September 27, 2006
Over at the utlra-right-wing website World Net Daily, Jonathan Wells has posted a characteristically ignorant and dishonest essay entitled “Why Darwinism is Doomed.” Yawn. P. Z. Myers takes care of business with this smackdown. Worth reading both for the joy of seeing Wells' rhetorically…
September 26, 2006
Veselin Topalov finally managed to get on the board in the third game of his match with Vladimir Kramnik. On the black side of another Catalan Topalov made a draw in 38 moves. This was no grandmaster draw, however. Topalov fought hard as always to generate chances, and at one point might have…
September 25, 2006
Two games down in the big World Chess Championship and two wins for Kramnik. But that doesn't tell the whole story.
Game One saw the quiet Catalan Defense from Kramnik, an ultra-solid opening fitting Kramnik's style. He obtained a small advantage out of the opening but Topalov was never in…
September 22, 2006
Omigod, omigod, omigod! Ask me how excited I am. Go ahead, ask me.
Answer: Very excited. Why? Because the match for the World Chess Championship begins tomorrow, as you would know if our miserable press corps would get around to covering something important for a change.
The defending champion…
September 21, 2006
In Tuesday's post I commented that Christopher Hitchens is always reliable when writing about religion. As if to prove my point, the new issue of Free Inquiry turned up in my mailbox that night. It features an essay by Hitchens addressing the looming schism in the Anglican Church on the subject…
September 20, 2006
The Washington Post reports the latest fossil hominid discovered in Africa:
Fossil hunters have unearthed the fossil skeleton of a baby who died 3.3 million years ago, marking the first time scientists have discovered the nearly complete remains of a child of an ancient human ancestor.
The child,…
September 19, 2006
Lee Alan Dugatkin's new book The Altruism Equation: Seven Scientists Search for the Origins of Goodness was sitting on my doorstep a few days ago (too big to fit in the mailbox). Dugatkin is a biologist at the University of Louisville. That evening I sat down to read the first chapter, and ended…
September 19, 2006
When Christopher Hitchens writes about religion, he is always reliable. Over at Slate he offers his thoughts on the Pope's recent dust-up with the Muslim community:
Attempting to revive his moribund church on a visit to Germany, where the Roman congregations are increasingly sparse, Joseph…
September 18, 2006
According to this brief from The Washington Post, Al Gore will be publishing a book next year entitled The Assault on Reason:
That is when Gore is scheduled to publish his next book. With no fanfare, he signed a few weeks ago with Penguin Press to write “The Assault on Reason.”
As described by…
September 15, 2006
In an incomprehensible display of poor editorial judgment, Slate recently published this unusually bad article on the merits of string theory, by Gregg Easterbrook.
It's a familiar name to connoisseurs of bad science writing. Easterbrook has previously come out in favor of teaching ID in schools…
September 14, 2006
Have to blog and run today. I get to spend three hours this afternoon trying to persuade skeptical calculus students that “related rate” problems aren't so bad. A forlorn quest, I know. Anyway, how about I just point you towards some interesting reading:
Over at CSICOP's site, Penny Higgins…
September 13, 2006
One of the nice things about being a big shot science blogger is that publishers frequently send you free books to review. In fact, lately they've been arriving a lot faster than I can read them.
One book that turned up recently in my mailbox was Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, by…
September 12, 2006
It all started when Pat Hayes, of Red State Rabble, posted this blog entry describing a recent talk given by Ken Miller at the University of Kansas. Miller, you will recall, is the author of Finding Darwin's God. The first half of this book is brilliant in explaining some of the evidence for…
September 11, 2006
From the Connelsville Daily Courier, a Pennsylvania newspaper, comes this blunt assessment of the merits of evolution. The essay is by guest columnist Rosemary Fike:
The United States of America no longer can be called a Christian nation. In fact, we could be called a nation of fools. We are…
September 8, 2006
Another point made in the Newsweek article mentioned in the previous post is that Harris et al are as hard on religious moderates as they are on the fundamentalists:
It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins and Harris. Their books are attacks on religious “moderates” as well--indeed…
September 8, 2006
Via Afarensis, I came across this Newsweek article about atheism. It focuses mainly on Sam Harris, RIchard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Overall I think it's a pretty good article. Here are a few highlights:
This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists “are…
September 7, 2006
It seems the big evolution confab in Rome has ended. The verdict? No change:
A participant at the Pope's closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church's teaching on evolution, saying nothing presented at the meeting…
September 7, 2006
Jerry Coyne has a review of the new book The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, by David Mindell, in the current issue of Nature. The ID folks are crowing over this remark:
To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many…
September 6, 2006
The August 28 issue of The New Yorker features this magisterial article about the Poincare conjecture. The focus of the article is on the priority dispute between Grigory Perelman on the one hand, and a team of Chinese mathematicians led by Harvard's Shing-Tung Yau on the other. According to the…
September 6, 2006
Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers these worthy thoughts on the subject of creationist arguments based on probability theory:
But there's another contributing factor to this opposition to evolution that I'd like to discuss here. It is the concerted attempt by creationists to dress up in the…
September 5, 2006
In this entry from last week I mentioned Joan Roughgarden's recent book Evolution and Christian Faith, and praised her firm dismissal of ID. Sadly, there are many other parts of her brief book where I believe she has missed the boat.
One such part concerns her criticism of Richard Dawkins' idea of…
September 4, 2006
The New York Times reports on the big evolution meeting in Rome:
They meet every year, the eminent German professor and his old doctoral students, for a weekend of high-minded talk on a chosen topic. For years it was nothing more than that.
But now the professor, once called Joseph Ratzinger, has…
September 4, 2006
I was watching Steve Irwin before it was cool.
I discovered him by accident, channel surfing. Commercial, commercial, Law & Order, infomercial, holy crap is that guy picking up snakes by the tail?! As I recall, it was a show called, “The Ten Deadliest Snakes in Australia.” He was not a big…
August 31, 2006
Have a look at this interesting article, by Samantha Shapiro at Slate, about the decline of conservative Judaism. She writes:
Since 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary has sought to negotiate a middle ground between Orthodox Judaism, which (to vastly oversimplify) teaches that the Torah and…
August 29, 2006
Slate offers up this depressing article, by Amy Sullivan about how religious people view the Democratic Party:
Which is why it is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual…
August 29, 2006
Chris Mooney's excellent book The Republican War on Science is now available in paperback. So if you didn't buy it in hardcover, shame on you! But now you have a chanc eto redeem yourself.
Kidding aside, Mooney does a first-rate job of confirming what anyone who has been paying attention has long…
August 27, 2006
David Heddle provides a typical example of the mental gymnastics required to believe that God is all -knowing and all-powerful. He writes:
Many of you know I live in a small town in New Hampshire. In a month or so, the scenery will knock your socks off. Believers will marvel at God's creation,…
August 26, 2006
How bad have things gotten for the ID folks? They're pathetically excited about the publication of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Drwainism and Intelligent Design.
It used to be that the ID folks were keen to persuade us that they were going to revolutionize science.…
August 26, 2006
It's been a good week for entertainment. I saw Snakes on a Plane, of course. Very enjoyable, though inevitably a bit disappointing given the hype. Needed more snakes. And Prison Break returned this week. I had to tape the premiere and only just got around to watching it. Looks like another…
August 25, 2006
I am currently holding in my hands a little book called Evolution and Christian Faith, by Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden. I don't agree with Roughgarden's religious views, but she sure does a good job of nailing ID:
Furthermore, neo-Darwinism can account for complex structures.…
