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Wall Street Journal Wrong on Templeton Foundation and ID

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had an article about various college professors around the country teaching about ID in freshmen seminars. In the process, they attributed much of the growth in the ID movement to the Templeton Foundation and did so wrongly. Long quote begins below the fold: Still, professors with evangelical beliefs, including some eminent scientists, have initiated most of the courses and lectures, often with start-up funding from the John Templeton Foundation. Established by famous stockpicker Sir John Templeton, the foundation promotes exploring the boundary of theology and…

Scalia and Originalism

Jack Balkin of the Yale Law School keeps a terrific blog that I link to and read often. On his blog today, he includes a reposting of a message he sent to a constitutional law listserv concerning Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his concept of originalism. The listserv thread concerned an article that was written by Steve Henderson comparing Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v Texas (last year's case striking down the Texas anti-sodomy law) to Justice Taney's decision in the infamous Dred Scott case, which returned a slave to the slaveowner and struck down the Missouri compromise, as well…

Penis Size: Does it matter and why?

A study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explores the question of penis size and female preference in humans. The study involved making a set of 3D models of human males of various relative body sizes, and fitting them out with various size flaccid penises. These were shown to a sample of Australian women to get their reactions. The assumption of this study is that at some time in the past humans did not wear clothing, so that information about penis size in men would be available to women who could observe flaccid penises and then choose sexual…

Greg Laden, liar.

I know, right? Anthony Watts, of the science-denialist Whats Up with That blog, has got his shorts in a knot because of a post I wrote indicating that he is a boob. He is upset because in a screen shot of him talking about a totally absurd pseudo-scientific claim that should have been rejected out of hand, I failed to include enough of the post to show that he was skeptical about the claim. Let me be very very clear: This is not a claim to be skeptical about. This is a Teapot orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars claim. A person who has reported debunked claims about alien life again…

A Book about Taung and "the Hobbit"

The Fossil Chronicles: How Two Controversial Discoveries Changed Our View of Human Evolution is by a scientist Dean Falk, who has contributed significantly to the study of evolution of the human brain, and who has been directly involved in some of the more interesting controversies in human evolution. Back when I was a graduate student I was assigned by my advisor a set of literature to absorb and comment on. The mix of published and soon to be published papers included a series of papers written by Ralph Holloway and Dean Falk. These represented a fight over the interpretation of early…

The Consensus on Climate Change

Sadly, a large percentage of Americans are under the impression that climate scientists do not agree on the reality of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). A lot of people are simply wrong about this. They think that there is a great deal of controversy among the scientists who study the Earth's climate. But there isn't. One way we know this is from a study done by John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce, called "Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature…

Updates on the past few posts:

I have a some updates on a few stories I covered the past couple of weeks: Some people who proclaim to have 'chronic fatigue syndrome' show everyone just how NOT CRAZY they are... by transcribing my entire interview with Conspiracy Skeptic by hand (they cant hold a job you see-- 'brain fog') and comparing me to a cheerleader/goat, and fantasizing about me getting my comeuppance for daring to speak negatively about St. Judy Mikovits (ie-- tell everyone the bullshit she and her comrades have been up to). Just to be clear, these folks are NOT CRAZY. THEYRE NOT FUCKING CRAZY GODDAMMIT!!!! We…

Sunday Confession of a Lapsed Priest

Dear Reader Michael Merren of the Religion, Philosophy and Other Oddities blog is a married man and a father of three. He also used to be a Catholic priest. Learning this, I asked Michael to write a guest entry on his personal history. And now I know whom to turn to with any theological question that might pop up. I don't know where else to start than from the beginning. I was raised Roman Catholic and always felt drawn to do something to give back to humankind, to be great and benefit my fellow man in some way. Some might call that a "vocation" or a "calling" I suppose. As a Catholic boy the…

Sam Harris Drives His Critics Insane

You can accuse Sam Harris of a lot of things, but being a bad writer is not one of them. Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I basically agree but think his manner of expression makes life too easy for his critics, and sometimes I disagree. But I always feel like I understand perfectly what he believes and why he believes it. I have also read enough of his writing and have seen enough of his public appearances to feel confident that he is in no way motivated by bigotry or Islamophobia. (Spare me the relentless out-of-context quotations that are meant to prove otherwise and the indignant…

Crux Magazine Off to Bad Start

Crux magazine is a new publication with a virtual who's who of ID advocates as contributors and editors. It also has three blogs associated with it, with contributions from those same people. While declaring itself the "last bastion of Truth" (yes, they even capitalized it), their contributors seem to have a little difficulty grasping the non-capitalized variety of truth in two articles about the Sternberg/Smithsonian situation. The first, written by Crux senior editor Bobby Maddex, repeats the accusations in the David Klinghoffer WSJ piece as gospel truth, but adds one bit of falsehood to it…

The Right Divided over Miers

It's kind of fun watching the right disagreeing over the nomination of Harriet Miers. It's even more fun watching them continue to scream about the left while doing so. Here's what Jay Sekulow, head of Pat Robertson's American Center for Law and Justice, had to say yesterday: "Once again, President Bush showed exceptional judgment in naming Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court to replace Justice O'Connor," said Sekulow in a statement. "At a time when the high court is facing some of the most critical issues of the day - including a number of cases dealing directly with abortion and life issues…

Sandefur Reviews Barnett

Timothy Sandefur has a review of Randy Barnett's book Restoring the Lost Constitution available on SSRN. It's an excellent review that adds some additional background to Barnett's work and the importance of the presumption of liberty. There are a couple of points I want to highlight from that review. One of the arguments one hears constantly from critics of the presumption of liberty, and you can see it in the many immediate responses to my earlier post on the subject at Positive Liberty, is that there is no objective way for judges to determine what is and is not a right other than by…

Cheney's Political Lies

We're all used to lies from politicians, so used to them that most of us barely react at all when we come across a new one. But one thing that fascinates me is someone lying boldly, that is, lying when it's so easy to find the truth and when they know that lots of people will in fact find it. One perfect recent example of this is Jerry Falwell's lie that his ministry had never lost their tax exempt status at any time. He said that on national television knowing full well that it was a lie and that, in fact, it was a matter of public record and that the resulting IRS fine had been announced in…

Tamara Wilhite Responds....kind of

In the last few months, I've given away numerous Idiot of the Week awards. This is the first time any recipient has ever replied. Mrs. Wilhite sent me an e-mail this evening. As we shall see, it is as badly reasoned and ridiculous as the commentary that won her this prestigious award in the first place. She begins: With regard to your blog - which someone sent me after searching for one of my articles - it was interesting. Do you really see yourself as in a war against conservatives? Of course not, nor do I recall ever saying or implying such. I find it bizarre when someone identifies…

How Big is Our Observable Universe?

"The mind, once expanded to the dimensions of larger ideas, never returns to its original size." -Oliver Wendell Holmes When General Relativity supplanted Newton's work as our theory of how gravity works in the Universe, it didn't just change how we view how masses attract, it gave us a new understanding of what the questions where and when actually mean. It gave us the very fabric of spacetime. Image credit: Christopher Vitale of http://networkologies.wordpress.com/. What this meant is that no longer could we view objects like matter and radiation as existing in some fixed, grid-like…

Baghdad Update: Rust and Paint

Senior Middle East Correspondant Paul Schemm checks in with another email update from Baghdad, this time describing a visit to a tank graveyard. ----------------------- It was a graveyard. That was the only way to describe it. The place where old war machines came to die. Row upon row of massive sand-colored metal tanks, their huge guns each raised to a different height, like a frozen image of a clumsy chorus line. There weren't just tanks either, massive artillery pieces, trucks, strange amphibious vehicles that looked half boat - an automotive mating ritual gone horribly wrong, and all…

Earmarks and the Ridicule of Science

There's an interesting exchange over at the Reality-Based Community around the topic of "earmarks" for science, like the grizzly bear DNA study McCain keeps mocking. Michael O'Hare argues that science should not be funded by earmarks: Almost any piece of scientific research, especially in biology, that isn't called "Cure cancer!" is liable to the kind of ignorant ridicule lobbed at these. Sure, some research is deeply silly and some is not worth doing. But that non-specialists can make fun of something from its title means nothing, and these japes indicate only the smug ignorance of the…

My New Tablet PC

Important Notice: I am not interested in what Cory Doctorow has termed "helpiness" (in analogy with Stephen Colbert's "truthiness") namely comments that have the general syntactical form of useful advice, without the content of useful advice. I don't want to hear about how I really should've bought a Mac, or ought to be running Linux, or whatever. This is commentary on the specific Tablet PC that I purchased recently, and nothing more. As noted here a few times, I recently acquired a Lenovo ThinkPad X61 Tablet PC, which does, in fact, have the touch screen option, though I didn't think it did…

A letter to you about saving the ocean

Dear Reader. The following letter was written by Randy Repass and Sally-Christine Rodgers and it concerns you and the planet earth. The publication of this letter is happening in numerous blogs at the same time, coordinated by Sheril Kirshenbaum. We are both lifelong boaters. What we have learned from sailing across the Pacific over the past 6 years, and especially from scientists focused on marine conservation, is startling. Whether you spend time on the water or not, Ocean Acidification affects all of us and is something we believe you will want to know about. What would you do if…

Still More On the Problem of Evil

After posting this essay about skeptical theism last week, Michael Egnor showed up in the comments to heckle me. Egnor, if you are unfamiliar with him, is a blogger for the Discovery Institute, which does not bode well for the merits of his comment. He opened his remarks sensibly enough by conceding both that evil poses a great problem for Christians and also that he had no solution to offer. But then he went off the rails by claiming that atheists have no right to assert the problem of evil since, having rejected the existence of God, we lack an objective standard of morality from which…

Did You See What Anand Did to Aronian at Wijk aan Zee?

Today we have cause to celebrate. I am breaking the months-long chess drought at this blog. You see, the future game of the year was just played in the big chess tournament at Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands, and I could not live with myself if I did not share it with you. Playing white is Levon Aronian, currently ranked number two in the world. Playing black is Viswanathan Anand, the current World Champion. Anand's results over the last few years have not been up to his historical standards. He barely managed to keep his title last year, and he has not won a tournament in over four…

Netanyahu Is Crazy, But So Are Many Of His Critics

These are hard times to be a supporter of Israel. Bibi Netanyahu is a lunatic who is now actively trying to mess with the American election. You see, President Obama, early in his term, politely suggested that if Israel seriously wants to make peace with its neighbors they might want to consider not expanding settlements in the West Bank. For this transgression, Netanyahu, and his lackeys on the American Right, have decided that Obama is morbidly anti-Israel. Their relentless vitriol has convinced some of the dimmer segments of the American Jewish population that they should vote for…

Michael Egnor is a friggen nutbar.

(H/T AtBC) Oooooooookaaaaay. I think its time for nappy-nap time at the Discovery Institute. Casey-baby is all cranky, and now Michael Egnor, who is normally the most adorable cuddliest toddler ever has thrown a mighty temper tantrum. While their ba-bas are warming up in the microwave, lets preserve this rant for posterity. Cause its all about how awesome Creationism is. Yes, Creationism. Engors word. Not mine (well, its mine too for describing ID, but he did it *points*): Most Americans are creationists, in the sense that they believe that God played an important role in creating human…

What I Really Think

It's sweet. It's soooo sweet. All the years of hiding, of playing along, of pretending to be one of them, just to get to this point. How many times did I sit there during afternoon tea, throwing darts at the board with Michael Behe's face on it, laughing at their sick little jokes: How many Creationists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Creationists don't use lightbulbs. They prefer the Dark Ages!! Hahahahahaha! Hey, that's a good one. Tell me that one about William Dumbski again... Sure, I went along. I participated in all those morbidly anti-religious initiation rites…

Is God Like an Imaginary Number?

As a companion piece to yesterday's post have a look at this essay in the religious periodical First Things, written by Amanda Shaw. The purpose is to draw a parallel between imaginary numbers and belief in God. You see, for centuries mathematicians scoffed at the idea of imaginary numbers, but a few brave folks were able to look beyond the stiflng orthodoxy of their times and now imaginary numbers are commonly accepted. See where this is going? Shaw presents a passable history of imaginary numbers. But if her intention is to develop a parallel between belief in imaginary numbers and…

The Democrats on Church and State

Here is one of the questions from last night's bizarre CNN/You Tube debate with the Democratic candidates: QUESTION: Hi, I'm Zenne Abraham in Oakland, California. The cathedral behind me is the perfect backdrop for this question. This quarter reads “United States of America.” And when I turn it over, you find that it reads “liberty, in God we trust.” What do those words mean to you? Thank you. And here's how Senator Biden responded: COOPER: Senator Biden. BIDEN: Religion informs my values. BIDEN: My reason dictates outcomes. My religion taught me about abuse of power. That's why I moved to…

Another Round on Evolution and Thermodynamics

One of the great frustrations in responding to creationist literature is their penchant for using technical sounding jargon in ways no scientist would recognize. A good example is their use of the word “information.” This word has a variety of meanings within mathematics, but creationists usually do not intend any of them when they say, “Natural selection can not lead to information increase in the genome.” Instead they mean something like, “I find it hard to believe that evolution can lead to organisms becoming more complex over time.” That is why they are generally unmoved when you ask…

PNAS: Julie Myers-Irvin, Scientist Administrator

(On July 16, 2009, I asked for volunteers with science degrees and non-academic jobs who would be willing to be interviewed about their careers paths, with the goal of providing young scientists with more information about career options beyond the pursuit of a tenure-track faculty job that is too often assumed as a default. This post is one of those interviews, giving the responses of Julie Myers-Irvin, who helps scientists put together grants.) 1) What is your non-academic job? I work at the University of Pittsburgh as a "Scientist Administrator" (a terribly nondescript title that I will…

Links Dump Backlog: 7/25/09

The del.icio.us automatic blog posting that usually produces the daily links dump posts here has been broken during the recent ScienceBlogs upgrade. The links dump posts from last Thursday on didn't happen, but we've kludged up a way to get that material back. These are the links that should've posted on Saturday the 25th: Friday Recipe: Chinese Potstickers (aka Jiao Zi) : Good Math, Bad Math Mmmmmmm.... potstickers..... (tags: food blogs good-math) The importance of stupidity in scientific research -- Schwartz 121 (11): 1771 -- Journal of Cell Science "A Ph.D., in which you have to do a…

The Discovery Institute doesn't like smart college students

Those crazy rascals behind Expelled have some new games they want to play: they've put out a casting call for victims of persecution. It's a pitiful plea, but it will probably net a nice collection of complaints — because it's true. We do reject Intelligent Design from the academy, from science, and from science education, and there's a very good reason for that: it's the same reason we reject astrology, alchemy, creationism, haruspication, necromancy, ornithomancy, and witchcraft from our science courses. Because they aren't science. Taylor Kessinger gets it. He's a junior at the…

There's No Cloning in Football

Sunday night, the Patriots lost a heartbreaker to the Colts 35-34. The talk of the sports world yesterday was Bill Belichick's decision to go for it on fouth-and-two on his own 28 yard line when he was up by six with just over two minutes to play. They didn't get the first down, and turned the ball back over to the Colts, who went on to score a touchdown and win the game. Yesterday's discussion was a low point even by the standards of sports talk radio, with one idiot after another holding forth about how stupid Belichick's decisions was, and how he "disrespected his defense," and various…

Academia == Hollywood?

Matt Yglesias points to a Peter Suderman post talking about this post about finding jobs: The last couple of years have seen my friends begin to start their honest-to-goodness careers, as opposed to jobs that were by design short-term. I'd say that among people I would call friends, a good two dozen have gotten long-term/serious jobs in the last couple years. And here's the thing: literally none of them got there jobs without some sort of "in", a personal connection that got them the job. It goes on a bit from there, and Peter and Matt add some good thoughts about why this might not be as…

Lab Visit Report: Cold Plasmas

Another of the labs I visited while in DC was Steve Rolston's lab at the University of Maryland. This actually contains the apparatus I worked on as a graduate student, including many of the same quirky pieces of hardware-- Steve was the PI (Principal Investigator) for the metastable xenon lab in the Phillips group at NIST, and when he left NIST to take a faculty position at Maryland, he took the apparatus with him. The xenon lab is now dedicated to work on ultracold plasma physics, which they were just starting when I graduated. The idea is that you can use laser cooling to accumulate a…

You Are What You Appear to Have Read

Scott McLemee writes about the shelving of books, spinning off Matt Selman's list of rules for shelving books RULE #1: THE PRIME DIRECTIVE -- It is unacceptable to display any book in a public space of your home if you have not read it. Therefore, to be placed on Matt Selman's living room bookshelves, a book must have been read cover to cover, every word, by Matt Selman. If you are in the home of Matt Selman and see a book on the living room shelves, you know FOR SURE it has been read by Matt Selman. (has anyone ever seen Selman and Mike Kozlowski in the same place?) and Ezra Klein's…

JAM redux: a summary

Okay, so I have recovered from my visit to Washington, and my first JAM conference. Here are some highlights that are more edited than my lame live-blogging post is. ;-) I didn't realize how big JAM is -- there were ~1200 people attending, and ADVANCE was only a very very small part. There were people from AGEP, TCUP, GSE, CREST, RDE, HBCU-UP, and LSAMP. [Acronym dejargoner: AGEP= Alliances for Graduate Education and the Professoriate HBCU=Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program TCUP=Tribal Colleges and Universities Program LSAMP= Louis Stokes Alliances for…

Brain-enhancing drugs work by focusing brain activity... for better or worse

It's late at night and although I want to finish this post, I'm pretty shattered. At the moment, I sorely need to boost my concentration and attentiveness and stave off the effects of fatigue. In lieu of actually getting some sleep, the ability to pop a little pill that will have the same effect sounds pretty enticing. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily), the closest thing I have available is some coffee in the kitchen. But for many people, taking a pill to sharpen your mental faculties - a so-called "cognitive enhancer" - is a much easier deal. A large number of prescription drugs can…

Bacteria inspire drug that protects against radiation sickness

For comic book characters, big doses of radiation are a surefire way of acquiring awesome superpowers, but in real life, the results aren't quite as glamorous. A victim of acute radiation poisoning can look forward to hair loss, bleeding, the destruction of their white blood cells and bone marrow, and severe damage to their spleen, stomach and intestines. Radiation doesn't kill cells directly, but it can cause so much damage that they commit suicide, by enacting a failsafe program called apoptosis.  Now, Lyudmila Burdelya and colleagues from Roswell Park Cancer Institute have found a way to…

The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center takes legal action against Evolv water

In September we posted "M.D. Anderson name misused in Evolv nutraceutical water advertising," detailing the not-exactly-truthful claim by a multilevel marketing company that their bottled water product was "tested" by one of North America's premier teaching and research hospitals. A flurry of search engine hits to this post raised my attention to the fact that the The University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center has now initiated legal action against the makers of Evolv. Cameron Langford at Courthouse News Service reports: Two companies are pushing bottled tap water with false claims…

A river runs through this compromise

The South Nahanni River defies description. It is one of the most spectacular lengths of runnable river in the world. It lies in the southwestern corner of Canada's Northwest Territories and offers one of the more accessible wilderness adventures in the Arctic. Canoeing the Nahanni should be on everyone's lifetime to-do list. The waterfalls at right are twice the height of Niagara. Today it's in the news because the Canadian government has, after years of dragging its feet, agreed to expand the park that encompasses it by 5,400 square kilometres, a move that will help protect the river from…

How not to save the whales

It's that time of year, when the International Whaling Commission gets together and pretends its decisions will be based on the best available science. In addition to poorly serving the planet's cetaceans, these annual gatherings are embarrassments for both the pro-whaling members and the animal-rights gang. It's also a case study in the politicization and abuse of the scientific method. For those familiar with the IWC, it's the recognized world authority on whaling. Formed about 60 years ago after it became bleedingly obvious that the industry required regulation -- the near extinction of…

One parasite to rule them all - Wolbachia protects against mosquito-borne diseases

This is an updated version of the first post I wrote this year. The scientists in question were looking at ways of recruiting bacteria in the fight against mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever. They've just published new results that expand on their earlier experiments. Mosquitoes are incredibly successful parasites and cause millions of human deaths every year through the infections they spread. But they are no match for the most successful parasite of all - a bacterium called Wolbachia. It infects around 60% of the world's insect species and it could be our newest recruit in the…

Fertility rates climb back up in the most developed countries

You wouldn't think it to look at our skyrocketing global population, but many parts of the world are experiencing serious falls in fertility. A country's fertility rate is the average number of children  born to a woman over her lifetime. In most developed countries, it needs to be 2.1 or higher if the number of newborns is to compensate for citizens who die. In developing countries, where death is a more frequent visitor, this replacement threshold is even higher. The problem is that declining fertility is intimately linked with a country's economic and social development. As a result, more…

Noise pollution drives away some birds, but benefits those that stay behind

Cities are noisy places. If you ever get annoyed by the constant din of traffic, machinery and increasingly belligerent inhabitants, think about what songbirds must think. Many birds rely on songs to demarcate their territories and make their advances known to mates. They listen out not just for the sounds of seduction or rivalry, but for approaching predators and alarm calls that signify danger. Hearing these vital notes may be the different between life and death. Last year, I wrote a feature for New Scientist about the effect that urban noise has on songbirds. Those that can't make…

The infofuse - encoding messages using colourful fire

For many of us, the most memorable bits of school chemistry classes were lessons where we ignited metal salts over a Bunsen burner to produce brightly coloured flames, from the lilac of potassium to the distinctive red of lithium. Now a group of chemists from Harvard University have found a way of using these colourful flames to transmit coded information. Working in the lab of legendary chemist George Whitesides, Samuel Thomas III has developed the 'infofuse', a strip of flammable paper patterned with metal salts. As the strip burns, the metals change the colour of the flames, creating…

Baby names suggest that cultural trends are abandoned more readily the quicker they catch on

Popularity is a fickle thing. Styles, products, social movements and people can be bathing in the spotlight one day and languishing in obscurity the next. And according to a new study, things that catch on most quickly are also abandoned most easily - the faster the rise to prominence, the steeper the fall from grace. Many researchers have looked into the reasons behind the success of cultural tastes, but Jonah Berger and Gael Le Mens were more interested in the factors that drive them to extinction. To examine that, they looked at the changing popularities of first names in France and the…

Human-induced evolution reverses for shrunken fish once fishing stops

Earlier this year, I wrote about how the human obsession with size is reshaping the bodies of other species at an incredible pace. Unlike natural predators that cull the sick, weak and unfit, human fishermen prize the biggest catches and throw the smallest ones back in. As a result, fish and other species harvested by humans are shrinking, often within a few generations, and are becoming sexually mature at an earlier stage. These changes are bad news for populations as a whole, for smaller individuals often have lower odds of survival and produce fewer offspring. But David Conover from…

How political should scientists be?

Keith Burgess-Jackson questions in his TCS column whether we should listen to people like Noam Chomsky's opinions on politics -- a realm notably outside their stated occupational expertise. I must admit that I haven't read what Noam Chomsky's opinions are lately -- although it is my suspicion that with respect to the present administration, they are hardly complimentary. To whit: Noam Chomsky is, by all accounts, a brilliant linguist. Let me stipulate that this is the case, since I'm not a linguist myself. Let me also stipulate that he is a competent philosopher of language, although he has…

Not so much "Are Whales Fish?" as much as "Who Says So?"

Pt 1 | Pt 2 - - - Part 2 with Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here. WF: What would you have biologists today take from this book? I ask because you are at some pains in Trying Leviathan to argue for the contingencies of taxonomic systems, which appear always to be in flux, and seem generally to reflect a host of larger cultural preoccupations. DGB: I don't think of my book as having special "lessons" for biologists. Indeed, I rather incline away from thinking of my books as having "lessons" for…

Elsewhere on the Interweb (9/6/07)

Beer pong is now industrial: These guys aren't exactly Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. But Messrs. Wright and Johnson, both 22 years old, are part of a new wave of young people trying to make money tapping into their peers' devotion to beer pong, a cross between ping-pong and beer chugging. As beer-pong season hits a peak with the start of the school year, these beer-pong entrepreneurs are running tournaments and peddling customized beer-pong tables, balls and apparel. In 2004, brothers Ben and Jesse Spiegel took a leave from the University of Denver, pooled more than $50,000 in savings and…

Revisiting Rivista

The following post first appeared at my old blog on June 2nd 2005. I'm reposting it here, not just because PZ recently linked to it, but because it remains a relevant examination of the sorts of venues anti-evolutionists choose for their "scholarship". Today, the DI proudly announced that "[f]or the second time in nine months, an article explicitly applying intelligent design theory to scientific research has been published in an internationally respected biology journal -- despite Darwinists' claims that this never happens." This leads one to wonder about the status of Rivista within the…