jrosenhouse | June 8, 2006I've been travelling for the last two weeks, which explains the lack of blogging. I had intended to try to keep up with things while I was out of town, but that has proven more difficultthan I had intended. Sorry about that. Regular blogging will resume on Tuesday.
When I return: Some thoughts on Freeman Dyson's review of Daniel Dennett in the New York Review of Books. Detailed commentary on John Brockman's anti-ID anthology. And a report on my non-embarrassing performance at the U. S. Amateur East Chess Tournament. Stay tuned!
jrosenhouse | June 1, 2006I recently received an e-mail Ken Parejko, a biology professor at the University of Wisconsin at Stout. He described his experiences in taking the PRAXIS II Content Exam in science. He points out that the exam is overwhelmingly based on the facts of science, with no attention paid to science as a process. I think he raises some important points, and I have posted below the fold, with his permission, a letter he sent to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction on this subject.
I have some experience with training future elementary and secondary mathematics teachers, and can report…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2006Thanks to alejandro for directing me to his own take on Dembski's theodicy, discussed in the previous post. You can find his thoughts here. I liked his summary of the problem of evil:
This article discusses that old chestnut, the problem of evil. My own opinion on the problem of evil is simple: For someone with no previous commitment to religion that examines impartially the evidence for and against it, it is pretty damning evidence against the existence of God. For someone who is already firmly religious, it is not a contradiction to his religion; he claim can always be made that there…
jrosenhouse | May 31, 2006I have written before that I regard the problem of evil as essentially a decisive refutation of Christianity. It's not quite logically impossible to reconcile an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God with the sheer quantity of evil and suffering in the world, but it's pretty close. So when William Dembski posted a 48-page essay entitled "Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science," I was intrigued. The word “theodicy,” pronounced to sound like a certain epic poem by Homer, generally refers to the problem of reconciling the existence of God with the existence of evil.
The problem of…
jrosenhouse | May 25, 2006A three judge panel for the eleventh circuit court of appeals has vacated the decision of the lower court in the Cobb County sticker case. At issue here was the decision by the Cobb County School Board to include the following stickers in its high school biology textbooks:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of liiving things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
Now, there can be no serious question that this sticker is deeply stupid. There can also be no…
jrosenhouse | May 24, 2006Over at Telic Thoughts, macht has posted this reply to some of my earlier posts on the nature of science. I believe he is still missing most of the important points. But in the interest of making this into something constructive I will eschew a point-by-point rebuttal. Instead let me emphasize what I believe the key points to be, and clarify some things that may have been left unclear in some of my earlier posts.
First, science is not something that exists “out there,” with properties and characteristics that we come to know by experiment and hard work. Rather, science is a human…
jrosenhouse | May 23, 2006I'm a bit pressed for time today, so why not just have a look at this insightful op-ed by Jay Ingram in The Toronto Star. He begins:
Scientists are absolutely correct to argue that intelligent design -- the claim that a designer, not evolution, created life on Earth -- is not science and does not belong in science classrooms. But it might come as a surprise to many of them that simply saying so isn't enough.
First, to understand why intelligent design isn't science, you do have to know something about what science is.
Scientists constantly test their theories, trying to poke holes in them…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2006After writing that last post, I decided to have a look at the comments to macht's essay. I found another delightful instance of macht being clueless.
Commenter Daniel wrote:
“if some modern scientist happened to introduce something supernatural into science and it was testable”
See, I don't get this - ID keeps missing the point, that it's impossible to simultaneously use supernatural explanations and have those explanations be testable. How can you test miracles and magic??
Good question. Here's macht's answer:
For those of you who have been following my posts lately, this is an…
jrosenhouse | May 22, 2006My essay on the nature of science has provoked this limp response from macht, over at Telic Thoughts.
My essay emphasized the fact that science has a specific goal in mind: To understand the workings of nature. Understanding is measured via predictability and control. Investigative methods are scientific to the extent to which they bring us closer to this goal. I went on to emphasize that many of the terms used in discussing the problem of defining science - such as testability, falsifiability, or methodological naturalism (MN) - are just short hand ways of saying that science cares about…
jrosenhouse | May 21, 2006Seed's ScienceBlogger Question of the week is the following:
If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?
My knee-jerk response was pretty obvious: “Evolution!” Sadly, John Lynch got there first.
Then I figured since I was the only mathematician here, I'd go with “Math!” No dice. P. Z. Myers beat me to it.
Well,I'm sticking with math. But let's make it more concrete. I want people to understand that there is no law of averages. There are no laws of probability (at least not if you mean something like “Really improbable things don't…
jrosenhouse | May 19, 2006I have a new essay up at CSICOP's Creation Watch site. The subject: What is Science? Figured it was high time to polish off that little question once and for all. Enjoy!
jrosenhouse | May 19, 2006Who was the guest on yesterday's episode of The Colbert Report? It was Ted Daeschler, a paleontologist at The Academy of Natural Science in Philadelphia. He was part of the team that discovered the fish-tetrapod transitional form Tiktaalik roseae. Not only did he appear with Colbert, but he was there to discuss paleontology and evolution. He even brought a plaster cast of Tiktaalik.
This is no surprise coming from Colbert. Both he and Jon Stewart routinely have scholars on their shows to have at least somewhat serious discussions of important issues. In this they differ from virtually…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2006With the Bush administration, and Repbulicans generally, tanking in the polls, the time has come to do some serious pandering to the right-wing base. Expect to see a lot more articles like this one, from The Washington Post:
A U.S. Senate panel advanced a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage on Thursday as the committee chairman shouted “good riddance” to a Democrat who walked out of the tense session.
“If you want to leave, good riddance,” The Senate Judiciary Chairman, Republican Arlen Specter, told Wisconsin Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold, who refused to participate because, he said…
jrosenhouse | May 18, 2006As a follow-up to yesterday's post, have a look at Carl Zimmer's post on the subject. He provides a lot of the scientific specifics:
But that's not what has emerged from the new study. The Broad Institute scientists lined up millions of bases of DNA in humans and chimps and measured their differences. Humans and chimpanzees both inherited each segment of DNA from a common ancestor. Over time, the copies of that ancestral segment picked up mutations. The differences between them can offer clues to how long they've been evolving along separate paths. It turns out that the ancestors for some…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2006The New York Times is reporting on new data concerning the date of the evolutionary split between the human and chimapnzee lineages:
Scientists are re-evaluating a pivotal event in human evolution, the split between the human and chimpanzee lineages, in light of a startling new comparison of the human and chimp genomes.
The new analysis, by David Reich, Nick Patterson and colleagues at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., sets up a serious conflict between the date of the split as indicated by fossil skulls and the much younger date implied by genetic analysis.
The conflict can be…
jrosenhouse | May 17, 2006The last six months have been hard ones for ID folks. First, there was the big Dover decision. Then came several new transitional forms (see here and here, for example). The evolution of complex biochemical systems gets less mysterious every day. Likewise for the evolution of of cooperative behavior. Nick Matzke's brilliant annotated bibliography on the evolution of the immune system was posted, showing once more that the Michael Behe's of the world are just making it up when they say that scientists can't explain the evolution of “irreducibly complex” systems. Meanwhile, there is…
jrosenhouse | May 16, 2006As a coda to the previous post, consider this article, from yesterday's The New York Times. It's headline is the title of this entry.
Some of President Bush's most influential conservative Christian allies are becoming openly critical of the White House and Republicans in Congress, warning that they will withhold their support in the midterm elections unless Congress does more to oppose same-sex marriage, obscenity and abortion.
“There is a growing feeling among conservatives that the only way to cure the problem is for Republicans to lose the Congressional elections this fall,” said…
jrosenhouse | May 16, 2006In Sunday's post I wrote the following:
People like [Kevin] Shapiro, George Will, or Charles Krauthammer are lonely voices in the conservative wilderness, accorded about as much respect in the Republican party as pro-lifers are in the Democratic party. Every conservative politican of any prominence is anti-Darwin, and virtually every right-wing media outlet publishes anti-evolution articles on a regular basis. Indeed, as Chris Mooney documented at book length, hostility towards science is an integral part of Republican politics today.
Over at Gene Expression, Razib took issue with these…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2006The New York Times is reporting that President Bush has chosen Larry Faulkner, a chemist and a former President of the University of Texas at Austin to head the National Math Panel:
The former president, Larry R. Faulkner, who led the university from 1998 until early this year, will be chairman of the National Math Panel, which President Bush created by executive order in mid-April.
The panel is modeled on the National Reading Panel, which has been highly influential in promoting phonics and a back-to-basics approach to reading in classrooms around the nation. Though that panel has been…
jrosenhouse | May 15, 2006Many thanks to Dave of Cognitive Daily for pointing out to me that my “comments moderation” feature was turned on, meaning that I had to personally approve of each comment before having it appear. Until he pointed it out to me, I didn't realize I had such a feature.
So let me apologize to the people who had to wait for so long to see their comments posted. I have now turned off the moderation feature, so comments should be published as soon as you finish writing them. We'll see how that goes for a while.
This might be a good time to lay down my comments policies. They're not very…