jrosenhouse | July 24, 2009On the subject of science and religion, Karl Giberson and Francis Collins are not among my favorite commentators. That notwithstanding, this interview actually manages to be pretty interesting. Giberson's questions are in bold face, Collins' answers are in regular type.
You seem like a mirror image of the fundamentalists who struggle with this, as I certainly did in college. Fundamentalists like me grow up with a lot of confidence in biblical literalism and then they encounter evolution, so they are bringing their prior biblical commitments to this new problem. You were interpreting the…
jrosenhouse | July 23, 2009Th Richard Dawkins award is given by the Atheist Alliance International based on the following criteria:
The Richard Dawkins Award will be given every year to honor an outstanding atheist whose contributions raise public awareness of the nontheist life stance; who through writings, media, the arts, film, and/or the stage advocates increased scientific knowledge; who through work or by example teaches acceptance of the nontheist philosophy; and whose public posture mirrors the uncompromising nontheist life stance of Dr. Richard Dawkins.
This year the award is going to Bill Maher. Seems like…
jrosenhouse | July 23, 2009In the course of expressing his dismay with the Episcopalian Church (for ordinating gay bishops) and with Jimmy Carter (for holding liberal political views), conservative pundit Cal Thomas provides an apt summary of the Bible:
Inclusivity has nothing to do with the foundational truths set forth in Scripture. The church, which belongs to no denomination, but to its Founding Father and His Son, is about exclusivity for those who deny the faith. The church is inclusive only for those who are adopted by faith into God's family. There are more biblical references to this than there is room to…
jrosenhouse | July 23, 2009From an interview with Brad Pitt posted at a German website:
BILD: Do you believe in God?
Brad Pitt (smiling): "No, no, no!"
BILD: Is your soul spiritual?
Brad Pitt: "No, no, no! I'm probably 20 per cent atheist and 80 per cent agnostic. I don't think anyone really knows. You'll either find out or not when you get there, until then there's no point thinking about it.
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2009An amusing comment from last night's Countdown. Guest host David Shuster was siting in for Keith Olbermann:
On this day in 1925, an anniversary of note if your name is Sam Brownback. High school biology teacher John T. Scopes was found guilty of breaking a Tennessee state law, teaching evolution. Scopes was fined 100 dollars for telling his students about Darwin. The conviction was later overturned.
Meanwhile, the GOP has since acknowledged that evolution as an important scientific theory, since they have evolved from Abraham Lincoln to Joe the Plumber. Wait, wrong direction!
Heh! I…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2009The overlords at Seed have informed us that there will be some server maintenence starting at 7:00 tonight. Alas, it will be impossible to comment during that time. Take that Turkish spammers!
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2009From Yahoo News:
Fish have lost half their average body mass and smaller species are making up a larger proportion of European fish stocks as a result of global warming, a study published Monday has found.
“It's huge,” said study author Martin Daufresne of the Cemagref Public Agricultural and Environmental Research Institute in Lyon, France.
“Size is a fundamental characteristic that is linked to a number of biological functions, such as fecundity - the capacity to reproduce.”
Smaller fish tend to produce fewer eggs. They also provide less sustenance for predators - including humans - which…
jrosenhouse | July 20, 2009Blogging will continue to be sporadic around here for a while longer while I struggle to finish up a few projects that for some reason aren't getting finished on their own. In the meantime you can have a look at two letters to the editor in response to the Meyer editorial on which I reported last week. The first comes from Owen Sholes, a professor of biology at Assumption College. The beginning and the end sum things up nicely:
IT'S TIME for the intelligent-design folks to pack up their revival tent and leave town. But here is Stephen C. Meyer using every kind of phony rhetoric to pretend…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2009Moving back across the pond, we find another wise op-ed, this time by Daniel Dennett writing in The Guardian. He writes:
I am confident that those who believe in belief are wrong. That is, we no more need to preserve the myth of God in order to preserve a just and stable society than we needed to cling to the Gold Standard to keep our currency sound. It was a useful crutch, but we've outgrown it. Denmark, according to a recent study, is the sanest, healthiest, happiest, most crime-free nation in the world, and by and large the Danes simply ignore the God issue. We should certainly hope that…
jrosenhouse | July 16, 2009Alas, op-ed's as measured and intelligent as the one from Reiss and White are a comparative rarity in American newspapers. More often we get tripe like this, from ID supporter Stephen Meyer. He writes:
IN THE battle over how to teach evolution in public schools, Thomas Jefferson's demand for a “separation between church and state'” has been cited countless times. Many argue that the controversial alternative to Darwinian evolution, intelligent design, is an exclusively religious idea and therefore cannot be discussed under the Constitution. By invoking Jefferson's principle of separation,…
jrosenhouse | July 15, 2009Writing in the British newspaper The Independent, Michael Reiss and John White have an interesting suggestion about the school curriculum in England:
It is a laudable aim of the current National Curriculum that pupils "know about big ideas and events that shape the world". But one of the biggest of these is too infrequently studied in schools. We are thinking of the growing loss of faith, over the past two centuries, in a religious picture of the world. David Hume's 18th-century onslaught on arguments for the existence of God was an early catalyst, Darwin's 19th-century attack on what today…
jrosenhouse | July 13, 2009Writing at the Huffington Post, Robert Wright has a very bad post up about the New Atheists and foreign policy. Let's have a look"
It must strike progressive atheists as a stroke of bad luck that Christopher Hitchens, leading atheist spokesperson, happens to have hawkish views on foreign policy. After all, with atheists an overwhelmingly left-wing group, what were the chances that the loudest infidel in the western world would happen to be on the right?
No essay that starts like that is likely to have anything interesting or insightful to say. Atheists are overwhelmingly left-wing on…
jrosenhouse | July 9, 2009Good news for chess fans:
The newspaper Marca (journalist Jesus J. Boyero) broke the news that Kasparov and Karpov will play a 12 game (4 Rapid and 8 blitz) match in Valencia 21st-24th September 2009. The match is on the 25th Anniversary of the start of their infamous first aborted match in Moscow in 1984-5, this was followed by an epic series of close World title matches which ended in Lyon 1990.
Score! I'm so there. Well, not literally there in Spain, but at least at my computer following the games.
In other Kasparov news, here's Kasparov's statement durin ghis recent meeting with…
jrosenhouse | July 9, 2009Via Jerry Coyne comes this report, from Daniel Dennett, of a symposium on science and faith held at Cambridge. It sounds like his experience was very similar to mine at the recent NAPC conference. Dennett writes:
I am attending and participating in the big Cambridge University Darwin Week bash, and I noticed that one of the two concurrent sessions the first day was on evolution and theology, and was 'supported by the Templeton Foundation' (though the list of Festival Donors and Sponsors does not include any mention of Templeton). I dragged myself away from a promising session on speciation…
jrosenhouse | July 8, 2009The Big Monty Hall Book just got a favorable review in The Columbus Dispatch. The reviewer is Rob Hardy. He writes:
Indeed, some of the chapters here are full-power mathematics, with unknowns x, y and z, summation or conditional probability symbols, and complicated equations choked with parentheses within brackets, and more. Math phobics won't get far with such stuff, but there is enough other material here, along with different explanations of the basic puzzle, that will be of interest to anyone who likes recreational mathematics in even the slightest degree.
I was really happy to read…
jrosenhouse | July 1, 2009Thursday morning started bright and early, since the first talk was at eight. It goes against my grain to be out of bed at that hour, but sometimes in life you just have to make sacrifices.
I was at the big meeting room by 7:45. Got to schmooze with some of the big shots, like Genie Scott and Ken Miller:
Keith Miller (no relation to Ken), a geologist at Kansas State University was there. I met him a few times during my post-doc at K-State, so it was nice to see him again. My fellow Panda's Thumbers Richard Hoppe and Art Hunt were there as well.
The morning's session was called, “…
jrosenhouse | June 30, 2009Here's an interesting tidbit from a blogger for the Indianapolis Star:
Indiana Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett hurriedly called this morning to be removed from the speakers list at an annual conference on Creationism after accidentally agreeing to speak, said Cam Savage, his spokesman.
The Creation Evidence Expo 2009 listed Bennett on the speakers list for its September conference in Indianapolis. (Speakers list here.) Other speakers include scientists and science teachers who advocate Creationism, the belief the world was created by God as described in the Bible, rather…
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2009A few weeks ago I took notice of a looming book fight between Richard Dawkins' forthcoming The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and Jerry Coyne's book Why Evolution is True.
I gave Round One to Dawkins on the grounds of having a better title. Now Round Two goes to ... Coyne!
His book has shown up on Newsweek's list of fifty books to read now. Quite an honor!
What's that you say? Not really a fair fight since Dawkins' book hasn't been published yet? Cry me a river. Timing is everything.
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2009Kenneth Chang of The New York Times has now weighed in with an article about the big trip to the Creation Museum. A couple of interesting tidbits:
Arnold I. Miller, a professor of geology at the University of Cincinnati and head of the meeting's organizing committee, suggested the trip. “Too often, academics tend to ignore what's going on around them,” Dr. Miller said. “I feel at least it would be valuable for my colleagues to become aware not only of how creationists are portraying their own message, but how they're portraying the paleontological message and the evolutionary message.”…
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2009For me the big paleontology conference began on Wednesday morning when a group of us gathered to go to the Creation Museum. There were a couple of luminaries in attendence, including Eugenie Scott:
If you look carefully you can make out my reflection in the glass.
I have made several visits to the museum, and it has been crowded each time. But even I was taken aback by the mob scene that greeted us. Things were so clogged it was sometimes hard to work your way through the labyrinth of exhibits. Very depressing.
Even more depressing was the ubiquity of small children from various…