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Joshua Rosenau spends his days defending the teaching of evolution at the National Center for Science Education. He is also a graduate student at the University of Kansas, completing a doctorate in the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology. When not modeling species distributions or battling creationists, 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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Culture Wars:
Category: Culture Wars
Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought: You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point....
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 9:09 PM • 90 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Don McLeroy, erstwhile head of the Texas Board of Education, doesn't like the National Academy of Sciences. At least not on even-numbered days. During the science standards fight, he praised the NAS definition of science. Then again, he endorsed a crazy, self-published pamphlet declaring that the NAS is "sowing atheism." And of course, he dismissed the good advice of the NAS and other science groups when they asked him not to undermine evolution education, telling the Board "Someone has to stand up to these experts." And now McLeroy has decided to attack the NAS in social studies standards. In a...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:56 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
I still don't know if I'm using that word right, but Science and Religion Today asked me a question about the award Chad wants to give me. They wonder "Do moderates have a responsibility to be more vocal in science and religion discussions?" It's an admittedly vague question, and they left off my epigram, from Petronius: "Moderation in all things, even moderation." Ah well. In brief, I said yes. I used "religious moderates" in what I think is an idiosyncratic way, taking it as the religious subset of moderates on a particular question much under discussion lately, not members of...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 2:07 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This has inexplicably been marked for deletion, but the author deserves a pat on the back. Genesis, the opening to the Conservative Bible: 1 In the beginning, God did a cost/benefit analysis and decided that social collectivism was the only sustainable economic paradigm and that the only people that actually go to hell are sinister, self-absorbed, greedy myopic fascists such as those that created Conservapedia. "The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal,...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 4:31 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Conservapedia is the gift that keeps giving. Recall that Conservapedia formed to correct the nefarious liberal bias of the collectively edited Wikipedia. That is, they kept losing edit wars because they could support their claims, and since they couldn't conform reality to their beliefs, they'd just write an encyclopedia enshrining them. Much fun. But now there's a bigger threat to their goal of completely isolating conservatives from any differing views: The Bible (h/t): As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2] Framework against Liberal Bias: providing a strong framework that...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:06 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Jerry Coyne is right: Nobody who has followed Dawkins’s work and writing could possibly think he’s an accommodationist Or rather, he's probably right. I've never been clear what "accommodationist" means, it seems to adapt itself in perfect Calvinball style to suit whatever enemy someone might have. Thus, when Eugenie Scott answers the question "Are science and religion compatible?": I don't have to address that as a philosophical question, I can address that as an empirical question. It's obvious that it is. Because there are many people who are scientists who are also people of faith. There are many theologians whose...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 11:46 AM • 115 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Creationism
Newsweek interviews Richard Dawkins: Are those incompatible positions: to believe in God and to believe in evolution? No, I don't think they're incompatible if only because there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God--to name only Francis Collins [the geneticist and Christian believer recently chosen to head the National Institutes of Health] as an outstanding example. So it clearly is possible to be both. This book more or less begins by accepting that there is that compatibility. The God Delusion did make a case against that compatibility in my own mind. I wonder whether you might be...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 3:57 AM • 93 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture Wars
Disco. clubber Bruce Chapman, a former census director who ought to have learned something about demography and perhaps accounting along the way, writes that the Public Doesn't Know the Truth About Social Security: …how many Americans (may we see a poll?) understand that …we really are at point (and past it for the next two years) when spending on Social Security finally exceeds income from Social Security taxes? Can a tax hike and/or benefits reductions be long away? Meanwhile, add this new item to the list of runaway Federal deficit spending.Yes we can see a poll! This, from 2005, seems...
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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 1:49 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 5:53 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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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Posted by Josh Rosenau at 7:45 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
