jrosenhouse | July 19, 2007During my absence it seems that Larry Moran, one of my favorite science bloggers, has declined an invitation to join ScienceBlogs. Outrageous!
Though I find it regrettable, I fear he now has to be crushed. I mean, if one blogger is allowed to turn down such an invitation and get away with it, pretty soon other bloggers will find it acceptable as well. And then where would we be?
But it gets worse. Here he is defending his decision:
When I first started Sandwalk, I was anxious to be part of that group but now, seven months later, there doesn't seem to be a good reason to give up this site…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2007I see that my fellow bloggers have not been idle during my absence. Matt Nisbet has another one of his Dawkins bashing posts up. This time his champion is philosopher Phillip Kitcher.
Nisbet quotes Kitcher as follows, from a recent podcast of Point of Inquiry:
DJ Grothe: Did you write the book to sell secular humanism, or maybe in a more limited way atheism to the public? All these anti-God books are the real rage right now, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens...your book is addressing some of the same topics, are you addressing the same audience...
Kitcher: Well I'm actually not happy with…
jrosenhouse | July 19, 2007Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything?
England ended up being a lot of fun, though it didn't start out that way. For reasons I won't try to explain here, Dominic and I took different flights. His landed early. Mine was two hours late.
We had flown through the night, so it was now early Monday morning. We quickly discovered that virtually every piece of information we had about getting from Heathrow Airport to the conference site (that would be the University of Reading) was incorrect or incomplete in some way.
Step one was to catch a bus from Heathrow to Reading. This was accomplished…
jrosenhouse | July 5, 2007On Sunday I will be flying across the ocean to participate in the 2007 British Combinatorics Conference, at the University of Reading. If you peruse the book of abstracts, you will see that I will be delievering an edge-of-your-seat barn-burner of a talk entitled, “Decomposition Theorems for Cayley Graphs of the Modular Group Over a Finite Field.” Don't you wish you were going? Though the barn will already have burnt down by the time he speaks, my friend and collaborator Dominic Lanphier will be discussing related work in a rhetorical tour-de-force entitled, “Isoperimetric Sets of Cayley…
jrosenhouse | July 5, 2007The Center for Inquiry offers up this excellent summary (PDF format) of the nature and goals of Intelligent Design Creationism. Its author is philosopher Barbara Forrest, whose expert testimony in the Dover trial played a significant role in the successful outcome of the case. Think of it as the Cliff's Notes version of her excellent book (coauthored with Paul Gross) Creationism's Trojan Horse, coupled with an update on relevant happenings since the book's publication. Well worth a look.
Of course, ID folks react to Forrest the way vampires react to sunlight. Here's William Dembski…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2007In his post on atheism and civil rights, Ed Brayton takes me to task for my assertion that books like those written by Dawkins and Hitchens are not the cause of the public image problem faced by atheists. I had written:
Atheists don't face a public image problem because of the books of Dawkins and Hitchens. They face a public image problem because of the bigotry and ignorance of so many religious people. Not all religious people, certainly, as the strawman version of their arguments would have you believe. But a much higher percentage than people like Matthew care to admit.
Ed replies:…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2007Rereading my post from Friday, I notice that I never actually answered the question I posed in the title. Is atheism a civil rights issue?
Happily, other bloggers have stepped into the breach. Mike Dunford gets us started:
Atheists, unfortunately, do face a great deal of discrimination. Actually, I should rephrase that. The discrimination is not faced by all atheists. It's faced by those people who, for whatever reason, choose to publicly identify themselves as nonbelievers. For one set of examples, you need look no further than child custody cases. Volokh has a laundry list of appeals…
jrosenhouse | July 2, 2007The only parts of the museum I have not reviewed are the bookstore (pretty much what you'd expect) and the men's room (impressively clean). So what conclusions should we draw?
Is this the end of civilization as we know it? No. But it is one more symptom of the disease that has been growing ever since Ronald Reagan started making appeals to religious fundamentalists a standard part of Republican Party politics in the 1980's. Just ponder the fact that AiG had little trouble raising the twenty-seven million dollars needed to build this monstrosity. Consider that now everyone in the…
jrosenhouse | June 29, 2007The only thing left was the big planetarium show. I managed to hook up with my posse on line, and together we went inside. Alas, we ended up sitting in the front row. This meant that even when we took advantage of the tilt back feature of the chairs, it was difficult to see some of what was going on.
Having visited the Hayden Planetarium in New York, this one looked a bit cheesy. The domed ceiling was a bit lower than you would normally expect for a show of this kind. On the other hand, the presentation itself certainly had a professional feel to it.
The show was called “The Created…
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2007My SciBling Matthew Nisbet says no. I think he really means it, since he put the title of his post in all caps.
Matthew writes:
One of the common claims that has been amplified by the Dawkins/Hitchens PR campaign is that “atheism is a civil rights issue.” (For an example, see the comments section of this recent post.)
This false spin serves as a very effective frame device for radicalizing a base of atheists into an ever more militant &dquo;us versus them” rhetoric, an interpretation that is used to justify sophomoric and polarizing attacks on religious Americans.
Indeed, “atheism is a…
jrosenhouse | June 28, 2007There was one final movie to be viewed. This one dealt with dinosaurs and dragons. I think the point was that dragon legends have their origin in the experiences people had interacting with dinosaurs. If this is correct, then all those secular geologists who say people and dinosaurs were separated in time by some sixty-five million years don't know what they are talking about. Let's take a look.
We begin with a dramatic voiceover recounting the familiar myth of Saint George and the dragon. There are many versions of the story, and the location changes depending on the particular version…
jrosenhouse | June 27, 2007Blogging over at The Huffington Post, my SciBling Chris Mooney has an excellent post up on the subject of global warming. He is responding to this op-ed from Emily Yoffe, a writer for Slate. Yoffe was trying to present herself as the calm, clear-thinking purveryor of common -sense against the blinkered alarmism of people like Al Gore. Mooney does an excellent job of showing she has little idea what she is talking about.
For example, Yoffe writes:
Thanks to all the heat-mongering, it's supposed to be a sign I'm in denial because I refuse to trust a weather prediction for August 2080, when…
jrosenhouse | June 27, 2007Ken Miller has now published his review of Behe's latest. He did an excellent job. I think he really nailed some of Behe's more egregious mathematical errors:
Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What he has actually done is to determine the odds of these two exact mutations occurring simultaneously at precisely the same position in exactly the same gene in a single individual. He then leads his unsuspecting readers to believe that this spurious calculation is a hard and fast statistical barrier…
jrosenhouse | June 27, 2007We now come to what one helpful museum employee described to me as “the climax of the museum.” The previous exhibits took us through the first four of the seven C's (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion). Now, with one further fifteen minute movie, we would get the final three (Christ, Cross, Consummation). The film was entitled The Last Adam, which is a reference to 1 Corinthians 15:45:
And so it is written, The first man Adam was made a living soul; the last Adam was made a quickening spirit.
Short review: Where's Mel Gibson when you need him?
After the build-up of the previous…
jrosenhouse | June 26, 2007Today's New York Times has a series of articles up about various aspects of evolution. One that caught my eye was this essay by paleontologist Douglas Erwin. It discusses various challenges to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Not the silly, brain-dead challenges of the creationists and ID folks, but the serious challenges from people who actually know what they are talking about.
Erwin begins by explaining the basics of Neo-Darwinism:
To understand the current tumult it helps to understand how our evolutionary framework developed. It was constructed from the 1930s to 1950s by early…
jrosenhouse | June 26, 2007Let us now ponder more closely a few of the specific exhibits at the big museum.
One surprising item in the exhibits is the blunt contempt for human reason. We are constantly told that apostasy begins when human reason is elevated above God's word. Placards on the walls contrast the conclusions of human reason (evolution, millions of years, people are the products of chance) to the vastly better conclusions of starting with God's word (creation, young Earth, God loves us). This strikes me as a bit of a blunder on their part. They are effectively conceding that evolution is a reasonable…
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2007You might also enjoy having a look at Professor Steve Steve's account of his trip to the Creation Museum. Many pictures.
jrosenhouse | June 25, 2007After leaving the theater it was time to enter the museum proper. The nice fellow at the door scanned the barcode on my ticket to verify that I wasn't trying to sneak in. He advised me that I should allow at least two hours to see all the exhibits, then invited me to go on in.
The museum is laid out like a long, twisting path. Visitors are moved through various sections, organized around the “Seven C's” of history. Those would be Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion, Christ, Cross and Consummation. To which I add an eighth C: Clever!
Two things struck me soon after entering. The…
jrosenhouse | June 24, 2007P.Z. Myers has a very helpful post up explaining the biological details behind the Michael Behe quote mine I reported on here. Basically, Behe's treatment of the subject was even worse than I realized. Recall that Behe was arguing that straightforward reasoning from Darwinian principles led certain mathematicians astray in resolving problems related to morphogenesis. Myers replies as follows:
But there are other problems with Behe's claim. What he's about to explain are not “basic features of life”, but the specifics of metazoan pattern formation. We know already that there are multiple…
jrosenhouse | June 23, 2007You might think that our corrupt and incompetant Attorney General would find it difficult to find a sympathetic audience these days. But you'd be wrong:
Gonzales is scheduled to deliver a 45-minute speech at the Seattle Westin Hotel's Grand Ballroom on the Justice Department's efforts to protect intellectual property and combat cybercrime. Justice Department spokesman Evan Peterson declined to confirm details of Gonzales' schedule, but he is also expected to visit the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle.
The speech, free and open to the public, is being sponsored by the Discovery Institute, a…