June 29, 2010
Category: Creationism
PZ is unamused. I criticized his criticism of prayer vigils in the Gulf, and he responds: It's strange how the people who most advocate sympathy and rapprochement with religion are blind to what religious people really think. Here's another case where Josh Rosenau complains that I misunderstand what the faithful were trying to do with their prayers for the Gulf…and then goes on to do exactly as I said the apologists should stop doing. He ignores the religious part of these prayer events. He says, as if it is refuting anything I say, that prayer reduces stress, has positive physiological...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:26 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Via ClimateProgress (who got it from Barefoot and Progressive), we get Kentucky's Republican nominee for the US Senate, Rand Paul, at an event for local homeschoolers. At the top of the Q&A, he's asked when he became a Christian and how old the earth his. Paul has no trouble giving a detailed account of where his Christianity came from, giving a careful timeline of not just the origins of his Christian faith, but his anti-abortion position. When it gets time to answer the second part of the question he gets tongue-tied, answering: I’m gonna have to pass on the...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:01 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 28, 2010
Category: Policy and Politics
Robert Byrd, the longest serving legislator in US history, died last night in a Washington hospital. He overcame the racial politics of his upbringing, repudiating his youthful flirtations with the Klan and championing a vision of the Constitution that secured rights to all Americans. He was a voice against needless war and against abusing the war on terrorism as an excuse to strip citizens of our Constitutional rights. He will be missed for those reasons, and among the many other reasons, for his strident speeches, like this from September 13, 2006: September 11 has come and gone, and as we...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:19 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 26, 2010
Category: Culture Wars
PZ Myers is disappointed. There's a massive oil gusher in the Gulf of Mexico, BP is incapable of stopping it, as is the federal government, and the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida (and soon on to Georgia and the Carolinas) are being coated in a chocolatey rainbow of crude oil. This is bad, and there's nothing that people who live in these areas can do about it, so there've been occasional calls for folks there to get together and pray. Now it's indisputable that PZ is unhappy with all of that, but he seems somewhat more vocal in his...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:27 AM • 55 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 24, 2010
Category: Culture Wars
Martin Cothran, scourge of all deviation, whether from his ideal of "classical education," from his creationist beliefs, from his homophobia, from his misogyny, from his aversion to women who assert their own sexuality, or from his conservative ideals, wants us all to know: My mother still keeps peacocks on her form in Kansas.Thanks for sharing....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 9:48 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 22, 2010
Category: Policy and Politics
I don't care that Gen. McChrystal and his aides got drunk and talked smack. I care that they were dumb enough to do so on the record with a reporter, and I care that McChrystal is behind schedule on in implementing his plan to win in Afghanistan. Neither speaks to his competence, or his staff's competence. It's disappointing that it's easier to fire someone for doing something boneheaded but inconsequential than to screw up professionally. Look, McChrystal and Vice President Biden were on opposite ends of an internal administration debate about Afghanistan last year. McChrystal wanted lotsa troops and to...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 10:55 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2010
Category: Chatter
Contrary to the expectations of my correspondent Miss.Alberta.Smith, invitations to international symposia generally do not have one exclamation point – let alone 15 – in the Subject line....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:51 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Remember when Disco. spinner Casey Luskin rolled out this silly attempt at refuting critics of irreducible complexity?: Car engines use various kinds of bolts, and a bolt could be seen as a small “sub-part” or “sub-system” of a car engine. Under [Ken] Miller's logic, if a vital bolt in my car's engine might also to perform some other function—perhaps as a lugnut--then it follows that my car's whole engine system is not irreducibly complex. Such an argument is obviously fallacious.He wrote that in April of 2006. Little did I know at the time that the Department of Homeland Security had...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 8:40 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Casey Luskin, Disco. 'Tute spinner, has recently relaunched a fight over whether and how textbooks use embryological drawings from Ernst Haeckel's 19th century popular works. In his two posts (excerpting from a jumbled essay he wrote for a law review), he repeatedly claims that those drawings are fraudulent. To wit: textbooks in use today, in arguing for evolution, still use Haeckel’s fraudulent embryo drawingsThat Haeckel’s drawings were fraudulent and have been used in textbooks is essentially beyond disputeStephen Jay Gould recognized that Haeckel’s drawings … fraudulently obscured the differences between the early stages of vertebrate embryosHaeckel’s fraud has had a...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 6:10 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 20, 2010
Category: Philosophy of Science
John Fleck, a superstar science journalist whose work on water in the southwest is consistently brilliant, has some sage thoughts on the Problem With Science Journalism: In the newspaper this week, I took a whack at what I think is one of the fundamental public misunderstandings about the nature of science. I like to call it “the textbook problem”, but one might also characterize it as “the science journalism problem.” Lay exposure to science comes in two fundamental ways. The first is academic learning, in which non-scientists are exposed to textbook explanation of things scientists have already figured out, knowledge...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at 
