jrosenhouse | August 17, 2008
Usually I write these accounts in strict chronological order. I will break from that tradition this time since one of my most interesting experiences at the conference came right near the end. I had made a pest of myself during several of the Q and A's after the talks, meaning that by the third day of the conference I had a bit of a reputation. Late in the day a pleasant enough fellow approached me in the bookstore, and we had a conversation.
I asked him flat out why he was a creationist. He replied with a brief biography about how he came to Christ when he was twelve, but didn't…
jrosenhouse | August 13, 2008My account of the big creationism conference will go up soon, but in the meantime you can tide yourself over with this op-ed from yesterday's New York Times. Olivia Judson explains a few of the reasons it is important to teach evolution in science classes. I especially liked this:
The third reason to teach evolution is more philosophical. It concerns the development of an attitude toward evidence. In his book, “The Republican War on Science,” the journalist Chris Mooney argues persuasively that a contempt for scientific evidence -- or indeed, evidence of any kind -- has permeated the Bush…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2008EvolutionBlog will be going dark for the next two weeks or so. I will be leaving my cozy digs in Harrisonburg to enjoy some serious wandering. First is a drive up to Pittsburgh for the International Conference of Creationism. How could I pass that up? Then I will explore the fine points of the Pennsylvania Turnpike as I shoot on over to visit the 'rents in my New Jersey office. There follows a quick train ride up to New York for the big blogger meet-up. I will also be sure to take care of the two most important things in any trip to New York: The visit to big bro over in Brooklyn, and…
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2008The all-consuming, all-devouring, ScienceBlogs collective has assimilated another victim. Go say hi to Matt Springer, who blogs about physics over at Built on Facts. Matt is a graduate student in physics at Texas A & M university. He writes:
New posts generally appear every morning, including weekends. I can't promise the schedule will be absolutely rigidly adhered to, but it's been a while since I've missed a day.
Why do I feel so lame all of a suuden?
jrosenhouse | August 1, 2008A few posts back I engaged a discussion about Richard Dawkins' metaphor of “Cimbing Mount Improbable” for the proces by which evolution by natural selection crafts complex structures from simpler precursors. Since I did not have his book in front of me at the time, I was working from memory.
As it happens, earlier today I was browsing through The God Delusion and I came across a description of the metaphor which, I am pleased to say, expresses precisely the view I attributed to Dawkins. You will find this on pages 121-122:
In Climbing Mount Improbable, I expressed the point in a parable…
jrosenhouse | July 31, 2008Karl Giberson offers up the usual cliches of the genre in in this essay for Salon. Those mean ol' atheists are trying to make a religion out of science, but savvy clear thinkers like him see the problems with that little project. Blah blah blah.
P.Z. has already spanked Giberson in this post. Nonetheless, there was one paragraph that really caught my eye:
In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions. I share with Myers, Dawkins and…
jrosenhouse | July 29, 2008Continuing my perusal of the new Notices of the American Mathematical Society, I came across this review (PDF format) of John Allen Paulos recent book Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. The review is by mathematician Olle Haggstrom. Paulos' book has been sitting on my shelf for a while, but I have not yet gotten around to reading it. My impression from flipping through it is that it will provide nothing new to people familiar with these arguments, but provides a decent overview for people only vaguely familiar with them.
Haggstrom's review…
jrosenhouse | July 28, 2008Via Mark Chu-Carroll, I just finished reading this article by mathematician Keith Devlin. He writes:
Let's start with the underlying fact. Multiplication simply is not repeated addition, and telling young pupils it is inevitably leads to problems when they subsequently learn that it is not. Multiplication of natural numbers certainly gives the same result as repeated addition, but that does not make it the same. Riding my bicycle gets me to my office in about the same time as taking my car, but the two processes are very different. Telling students falsehoods on the assumption that they can…
jrosenhouse | July 24, 2008Time for lighter fare. There are some really good movies out there...
Warning: A few minor spoilers ahead.
First up, of course, is The Dark Knight. Superhero movies just keep getting better and better, but this one is going to be hard to top. It's two and a half hours long, but I wanted to go on for another two and a half.
Heath Ledger is surely going to get a posthumous Oscar for this. If you've ever wondered what it means to commit to a part, this is it. But even more than his performance, the writing for the character was really first-rate. There are so many scenes that do a really…
jrosenhouse | July 23, 2008There's an interesting discussion going on between Larry Moran and Richard Dawkins. The subject is the title of Dawkins' 1996 book Climbing Mt. Improbable. It started with this post over at Larry's blog. He included Dawkins in his list of good science writers who were nonetheless excluded from Dawkins' recent anthology of science writing. Along the way, Moran offered this thought:
Dawkins is also a master of metaphor but, sometimes the metaphors are misleading and can give an incorrect view of evolution (e.g. Climbing Mt. Improbable).
Personally, I loved the metaphor of Mt. Improbable…
jrosenhouse | July 22, 2008James Carse directed the Religious Studies Program at New York University for thirty years. In this interview with Salon, regarding his new book The Religious Case Against Belief, he gives us a taste of what he learned from all that study:
And yet, you've just told me that you yourself don't believe in a divine reality. In some ways, your critique of belief systems seems to go along with what the new atheists are saying.
The difference, though, is that I wouldn't call myself an atheist. To be an atheist is not to be stunned by the mystery of things or to walk around in wonder about the…
jrosenhouse | July 21, 2008The new issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society turned up in my mailbox today. It features an interesting, if slightly disturbing, editorial (PDF format) by CUNY mathematician Melvyn Nathanson. He wonders about how confident we can really be regarding the proofs that appear in our research journals:
But why the delay? Surely, any competent person can check a proof. It's either right or wrong. Why wait two years?
The reason is that many great and important theorems don't actually have proofs. They have sketches of proofs, outlines of arguments, hints and intuitions…
jrosenhouse | July 14, 2008For Part One, go here.
Let us return now to the weighty topic of great locked room mysteries.
In Part One I focused on the works of John Dickson Carr, who is certainly a central figure in the history of the genre. There are plenty of other works to be acknowledged, however, and we turn to that subject now. This will certainly not be anything like an exhaustive list, which would be impossible in any case. I will simply list a few that made an impression on me, and I invite the commenters to mention others. The ever-useful Wikipedia has an interesting reading list, including quite a few…
jrosenhouse | July 12, 2008Andrew Sullivan was not amused by P. Z.'s post:
It is one thing to engage in free, if disrespectful, debate. It is another to repeatedly assault and ridicule and abuse something that is deeply sacred to a great many people. Calling the Holy Eucharist a “goddamned cracker” isn't about free speech; it's really about some baseline civility. Myers' rant is the rant of an anti-Catholic bigot. And atheists and agnostics can be bigots too.
But wait a minute! Wasn't Sullivan leading the charge in defense of the Danish newspapers that published caricatures of the prophet Muhammed? Yes, I believe…
jrosenhouse | July 11, 2008As I was mulling over what I wanted to say about the PZ Myers / William Donohue kerfuffle, I came across this post (via Bora) by Jeff Fecke, that said perfectly exactly what I was thinking. Go read it.
The basic story line here is that Webster Cook, a student at the University of Central Florida, accepted communion at a Catholic mass. Rather than eat the wafer, he removed it, unconsumed, from the Church. This is a rather serious breach of etiquette, seeing as how the consecrated wafer is said to be a portion of the body of Jesus Christ. Cook's motives for doing this are unclear.
Mentally…
jrosenhouse | July 10, 2008Somehow I'm not in the mood for a heavy post today. So how about an essay on another of my favorite topics: Locked Room mysteries.
Here are the first two paragraphs of what I regard as the finest detective story ever written:
To the murder of Professor Grimaud, and later the equally incredible crime in Cagliostro Street, many fantastic terms could be applied -- with reason. Those of Dr. Fell's friends who like impossible situations will not find in his casebook any puzzle more baffling or more terrifying. Thus: two murders were committed, in such fashion that the murderer must not only…
jrosenhouse | July 8, 2008Let's see. An op-ed in the New York Times entitled “Doubleday and Darwin”, with the following opening paragraph:
As I sat in my high school math class one day, my teacher asked a question that I doubt will find a consensus opinion in my lifetime: “Was math invented or was it discovered?” To this day, I still scratch my head.
Yeah, I think I can be persuaded to read the whole thing.
The writer is baseball player Douglas Glanville. He finds some interesting parallels between the rules of baseball and the evolutionary process. He writes:
But humility reminded me that there are rules by…
jrosenhouse | July 7, 2008Remember a few posts back, when we saw Michael Ruse lecturing Richard Dawkins as follows:
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. Saint Augustine, one of the greatest thinkers of Western civilization, devoted but one paragraph in the City of God to the proofs. Saint Thomas was categorical that the proofs are second to faith.
In light of that it is with some amusement that I direct you to the current…
jrosenhouse | July 6, 2008During my recent trip to the Creation Museum I picked up a copy of David DeWitt's book Unraveling the Origins Controversy. DeWitt is the Director of the Center for Creation Studies at Liberty University. It's been a while since I've read an actual YEC book, and I was growing nostalgic for the experience.
And wouldn't you know it! Almost as soon as DeWitt turns from religious questions to scientific ones, the quote-mining begins. Consider this:
Often the evidence that is used to support common ancestry is the similarities between organisms. Mayr explained:
Since all members of a taxon…
jrosenhouse | June 30, 2008I've just got back from a road trip to Marrowbone, KY (!!). Mostly I was there for a friend's wedding. Here's the church where the wedding took place. Pretty, but truly in the middle of nowhere. And, yes, I did find time to pay another visit to the Creation Museum, even though it is in an entirely different part of the state. How could I not? They've opened the Dinosaur Den and the Petting Zoo since the last time I was there!
The largest towns near Marrowbone are Burkesville and Tompkinsville, which have a few thousand people between them. My motel room had the Burkesville/…