jrosenhouse | February 5, 2009Sorry for the lack of blogging. Such are the vicissitudes of academic life. Piles of free time one week, crazy busy the next.
The fallout over Jerry Coyne's recent article in TNR continues. Sam Harris and Steven Pinker have now contributed responses. Both are excellent. Click here and scroll to the bottom. Harris goes for the sarcastic approach:
It is a pity that people like Jerry Coyne and Daniel Dennett can't see how easily religion and science can be reconciled. Having once viewed the world as they do, I understand how their fundamentalist rationality has blinded them to deeper…
jrosenhouse | January 30, 2009We close the week's blogging by savoring an amusing example of just how bad things have gotten for the creationists.
For as long as there have been creationists there has been the argument from complex structures. You know the one I mean. Some erstwhile evolution critic points to some complex structure and says, as smugly as possible, “Surely something that complex could not have evolved by natural means.” Then they slink on back to their hidey hole perfectly secure in the belief that they have just said something clever.
The annals of creationism record many such examples. For a time…
jrosenhouse | January 28, 2009If you saw my post the other day about Jerry Coyne's review of the recent books by Ken Miller and Karl Giberson, then you might also be interested to know that Miller and Giberson have now replied. Click here for Miller's reply, and click here for Giberson's.
Let's look at Giberson, first:
Empirical science does indeed trump revealed truth about the world as Galileo and Darwin showed only too clearly. But empirical science also trumps other empirical science. Einstein's dethronement of Newton was not the wholesale undermining of the scientific enterprise, even though it showed that science…
jrosenhouse | January 26, 2009Writing in Slate Ron Rosenbaum has a very funny, but very mean, polemic against...Billy Joel. What the aging pop star did to deserve this I don't know, but for anyone who grew up in the eighties it's worth a look:
But let's go through the “greatest hits” chronologically and see how this “contempt thesis” works out.
First let's take “Piano Man.” You can hear Joel's contempt, both for the losers at the bar he's left behind in his stellar schlock stardom and for the “entertainer-loser” (the proto-B.J.) who plays for them. Even the self-contempt he imputes to the “piano man” rings false.
“…
jrosenhouse | January 26, 2009Jerry Coyne returns to the pages of The New Republic with this review of Ken Miller's recent book Only a Theory and Karl Giberson's book Saving Darwin. I previously reviewed Giberson's book here and Miller's book here.
Miller and Giberson, recall, were both rying to carve out space for a reconciliation of evolution with Christianity. Coyne's verdict:
This disharmony is a dirty little secret in scientific circles. It is in our personal and professional interest to proclaim that science and religion are perfectly harmonious. After all, we want our grants funded by the government, and our…
jrosenhouse | January 23, 2009If you have some time this weekend, be sure to read this magnificent article from Vanity Fair. It presents excerpts from intervies conducted withhundreds of Bush administration officials and other politically important individuals, going through the entire eight years of the presidency. If a fiction writer devised a short story along these lines, no one would believe it. The article is quite long, so be certain you are in a comfy chair and have a nice beverage before starting. It's hard to capture the spirit of the article in just a few quotes, but here's a taste:
February 14, 2002 The…
jrosenhouse | January 22, 2009Recently, ScienceBlogs own Abbie Smith made some trenchant remarks about the problems with science journalism. The combination of sensationalism with writers who frequently do not understand the work about which they are writing leads to some serious difficulties for scientists wishing to communicate with the public. Abbie was talking specifically about reporting on AIDS, and used the example of presenting every small breakthrough in AIDS treatment as tantamount to a cure.
It all seemed pretty noncontroversial to me, but then science journalist George Johnson got cartoonishly offended by…
jrosenhouse | January 21, 2009Writing in The New Criterion, the always excellent Martin Gardner reviews Bart Ehramnn's new book God's Problem: how the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer. Since I am among those who think the problem of evil and suffering in its various forms is a real crackerjack argument against traditional Christian theism, I read the review with great interest.
The “review” part of the review is actually brief. What did Gardner think of the book?
Back to God's Problem, the book that triggered my long-winded speculations. It is hard to imagine how a better, more…
jrosenhouse | January 16, 2009And let us conclude the week's blogging with some wise words from the Financial Times:
Yet at the beginning of the 21st century, evolution is under sustained attack from creationist theories inspired by fundamentalist religion -- sometimes dressed in scientific clothing as “intelligent design”. Opinion polls show that more Americans believe in Biblical creation than evolution, and even in Europe's relatively secular societies a growing minority rejects Darwin.
Many scientists and liberal politicians regard the rising creationist tide as a side-show that they can safely ignore. They are wrong…
jrosenhouse | January 16, 2009Over at the New Republic Issac Chotiner offers up the following worthy thought:
As a respite from all the talk on cable television yesterday (and today) that the New York plane rescue was in fact a “miracle,” it is nice to see more coverage of the atheist ad campaign currently centered on London buses. (As a side note, and to answer a question asked by Rod Dreher and the great Alex Massie--namely, why are these atheists so “preachy”--the reason might be because every time something like a plane rescue occurs, we are subjected to 48 hours of nonsense and superstition).
Exactly right! See…
jrosenhouse | January 15, 2009By now I am sure you have heard that Ricardo Mantalban and Patrick McGoohan have died.
Mantalban is being remembered primarily for playing Khan in Star Trek and Mr. Rourke in the godawful-but-strangely-watchable Fantasy Island. For me, though, his best role was as a murdering bullfighter in a memorable episode of Columbo.
Be warned: some minor spoilers ahead.
Columbo, vacationing with his wife in Mexico, gets into some low-grade trouble with the police. The local inspector offers to clear things up for him if he will help with an investigation. The bookkeeper to the legendary…
jrosenhouse | January 14, 2009Today's New York TImes features two op-eds essential to clear thinking about the situation in Gaza. The first comes from journalist Jeffrey Goldberg. He paints a grim picture of the enemy Israel faces. It is a useful corrective to those who think Hamas is a leigitmate negotiating partner interested, with the right incentives, in peaceful coexistence with Israel. You really must go read the whole thing, since it is impossible to capture all that is right with it in a few quotes. But here goes:
What a phantasmagorically strange conflict the Arab-Israeli war had become! Here was a Saudi-…
jrosenhouse | January 13, 2009This particular problem is a bit too applied for my taste, but it's always nice to see mathematicians in the news:
For decades, math and computer science have played a profound role in the drawing of legislative districts. And it's hard to argue that they've improved the process. As the amount of information and computing power available to the gerrymanderers has ballooned, they have gotten much better at surgically crafting districts to their precise desires.
So, with a reapportionment of House seats coming up in just over two years, after the next decennial census, mathematicians are now…
jrosenhouse | January 13, 2009We militant atheist types often wonder, with exasperation, how people manage to persuade themselves of God's existence. Former conservative MSNBC pundit Tucker Carlson gives us his answer:
Yet for Carlson, who was baptized as an Episcopalian but didn't attend church growing up, the question of God's existence was settled with two words.
As a high school junior, Carlson was reading, “Wishful Thinking,” a book by author and minister Frederick Buechner, when he said he heard a voice.
“I was reading this book and all of a sudden, God just spoke out loud to me, in my room, totally randomly, out…
jrosenhouse | January 12, 2009Since I am still getting caught up on my blog reading after my trip to the big conference, I have only just noticed Jeffrey Shallit's interesting post on information theory. He writes:
Creationists think information theory poses a serious challenge to modern evolutionary biology -- but that only goes to show that creationists are as ignorant of information theory as they are of biology.
Whenever a creationist brings up this argument, insist that they answer the following five questions. All five questions are based on the Kolmogorov interpretation of information theory. I like this version…
jrosenhouse | January 11, 2009Now that the big ScienceBlogs software upgrade is complete, I can tell you about the big conference in Washington D.C. Lucky you!
According to careercast.com, mathematicians have the most wonderful job there is. I am inclined to agree, of course. I don't understand why everyone doesn't get a PhD in the subject and join the fun.
This is the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings, so called because it is organized jointly by the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America (no Monty Python jokes, please.) It is basically a big math party. Feeling glum about the…
jrosenhouse | January 3, 2009I will be leaving town tomorrow to spend most of this coming week in Washington D.C., participating in the annual extravaganza known as the Joint Mathematics Meetings. This is quite simply the place to be if you have any interest in mathematics.
Of course, this means I will only have limited internet access for the next few days. So I will not be blogging, and I will not be making detailed replies to comments. Try to soldier on in my absence!
jrosenhouse | January 3, 2009In the Washington Post, Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevi has a moving take on the conflict in Gaza. His nineteen year old son is in the Israeli army, you see.
A majority of Israelis emerged from the first intifada convinced that we need to do everything possible to end the occupation and ensure that our children don't serve as enforcers of Gaza's despair. That was why I initially supported the 1993 Oslo peace process that took a terrible gamble on Yasser Arafat's supposed transformation from terrorist to peacemaker. And even after it became clear that Arafat and other Palestinian leaders…
jrosenhouse | January 3, 2009As a companion piece to the last post, I recommend the sledgehammer vs. the fly exchange between Ken Miller and Casey Luskin. Miller is a biologist at Brown University, and is the author of Finding Darwin's God and Only a Theory, two of the most important popular-level evolution books of recent memory. Luskin is the Discovery Institute's lead blog hack. He has a law degree. Luskin tried to argue biology (blood clotting, to be exact) with Miller. Miller ate him.
Luskin served up three posts: Part One, Part Two and Part Three.
Miller has replied to Part One here, and to Part Two here.…
jrosenhouse | January 3, 2009Continuing with the recent book review theme, allow me to say a few words about The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God, by David J. Linden. Linden is a professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
If you have been paying attention to the creationists lately, you know they have been playing the brain card something fierce. It is here, they claim, that the bad ol' materialist paradigm has met its waterloo. Surely so magnificent an organ can not be explained by Darwinian evolution? It just has to be the result of intelligent…