May 31, 2008
From Michael Ruse's review of The God Delusion in Isis:
More seriously, Dawkins is entirely ignorant of the fact that no believer - with the possible exception of some English clerics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - has ever thought that arguments are the best support for belief.…
May 30, 2008
In his book Indiscrete Thoughts, mathematician Gian-Carlo Rota spoofed a certain style of book reviewing:
The bane of expository work is Professor Neanderthal of Redwood Poly. In his time, Professor Neanderthal studied noncommutative ring theory with the great X, and over the years, despite heavy…
May 29, 2008
There are certain milestone moments in the history of any household that, while representing small triumphs, are also tinged with a bit of sadness. Baby's first steps. The first visit from the Tooth Fairy. High school graduation. Each represents a passage from a comfortable and familiar phase…
May 28, 2008
There is something about Richard Dawkins that seems to drive otherwise intelligent people completely out of their minds. Dawkins writes a book called The Selfish Gene, and some scholarly critics actually go after him on the grounds that genes can not be selfish. Then he wrote The God Delusion, a…
May 28, 2008
According to former White House Press Secretary Scott McLellan, the Bush administration has been somewhat less than forthcoming:
Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan writes in a surprisingly scathing memoir to be published next week that President Bush “veered terribly off course,”…
May 27, 2008
This essay by Peter Bebergal is getting some bloggy attention. Chad Orzel liked it. John Wilkins calls it “lovely, lyrical and wistful.” P.Z. is less impressed.
I'm with P.Z. Surprise!
The essay starts off strong with a condemnation of the Creation Museum. Hard to object to that!
Sadly,…
May 27, 2008
Tomorrow is the first anniversary of the big Creation Museum in Kentucky. They grow up so fast, don't they?
To recognize the occasion, the Northern Kentucky Enquirer offers us this article. It's a sadly typical representative of the genre.
All 280 staff members of the museum and founding…
May 23, 2008
It seems I'm not the only one who's spent the last year worrying about whether I needed to update my CV. My SciBling Janet Stemwedel got tenure! In philosophy no less. (You can have a career doing that?)
So congratulations to Janet!
May 22, 2008
Check it out:
Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many…
May 22, 2008
I'm about halfway through Reza Aslan's book No God But God: The Origins, Evolution and Future of Islam, published in 2005. I've read enough to recommend the book whole-heartedly. Aslan is an excellent writer who presents some very dry material with a lot of verve. At times the book is hard to…
May 22, 2008
The big Monty Hall book has finally been sent off to OUP, so it's time to get back to blogging. We begin with lighter fare.
I caught the midnight screening of the new Indiana Jones movie last night. Did it live up to its billing?
No. It was terrible. A true disaster. Cringe-worthy. Hard…
May 16, 2008
Every once in a while Chris Matthews does a good deed. On last night's edition of Hardball he had conservative radio talk show host Kevin James on his show. James was keen to pontificate on the nature of appeasement. Matthews' other guest was Mark Green. What happened next was priceless:…
May 14, 2008
That's the title of a truly excellent article by Stephen Pinker for The New Republic. The subject is the 500+ page report by the President's Council on Biotheics attempting to define what human dignity actually is. I despair of selecting just a few quotes, since the whole article is superb, but I…
May 13, 2008
What a charming President we have:
For the first time, Bush revealed a personal way in which he has tried to acknowledge the sacrifice of soldiers and their families: He has given up golf.
“I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said…
May 13, 2008
Ed Brayton has an interesting post on one of my favorite subjects. It is based on remarks made by two of Ed's commenters. Let's have a look.
Commenter Sastra begins with the following:
I suspect that ID advocates haven't bothered to condemn Stein's statement because they have all intuitively…
May 13, 2008
David Brooks has a fairly goofy column in today's New York Times. Apparently “hard-core materialism” is on its way out:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead,…
May 8, 2008
There's nothing to see here. Let's all move along now...
Oh, and go see Iron Man. Great movie!
May 7, 2008
It's sweet. It's soooo sweet. All the years of hiding, of playing along, of pretending to be one of them, just to get to this point. How many times did I sit there during afternoon tea, throwing darts at the board with Michael Behe's face on it, laughing at their sick little jokes:
How many…
May 6, 2008
Here at EvolutionBlog we're sometimes a bit slow with the routine maintenance. My blogroll over there has long been in need of a massive updating. My brief attempt to come up with a cool banner for the blog foundered on my general lack of motivation for such a project. And I still haven't gotten…
May 1, 2008
I have often commented that it is the arguments of theistic evolutionists, as opposed to those offered by Creationists, that have convinced me that evolution and Christianity can not be reconciled in any reasonable way. A good case in point is Francisco Ayala.
Via Ed Brayton I came across this…
April 26, 2008
When I was in elementary school I was taught that if you have a noun that ends in `s', and you want to make that noun possessive, you do it by placing an apostrophe at the end of the word and that is all. Thus, in referring to the theorem proved by Thomas Bayes, you would write Bayes' theorm. In…
April 26, 2008
A common response to the books by Dawkins, Hitchens and Harris involved castigating them for the shallowness of their understanding of religion. In their incessant focus on fundamentalism and more extreme forms of religious belief, they proved themselves unwilling to consider seriously the nuance…
April 22, 2008
I went to see Expelled yesterday. I am happy to report it was a private screening. Had the theater to myself. Last time that happened was when I saw Snakes on a Plane (a far more scientifically accurate film, by the way).
Granted, it was a Monday night. Indeed, when I go to see movies I nearly…
April 20, 2008
Well, I finished the first draft of the big Monty Hall book this past week. Still need to make some diagrams, and there's probably a fair amount of rewriting in my future, but the “words from nothing” phase is now over. Yay!
If anyone would care to give me some feedback, here is the first chapter…
April 14, 2008
Here's Slate's Melinda Henneberger commenting on small-town political attitudes:
When I went back there, and visited similar small towns in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, one thing I heard over and over--from registered Democrats!--was that their national party leaders were elitists who…
April 14, 2008
Meanwhile, the release date for Ben Stein's antievolution propaganda piece Expelled draws nigh. If you've been following any of the press coverage you are probably aware that one of the main charges in the film is that Darwinism in some way led to the Nazis and the holocaust.
In that light, it…
April 14, 2008
William Dembski's lead blogflak DaveScot has stepped in it even more badly than usual. Commenting on Richard Dawkins' recent appearance on Bill Maher's show the other night, he writes:
I watched Dawkins on the Bill Maher show last night. Among other interesting things he said was when it comes to…
April 9, 2008
Not because it's false, mind you. There is no reasonable definition of science that includes Intelligent Design and Creationism, and it is perfectly legitimate to point that out. In certain contexts, like when you are arguing that it is unconstitutional to teach ID in public high school science…
April 8, 2008
Monty Hall strikes again!
Today's New York Times has this article, by John Tierney, about the latest wrinkle in the Monty Hall problem. According to M. Keith Chen, an economist at Yale University, the results of certain psychological studies are called into question by a sytematic error in their…
April 2, 2008
I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but I actually enjoyed David Berlinski's talk yesterday in Washington D.C.
Berlinski might be familiar to you as the author of a number of boneheaded articles in Commentary magazine over the last ten years. He has decided to jump on the anti-Dawkins bandwagon…
