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Ermentrude the liolaemine

Thank you and well done to everyone who had a bash at identifying Ermentrude. For the most part, you were correct: Ermentrude was indeed an iguanian, and within Iguania a tropidurid... or tropidurine... I mean liolaemid... or liolaemine, or liolaemin.. and, within that group, a species of the large South American taxon Liolaemus. What species? Well, that's a bit trickier to answer... An average of about four new Liolaemus species are described every year, and there are currently around 200 species*, so it can be difficult to keep track of them. Ermentrude was labelled as a 'spotted swift'…

Programming without Control: Smith

Joy of joys, [Cat's Eye Technologies](http://catseye.mine.nu:8080/projects/), the home of Chris Pressey, one of the most prolific designers of thoroughly bizarre languages is back up! And so, today, we're going to take a look at one of his masterpieces, the language *Smith*. This is one of my personal all-time favorite pathological languages; it's positively brilliantly twisted. Smith is, mostly, a pretty typical memory-oriented machine language. So what makes it pathological? It's got *no* jumps, *no* branches, *no* control flow whatsoever. The program counter starts at zero, and every step…

Birdbooker Report 122

tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books Books to the ceiling, Books to the sky, My pile of books is a mile high. How I love them! How I need them! I'll have a long beard by the time I read them. ~ Arnold Lobel [1933-1987] author of many popular children's books. The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature, environment and behavior books and field guides that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "…

2009, a year of Tet Zooery

So, if you read the previous article, you'll know that we're here because Tet Zoo was four years old on January 21st. In that article, I got as far as discussing blog-relevant events that happened up to the end of May or so. Time to crack on... During June I had a particularly bizarre job - I did a day's worth of radio interviews on behalf of The Sun newspaper. They were running a promotional event that tied in with the British tour of the Walking With Dinosaurs Live show (incidentally, I was fact-checker for the script of WWD Live when I worked at Impossible Pictures). Felt a bit weird…

How eyes talk to each other?

One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output. In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei are anatomically close to each other and have direct nerve connections between them, so it is not difficult to imagine how the two clocks manage to remain continuously coupled (syncronized) to each other and, together, produce a single output, thus synchronizing all the rhythms in the body. In the…

ScienceOnline'09 - Interview with Greg Laden

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked one of my SciBlings, Greg Laden of the eponymous blog, to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? When I was young, I intended to become a priest. Since I was being raised among Jesuits…

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. I guess picking all 12 would not really be 'picking'? But all 12 are interesting to me! OK, here are six, and you go and look at the other six as well. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Social Waves in Giant Honeybees Repel Hornets: Giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) nest in the open and have evolved a plethora of defence behaviors. Against predatory wasps, including hornets, they display highly coordinated Mexican wave-like cascades termed 'shimmering'. Shimmering…

Obama-McCain race - a Serbian parallel lesson?

For some reason, my (rare) posts in which I make direct comparisons between Serbia and the USA (usually about politics) tend to become wildly popular (as in: spreading like wildfire on digg, redditt, stumbleupon, etc.). See, for example: Bush is Milosevic, Comparative Wingnuttery, Darwin in Serbia, More about me, The Warriors, Never Again!, Sixteen years ago today, We are now officially living in a dictatorship and When religion goes berserk! for examples of my typically inflamatory prose on the topic ;-) Let me take a stab at another one, connected to the current US election. I'll try to…

How eyes talk to each other?

One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output. In the case of mammals, the two pacemakers are the left and the right suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN). The tow nuclei are anatomically close to each other and have direct nerve connections between them, so it is not difficult to imagine how the two clocks manage to remain continuously coupled (syncronized) to each other and, together, produce a single output, thus synchronizing all the rhythms in the body. In the…

Tsunamis and Mangroves: The Shrimp Connection

tags: Environment, tsunami, earthquake, Indonesia, Mangrove, Shrimp Farming Note: Originally published on 2 January 2005. Nominated for the 2005 Koufax Award for "Best Individual Post". Indonesian Mangrove. All the survivors agreed that 26 December 2004 was an idyllic morning, indeed, it was a perfect morning, in spite of the earthquake. This earthquake was triggered within an interval of a few seconds when the Indian tectonic plate suddenly plunged 20 meters (60 feet) under the Burmese tectonic plate along the Sunda Trench. This submarine jolt caused the Burmese plate and the lands…

Books: 'The Poisoner's Handbook' by Deborah Blum

If you picked up The Poisoner's Handbook (amazon.com) looking for a fool-proof recipe, I hope you have read the book through and realized at the end that such a thing does not exist: you'll get busted. If they could figure it all out back in 1930s, can you imagine how much easier they can figure out a case of poisoning today, with modern sensitive techniques? And if you have read the book through, I hope you found it as fascinating as I did. Perhaps you should use your fascination with poisons to do good instead, perhaps become a forensic toxicologist? My SciBling Deborah Blum (blog, Twitter…

Scooped

Why do people worry about being scooped, how do scoops happen, how can there be rumours of discoveries and why isn't the whole process made transparent? Asked a commenter a few weeks ago during the speculation about Greg Laughlin's teasing anagram hint about a pending discovery or new result. Why do academic scientists worry about being scooped? Are there situations where it is not a concern? And if so, why the secrecy? And why isn't there a way to publicly record precedent without the games and rumouring? The essence of the scoop is someone working on a result, and a competing group…

Birds in the News 86 (v3n13)

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter Yellow-eyed Junco, Junco phaeonotus: Resident in the mountains of southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico. Preferred habitats include coniferous forests and pine-oak woods. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger] Birds in Science Wild ducks have been fitted with global positioning system (GPS) devices in an effort to track migratory patterns in China. The Bureau of Animal and Plant Health Inspection and Quarantine (BAPHIQ) under the Council of Agriculture (COA), in collaboration with the wild bird societies of…

Birds in the News 133

tags: Birds in the News, BirdNews, ornithology, birds, avian, newsletter "Not skulking" Lincoln's Sparrow, Melospiza lincolnii. Image: Dave Rintoul, KSU [larger view]. People Hurting Birds The number of lesser scaup is dwindling, and it could be an invasive species that does them in. Invasive snails and parasites are attacking these and other ducks on the Upper Mississippi. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officials say with no natural predators, the snails and the parasites are thriving, and killing off a duck population that is already in trouble. The snail has helped kill nearly 50,000…

Will Gulf Coast ecosystem restoration include restoring the health of its people?

By Elizabeth Grossman It's now almost eleven months since the BP/Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded, killing 11 workers, and almost eight months since the damaged well was capped. While the emergency phase of this disaster is over, the assessment of and response to its long-term impacts are just now getting underway. On February 28th, the Gulf Ecosystem Restoration Task Force held the second of its five planned meetings - this one in New Orleans - and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) launched its long-term study to evaluate health effects of the oil spill…

California work fatalities and injuries on the rise while millions of dollars of enforcement resources are “left sitting on the table”

At the end of two complete years when dozens of fully-funded field compliance positions went empty, reported workplace fatalities and injuries in California are on the rise. California’s Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) has had a monthly average of 34 vacant field enforcement positions since July 2015, which means that more than $10 million in state-authorized funding was left unused. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest available data shows that 388 workers were fatally injured on the job in California in 2015. On average, that is more than one worker a…

coolfuturesfundsmanagement

Bored with force X from outer space? Was Force F just too fuckwitted, and part 22 just too dull? Then why not play "hedge funds"? Hedge funds do lots of complex maths and make lots of money (only not so much recently); they also have the advantage of being opaque. So play today, with Jo Nova and her band of performing marsupials. Yes, I know, its a picture of a monkey with an arrow up it's bum, and a monkey is not a marsupial. But no known mediaeval manuscripts feature marsupials. Context, context: I forget the context in my obsession with primate posteriors. coolfuturesfundsmanagement is,…

Historical Ignorance on Display

One of the Talk to Action diaries has the text of a speech by Gary Lankford, president of the Ohio Restoration Project. Some of the statements in it are astonishingly ignorant. Like this one: For over 300 years in America, it was widely assumed that to be in public office, you needed to be a Christian--or at least a Unitarian or a Deist. And that distinction, though important, wasn't critical, because even Deists in ages past were much more biblical in their worldview and their understanding of scripture than many of today's Evangelical office-holders. Wow. Has he never read Thomas Paine? Or…

Drawing Religious Battle Lines

I had a long phone conversation the other day with a friend who is a devout Christian. I remarked that it's always difficult for me to strike a balance in my writing in terms of justifiably criticizing the Christian right while not sounding as though I am generally anti-Christian (which I'm not). I write a lot about some of the utter stupidity I see , in particular, from the more political forms of Christianity (the war on Christmas, creationism, claims about the founding fathers, reconstructionism). As a result, I tend to attract a lot of people who, in my view, take things entirely too far…

NBA Draft Review

In one of the craziest drafts I've ever seen, the craziest move of the night belonged to - who else? - Isiah Thomas. I've given the numbers before to demonstrate Thomas' world class incompetence as an executive, but let's recap: 3 years ago he took over a 35 win team that was $40 million over the salary cap and had long term contracts with stiffs from one end of the bench to the other He's traded away 25 players and traded for 18 players in 3 years. And he now has a 20 win team that's $85 million over the salary cap and long term contracts with a different set of stiffs from one end of the…

Hearings on Presidential Signing Statements

The Senate Judiciary Committee has begun holding hearings on the issue of presidential signing statements. PSS are statements that the President signs along with a piece of legislation that gives his interpretation of certain provisions of the act. Such statements are not new, but Bush has used them more often than any other President in history, by a wide margin, and for increasingly deceptive intent. In principle there is nothing wrong with such statements, but if they essentially say that the President reserves the right to ignore those provisions he doesn't like, that's pretty obviously a…

An Open Letter to Neil deGrasse Tyson

Dr. Tyson: (I find the faux-familiar thing people do with "open letters" really grating, so I'm not going to presume to call you "Neil" through the following...) First of all, I should probably say "Thanks," because I'm using some of your material in my class this term-- I had them read Stick in the Mud Astronomy, and contrast it with wacky Ancient Alien stuff, and gave them a second assignment based on Manhattanhenge, so that stuff's great. And I'm psyched to hear you've gotten your own talk show. So, you know, that stuff's awesome. Thanks. And I should also note that while I haven't always…

What we learn just by being here

"Everyone carries a piece of the puzzle. Nobody comes into your life by mere coincidence. Trust your instincts. Do the unexpected. Find the others." -Timothy Leary Here we are, on planet Earth, the product of generations of civilization-building, maybe four-billion years of evolution on our world, around 13.7 billion years into the existence of our observable Universe. Image credit: Paranal Observatory, ESO / Babak Tafreshi. The Universe, quite possibly, didn't have to be exactly the way it is. It didn't have to have the laws of physics be exactly what they are, with the masses and charges…

Weekend Diversion: You are responsible for what you say

"In the long run, we shape our lives, and we shape ourselves. The process never ends until we die. And the choices we make are ultimately our own responsibility." -Eleanor Roosevelt I've always been a big fan of personal freedom, which includes the freedom to speak your mind, say what you think, ask questions, be wrong, and learn. This is, after all, how we've all improved ourselves over our lives, as none of us were born knowing all that we've managed to acquire over our lifetimes. And I've never had to have an official comment policy for all the years I've been blogging; the most I've ever…

Testing Matt Ridley's Hypotheses About Global Warming

Matt Ridley has written an opinion piece for The Times (not the New York Times, the other one) which is a response to his critics, specifically, to those who openly disagree with him about climate change. Ridley’s commentary is jaw dropping, and for most of you, those who are not of Royal Blood and highly privileged, it is more than a little squirm-inducing. But, putting that aside, Ridley makes a number of assertions, two of which (*) I’d like to address. Other problems with Ridley's approach have been addressed here, by Dana Nuccitelli. Spoiler alert, he is wrong on both counts. First, to…

2014 will not be the warmest year on record, but global warming is still real.

I'm going out on a limb here. 2014 has been a very warm year. We've had a number of record setting months. But, a couple of months were also coolish, and November was one of them. December started out cool (like November ended) globally, but actually over the last few days the global average temperature has been going up. But, unless December gets really warm really fast, is is probably true that we will break some records but not all. This entire discussion, however, is problematic for a number of reasons. How much does one year matter? How warm or cold a given year is does not matter…

Something important, something troubling, and something dangerous

The important thing first. I predicted who would win the Wisconsin primary, although my prediction suggested that Sanders would do better than he did. (He underperformed.) I predicted the outcome of the Wyoming primary exactly. These are the most recent two in a long series of mostly correct predictions of which Democratic candidate will win each of the contests in this long presidential primary season. My predictions of which candidate would win have been mostly accurate, but also, fairly accurate with respect to how many delegates each candidate would pick up. Several primaries back, for…

Arctic Sea Ice in 2015

Every year the sea ice that covers the northern part of the Earth expands and contracts though the winter and the summer. The minimum extent of the sea ice is usually reached some time in September, after which it starts to reform. Human caused greenhouse gas pollution has increased the surface temperatures of the earth, as measured on the land at about heat height with thermometers, and on the sea at the surface, mainly with satellites. Warming of the surface has continued apace for several decades, though with some expected squiggling up and down in how fast that is happening. Greenhouse…

What do you think about Hillary Clinton's climate plan?

Hillary Clinton just came out with her climate change plan. Here it is. Hillary Clinton’s Vision for Modernizing North American Energy Infrastructure Flipping a light switch, adjusting the thermostat, or turning a car key in the ignition brings predictable results—the light goes on, the temperature changes, the car starts. But where the energy for those everyday tasks comes from has changed dramatically in recent years, due to massive gains in renewable energy and a boom in domestic oil and gas production. And the amount of energy required to perform those tasks has fallen thanks to historic…

Egnor's machine is uninhabited by any ghost

Egnor, the smug creationist neurosurgeon, is babbling again, but this time, it's on a subject that he might be expected to have some credibility: the brain (he has one, and operates on them) and the mind (this might be a problem for him). It's an interesting example of the religious pathology that's going to be afflicting us for probably the next century — you see, creationism is only one symptom. We're seeing an ongoing acceleration in scientific understanding that challenge the traditional truisms of the right wing religious culture warriors, and represent three fronts in our future battles…

NSA Wiretapping and Political Discourse

Sandefur posted an unusually important bit of information about the NSA wiretapping scandal at Positive Liberty the other day. Quoting Robert Levy, a constitutional scholar at the Cato Institute, he established that the FISA law explicitly said that warrantless wiretaps were only allowed during the first 15 days after war was declared: Second, in FISA, §1811, Congress expressly contemplated warrantless wiretaps during wartime, and limited them to the first 15 days after war is declared. The statute reads: "Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may…

Response to Lawrence VanDyke

Lawrence VanDyke has left a comment below, which I would like to bring up here to address in more detail. Lawrence wrote: I left out the "in support of ID" because I assumed that much was obvious in context. You make it sound like I was trying to make Leiter say ID proponents haven't published any articles in peer reviewed journals at all. If I were trying to say that, my response to Leiter's statement would have been much simpler and I wouldn't have bothered to address Pharyngula's post. Nice try. But the two links you provided don't address what Brian said. They do not provide a single…

Why Romney's "Route to the sea" gaffe is way worse than you think

In last night’s debate, Mitt Romney said this: “Syria is Iran’s only ally in the Arab world. It’s their route to the sea.” This is not the first time Romney has said this. In March, he said, “Maybe one of the few bright spots in the Middle East developments in the last year has been the rising of the people in Syria against Assad. Obviously, as you know, Syria is Iran’s only Arab ally in the region. Syria is the route that allows Iran to supply Hezbollah with weapons in Lebanon. Syria is Iran’s route to the sea …” When he said that in March, the Washington Post called him on it, but…

The vaccination does make the baby cry, so why do it?

It seems like every time I take Huxley (now 18 months old) to the doctor, the following things happen: 1) Somebody says "Well, he won't need to get stuck with any needles for a long while now .... his next scheduled immunization is [insert phrase indicating 'a long time into the future']"; and 2) Huxley gets stuck with some needles. The last time, a few days ago, was especially bad. [A repost in honor of Get Your Damn Flu Vaccine Week] We hung around in the exam room for a while, and Huxley was in a very happy mood. He learned to say "Elmo" and how to point to the "Otoscope" when asked…

El Nino 2014: Historic?

The weatherologists have more or less stopped saying there might be an El Niño this year. Now they are saying there will be an El Niño, and they are starting to consider how strong it will be. Well, actually, they've stopped doing that too and are now talking about whether it will be a mondo-El Niño or a mondo-mondo-El Niño. Here is a newly released video by Peter Sinclair and the Yale Climate Forum about the coming El Niño: I have a prediction to make. First a bit of background. You know about the so-called "hiatus" in global warming, because every Tea Partier with a mouth is yammering…

Why Was Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda So Powerful, and is this a trend?

I’m sure the measurements are still being checked and adjusted but it is clear that Typhoon Haiyan/Yolanda was one of the most powerful tropical cyclones (termed “Typhoon” in the western Pacific) ever recorded. There are several ways to measure how big and bad a tropical cyclone is including it’s overall size from end to end, how low the barometric pressure gets, how high the sustained wind speed is, and how wide that wind field is. In addition, when a typhoon hits land details matter. The front right quadrant of a counter-clockwise spinning typhoon packs the maximum punch and if that part of…

Derek Parfit, Ex-Philosopher

Or, "philosophy advances one funeral at a time"? Oddly, no-one has ever said that (<checks Google> - no, I'm right: no-one ever has) because of course it doesn't fit. Philosophy isn't like science, with clear progress that rather leaves the Emeritus behind it3. DP says otherwise in his magnum opus, OWM, but doesn't prove the point. So: news reaches me of the death of Derek Parfit, Philosopher. I am entirely unaware with his work, although the name is very vaguely familiar. Some people I respect pointed me initially at The whole philosophy community is mourning Derek Parfit. Here's why…

The "Ballistic" Story

Last week, in the post about fermion conduction, I left a reference hanging: There’s nothing physically blocking the atoms from flying right through the channel– in fact, an atom that enters the channel will always exit the other side without slowing down along the way. This is termed “ballistic,” a term that will always have a special place in my heart thanks to an incident at my Ph.D. defense. Which was what? Let’s just leave that hanging to see if anybody actually reads this far. I can explain it in a comment if people want to know. A couple of people asked for the explanation in comments…

Worldnutdaily Owner and Young Earth Creationism

Just when you think Joseph Farah can't get any more absurd, he does. Exhibit A: this column about evolution and creationism. I especially like this tidbit at the beginning: I was stunned the other day when I asked evolution-believing listeners to my nationally syndicated radio show to call in and tell me why they believed. "Just give me one reason why you accept the theory," I said. "Just give me the strongest argument. You don't have to give me mountains of evidence. Just tell me why I should accept it." Not one evolutionist called in. Meanwhile, the phone banks lit up with dozens of…

Excerpts from Hitchens

I came across this interview with Christopher Hitchens and I'd like to post a few excerpts from it. I've long had a fascination with Hitchens. His collection of essays, For the Sake of Argument, is one of my favorites, and I quite enjoy his wit. My earliest memory of him was seeing him on the CNN show Crossfire fairly regularly, where he was a master of the quintessentially British putdown. I particularly recall him going after a conservative guest in the mid-80s on that show, leading to this exchange: "Do you know the phrase 'the global village'?" "Yes" Do you know the phrase 'the village…

Luskin on gene duplication

Casey Luskin has to be a bit of an embarrassment to the IDists…at least, he would be, if the IDists had anyone competent with whom to compare him. I tore down a previous example of Luskin's incompetence at genetics, and now he's gone and done it again. He complains about an article by Richard Dawkins that explains how gene duplication and divergence are processes that lead to the evolution of new information in the genome. Luskin, who I suspect has never taken a single biology class in his life, thinks he can rebut the story. He fails miserably in everything except revealing his own ignorance…

Miscellaneous inanities

The godless seem to be making some people desperate and angry and worried — the stupid arguments have just been flooding in, and I've had to exercise some restraint, or every day would be a day for yet another long "religiots are nuts" post. So I've saved them up and will throw them out with fairly short commentary here. You'll see what I mean: bad arguments and pious indignation seem to be the only fuel they're running on right now. First up, let's pick on a University of Chicago student. He's very upset that scholars (oh, excuse me: "scholars") dare to point out the follies of religion. The…

Quantum Mechanics Is Square: "Ruling Out Multi-Order Interference in Quantum Mechanics"

This week's big story in physics is this Science paper by a group out of Austria Canada (edited to fix my misreading of the author affiliations), on a triple-slit interference effect. This has drawn both the usual news stories and also some complaining about badly-worded news stories. So, what's the deal? What did they do in this paper? The paper reports on an experiment in which they looked at the interference of light sent through a set of three small slits, and verified that the resulting pattern agrees with the predictions of the Born rule for quantum probabilities. What does Matt Damon…

Effect of Political Leaning: Franken-leaning areas do not produce more Franken votes in recount

... and there is strong evidence of shenanigans on the part of Coleman supporters (or someone). As I mentioned earlier, the idea is afoot that there will be more of a shift towards Al Franken in geographical regions that favor Franken than in Coleman-sympathetic regions, in the current US Senate recount for Minnesota. I disagree, and in fact, I'm going to suggest the opposite. There seem to be two reasons proposed as a basis for this assertion. One is this: The Democratic Party is the big tent party, with lots of immigrants from countries without bubbles, new voters, and people who…

A Calm, Reasoned Discourse On Moral Philosophy From Uncommon Descent

I occasionally check in with the pro-ID blog Uncommon Descent, on the off chance they may have said something interesting. Sadly, the blog has mostly fallen on hard times. Nowadays it's mostly just post after post whose only point is to demean and insult people, or to proffer absurd misunderstandings of thermodynamics. Sometimes, though, they really come through. Every once in a while they present an argument so carefully reasoned, so cogently thought-out, that the rest of us must sit-up and take notice. Folks, one such post has recently appeared. It was authored by Barry Arrington, who…

Haught on Science and Faith

Along the same line, here we have Georgetown theologian John Haught discoursing on matters theological. I see that P. Z. Myers has already given Haught a proper reaming, but perhaps there is a bit more to say. Haught is a pro-evolution theologian. He did a very good deed in testifying on behalf of evolution at the big Dover trial. He's written a number of books about science and religion, two of which, God After Darwin and Is Nature Enough?, I have read. I can say with perfect sincerity, though it gives me no joy to do so, that it is people like Haught far more than the fundamentalists…

How Not to Defend Evolution, Part One

Here at ScienceBlogs we often debate the best way of promoting science literacy generally, and an understanding of evolution in particular. Is a calm recital of the evidence a good approach, or does that merely come off as an uninspiring “data dump” to non-scientists? Does the vocal atheist wing of the party scare off moderates, or are they an essential part of any long-term solution? And what role does proper framing play in the public's acceptance of evolution? All worthy questions, and while I certainly have my opinions on the subject, I don't pretend to know the answers. But there is…

Teacher's Unions Are An Unambiguous Force For Good

Certain portions of the political blogosphere have erupted over the subject of teacher's unions. It started with this column, from July 3, by Richard Cohen of The Washington Post. Those of you who follow these things will recognize Cohen as one of the most odious skunks in the punditocracy. Any time his name comes up we really must recall the following incident, here described memorably by The Daily Howler: In October 2000, things got better. Cohen savaged VP hopeful Joe Lieberman for something he said before B'nai B'rith. “I wonder what in the world he's talking about,” Cohen wrote.…

Is Atheism a Civil Rights Issue?

My 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…

It's About Usages, Not Definitions

On Tuesday I discussed a post by my SciBling Rob Knop on the subject of spirituality in an age of science. In that post I made three main points: (1) That Rob was badly mischaracterizing the views of Richard Dawkins on the question life's ultimate purpose, (2) That in downplaying the role of God as creator he was conceding many of the major points made by people like Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, amd (3) That his reconciliation of science with religion depends on a notion of Christianity that leaves out many of the things people generally consider essential to Christian faith. Since…