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Josh at work Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is formerly a doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas, in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not battling creationists or modeling species ranges, he writes about developments in progressive politics and the sciences.

The opinions expressed here are his own, do not reflect the official position of the NCSE. Indeed, older posts may no longer reflect his own official position.

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    September 29, 2009

    Again with literary truth

    Category: Culture Wars

    I've gotten distracted recently from a couple of topics I desperately want to return to. A look at Jason Rosenhouse's sensitive and personal essay on "Ways of Knowing" will have to wait a bit longer, because I finally got ahold of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a copy I've had since high school and which I haven't read since then. I'll be spending some time, then, on notions of truth in literary contexts. I do this not to claim that religious truth claims are identical to literary truth claims, but because I think we can sort out some ideas in the less...

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    September 28, 2009

    Shorter Denyse O'Leary

    Category: Creationism

    Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinists resort to whining when they are not popular (Also, this just in, water runs downhill): In responding to a news item from two weeks ago, I'll assume Creation still has gotten a distributor. Therefore it's crummy and boring and will never get a distributor, as it did last week. With Bonus Shorter D'oh! Leary: Origin of life theory: Complexity theorist Kauffman moving on: I don't know who Stuart Kauffman is or what he does, but he sure isn't a genius. Neither is Bill Dembski, who at least has the courtesy not to self-aggrandize, for instance...

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    Crack and polling

    Category: Culture Wars

    Last Friday I made some remarks about polling and evolution and atheism that got some knickers in twists. To summarize: Kevin Padian was asked to comment on a stupid stunt by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, who are passing out copies of the Origin of Species along with a foreword that alleges Darwin caused the Holocaust. Padian was appropriately dismissive, and noted that "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists. Everyone else doesn’t really have a problem. [A majority] of Americans believe that a belief in god...

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    September 26, 2009

    There really is a war on science

    Category: Policy and Politics

    FDA Admits Politics Trumped Science on Knee Device: For the first time, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has publicly admitted that politics has trumped science. The agency acknowledged yesterday that it approved a device to help with knee-replacement surgeries—a device the agency’s own scientists said often failed—only after it received pressure from a cohort of Democratic congressmen from New Jersey, where the device’s manufacturer is located. The $3000 device was known as the Menaflex, a “collagen scaffold” that supported a damaged meniscus in the knee. It failed its initial reviews but received approval in December of last year anyway,...

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    September 25, 2009

    On cracks

    Category: Culture Wars

    Jerry Coyne, 9/21/2009: Kudos to the National Center for Science Education for putting up these videos [of Texas science standards hearings], and for their tenacious defense of evolution in Texas.Thank you, Jerry. Since I shot those videos, and was present in Texas as part of that defense, I thought I was off Coyne's shitlist, and it certainly seemed like NCSE was off it as well. But three days later he objects to a line I wrote about "atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion": Quote of the week, from the personal website of the Public...

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    September 24, 2009

    Attention nerds

    Category: Policy and Politics

    I've finally gotten around to reading through hundreds of comments on my posts about truth claims and ways of knowing and whatnot, and posted replies to as many commenters as I could manage (hopefully touching on themes raised by some commenters I didn't respond to by name). I'll be monitoring those threads more closely now, and hope to have a few new posts up on related topics tomorrow. Sorry for the delay, but I've been working and catching up on stuff from my laptop-less stretch. Unread blog posts: 9997. Whee!...

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    On baggage fees

    Category: Planet Earth

    Nicholas Beaudrot defends the (second) bag fee against Atrios's opposition to any fees, and against Matt Yglesias's defense of all fees for checked luggage. Atrios rightly notes that the fees are part and parcel of the generally crappy air travel experience, Matt argues that the fees discourage excessive packing, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Nick replies that Matt's economic analysis fails to consider shifts from checked luggage to carry-on: bag fees on the first bag encourage two behaviors:Travelers pack the largest bag they think they can carry on to the plane. This results in higher boarding and de-planing...

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    September 23, 2009

    Brief thoughts on analogies

    Apologies for the unusually crappy blogging this week. With the arrival of a replacement from my lost/stolen laptop, I should catch up on the 12,000 unread items in NetNewsWire soon, and return to normal crappy blogging. In any event, Chad Orzel replies to last week's ruckus over "ways of knowing" by observing that "Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing": No matter what the analogy is, any attempt to use analogy, simile, metaphor, or any other lofty rhetorical technique in a debate being conducted on the Internet is doomed to end badly. No matter how...

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    September 18, 2009

    A brief note on analogies

    Category: Policy and Politics

    Several commenters on earlier posts have suggested that I am claiming that religious truth claims are the same as literary truth claims. I understand how that misunderstanding could be reached, but it is a misunderstanding. I think that religious truth claims would include aspects of literary truth claims (the Bible surely uses metaphor and other literary techniques), but for religious believers, it clearly encompasses much more. As a non-theist, I don't fully grasp the level of meaning that theists experience in religion, and my analogy to literary truth claims is meant to set a lower limit, not a maximum, on...

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    Defining terms

    As promised, I've put a few tentative definitions below the fold, in hopes of clarifying questions in comment threads here and elsewhere. These definitions represent a starting point, not gospel. I'm not a philosopher, I haven't spent much time reading epistemology, and I may mangle things badly. If so, polite critique will lead to productive revision, and hopefully progress toward broader agreement....

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