of April 18th. Not coincidentally, April 19 is the anniversary of Darwin's death. I don't know if they intended any significance to their release date, and I will give the producers the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, but that's just the way I roll.

I'll certainly blog about this later, but for now go check out Pharyngula on the latest Pew Report on Religion.

It's mostly good news. We've got a fragmented, shrinking Protestant population, Catholics are abandoning ship in droves and what's keeping it afloat is Catholic immigration from the south, and the "unaffiliateds" are growing fast, especially among young adults....

Another item I'll certainly blog on soon is a recent paper in the Ecological Society of Ameria on teaching science in US schools. PZ has it covered.

the majority of our college-bound high school students are at least getting exposed to evolution to some degree -- but they're also getting taught creationism to an unfortunate degree.