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Joe Wilson's outburst is not about civility. It's about racism.

It has been said that civility is an excellent conversation stopper. And it can be, because demanding civility has been a way to control or limit the voice of alterity or the unprivileged. When it comes to Joe Wilson's now-infamous shouted remark at the joint session, the question arises as to whether the tone or style of this act was the important issue, or whether the meaning or content of what he said ... the truth of his "You lie!" ... is what should be focused on. In my view, the answer is: Both, neither, and you are missing the point. I offer the following: 1) His incivility at this…

Doctor Who and Spinoffs

As many of you know, I'm a big Doctor Who fan. Big enough that I've grabbed all of the episodes of the new series, and its spinoffs, via BitTorrent. (I also buy them on DVD as soon as they become available.) A few folks have asked me what I think of the spinoffs. And I'm sick at home, feeling like hell, not up to doing any work or any serious math writing. So I've been sitting around watching videos, which makes this the perfect time to tell you about what I think of them. I'll run through my opinions of the episodes of the third season of Doctor Who, the first season of Torchwood, and the…

More on the science of the influenza "cytokine storm"

If you had a prowler at your house you'd call the police. You'd want them to come. But what if they sent a SWAT Team, surrounded the house and blasted it from all sides. Not good. That seems to be something like the scenario for a response to a class of virulent influenza viruses. They trip the alarm and the army descends and levels the house. The prowler is taken care of. So are you. The phenomenon has acquired the name "cytokine storm," although a better description might be immune system dysregulation. Your immune system has a lot of powerful weapons to protect you, but like a police force…

King v. Burwell: Supreme Court case could wreak havoc on working families, state governments and health providers

“Established by the state.” Those are the four words at the center of an upcoming Supreme Court case that could strip affordable health insurance coverage from millions of working families and result in billions of dollars in uncompensated care costs. The case is known as King v. Burwell and at its core is the question of whether residents who live in states with federally administered health insurance marketplaces, versus state-run marketplaces, are eligible to receive insurance subsidies. The plaintiffs in the case claim that those four little words in one section of the entire Affordable…

Political Speech In Uniform

Right wing blogs of various types are beating drums on behalf of an as-yet-unidentified US Army soldier who got into a bit of a confrontation with the moderator at a YearlyKos panel discussion. The soldier was a sergeant in uniform; the moderator was (or is, I'm not sure which) a reserve officer. The moderator took exception to the soldier appearing in uniform, and the right is spinning this as a soldier getting "shouted down" at Kos. Right now, there are two videos of the incident. Neither paints a complete picture of the scene. In the official video, the soldier's comments are almost…

The "big idea" behind integrative medicine is not so big at all...

I’ve frequently referred to “integrative medicine” as the “integration” of quackery with conventional, science-based medicine for the very good reason that that’s what it really is. However, advocates of medicine not based in science are nothing if not masters of marketing, which is how, over the course of three decades or so, “alternative medicine” morphed into “complementary and alternative medicine” (CAM), which ultimately morphed into its most recent incarnation, “integrative medicine.” The term “integrative medicine” is fantastic from a marketing perspective because it implies (and is…

Important flu paper on immune response

Every day, it seems, we find out that what we thought we knew about flu isn't the case. As one noted flu expert said to me once, "I knew much more about flu 20 years ago than I do now." So it's good to remember that we are also finding out a lot about flu that we never knew or even thought we knew. A case in point is an extremely important new paper in PLoS Medicine ( Khurana S, Suguitan AL Jr., Rivera Y, Simmons CP, Lanzavecchia A, et al.(2009) Antigenic Fingerprinting of H5N1 Avian Influenza Using Convalescent Sera and Monoclonal Antibodies Reveals Potential Vaccine and Diagnostic Targets.…

Nagel on Dawkins

Philosopher Thomas Nagel reviewed Dawkins' book for The New Republic. Sadly, the review does not seem to be freely available online. Nagel begins with the standard talking points about Dawkins working outside his field of expertise and about how contemptuous he is of religion. After a few hundred words of this, he gets down to business. He describes the argument from design, and then offers two objections commonly levelled at it. Let me briefly mention the second one: Second, the designer and the manufacturer of a watch are human beings with bodies, using physical tools to mold and put…

Orac is upset with me

There are over sixty blogs under the Scienceblogs umbrella. There is an impression we are all "progressives" (aka left-leaning) and must agree on matters social and political. While we probably are more to the left than the average (we are reality-based and rational, after all) there is a wide spectrum of views amongst ourselves. While I have no hesitation declaring myself a Person of the Left (whatever that means), I am also a scientist and put a premium on critical thinking and rationality, values I share with other Sciencebloggers. This tends to reduce differences between us. But there…

PANRC: Prelude, Part I

Just an update - all the copies of Prelude in circulation are presently going 'round, but if past experience is any guide, the books should have at least one more cycle before the end of the month. So watch here for the next announcement. In some ways I'm not the optimal audience for Kurt Cobb's _Prelude_ in that I generally hate thrillers. I find the "ordinary person caught up in a chase sequence" thing silly, and while I can read science fiction and suspend belief long enough to believe in wormholes and colonization, or mysteries, and believe that the town of Whateverville experiences a…

22 OSHA standards?

During the April 24, 2007 House Workforce Protection Subcommittee hearing, â"Have OSHA Standards Kept up with Workplace Hazards?", the Bush administrationâs record in promulgating occupational safety and health standards was a hot topic. (âWith all of those [rules] that have been cast aside,â asked an indignant Congressman Hare (D-IL)â âwhatâs OSHA been doing?â)             Congressman Joe Wilson (R-SC) stated: âTo date, the Bush administration has implemented 22 standards, with more than year left in the term,â and that therefore, âthe pace of regulatory rulemaking has not changedâ…

Bush, Intelligent Design, and the Art of Marketing Slogans

The Washington Post's interview with President Bush was....well, just surreal at times. Bush's answers virtually drip with disdain. At one point he actually says that he's having to make an effort to concentrate to answer their questions. And this exchange can only strike me as bizarre: The Post: Will you talk to Senate Democrats about your privatization plan? THE PRESIDENT: You mean, the personal savings accounts? The Post: Yes, exactly. Scott has been -- THE PRESIDENT: We don't want to be editorializing, at least in the questions. The Post: You used partial privatization yourself last…

Classic Edition: Advice to New Faculty

Classes for the Fall term start next week, which means that things are starting to gear up on campus. We've been sent our class rosters, and lists of new freshman advisees, and have started to have meetings about team-taught courses and department policies and the like. And, of course, the new faculty hired for this year have shown up. There was a meet-and-greet last night with the new faculty, which was fun (though as usual, I got to talking to people, and wound up coming home an hour later than I had said I would...). This also reminded me that I should dip into the archives for a Classic…

Worst columnist ever

Every now and then someone with a substantial public platform says or writes something that transcends the stupid to the realm of the genuinely idiotic. Regular readers of the Island will know I am usually a little more respectful of those with whom I disagree, but I feel compelled to respond to Newsweek/Washington Post columnist Cal Thomas' latest offense to reason if only to provide some balance in the blogosphere. Also, it's not every day that every single phrase in a widely distributed, non-Ann Coulter column is so utterly wrong. Plus, the folks who syndicate Thomas describe him as "…

Men and Women Cannot Can Have Different Average Numbers of Sexual Partners

I hadn't really ever thought about it, but surveys consistently report that heterosexual men have a larger number of sexual partners on average than heterosexual women. However, that really isn't logically possible, is it? I mean, last time I checked it took two to tango. Mathematician David Gale demonstrates why these results cannot be right in the NYTimes: One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7…

Natural Selection vs. Opportunity in Macroevolutionary Patterning of the Fossil Record

I'm going to talk about one or two peer reviewed papers, but in doing so, I'm going to have to say a few words ... and this will not be pretty ... about a certain science writer's report at the BBC. In an article titled "Space is the final frontier for evolution, study claims" BBC "science writer" Howard Falcon-Lang uses the old, tired, and quite frankly, stupendously unethical tack of making a claim that Darwin has been overthrown by new research. If someone actually overthrows Darwin, then so be it. But this is not what has happened. Falcon-Lang, or perhaps his BBC handlers, have used the…

The Work-Place, or, Catching a Catfish Online

A May 9, 2007 post, wondering to telecommute or not. I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it. Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the…

The Work-Place, or, Catching a Catfish Online

I will be offline for a couple of days so I will not be able to post at my usual frantic pace. Instead, I decided to write something that will take you a couple of days to read through: a very long, meandering post, full of personal anecdotes. But there is a common theme throughout and I hope you see where I'm going with it and what conclusions I want you to draw from it. Pigeons, crows, rats and cockroaches I was born and grew up in a big, dirty city and I am not going back (my ex-Yugoslav readers have probably already recognized the reference to the good old song Back to the Big, Dirty…

Scenes from the Shelter

(Mac, doing the guard thing) I don't live in New York City, so I don't have to go quite through what these folks did to adopt a cat. If one of my neighbors hasn't rescued a cat some idiot dropped off (because that's what you do with cats you can't take care of, right, throw them out of your car in the country where they will totally be fine ;-P), we have a long-standing and deeply friendly relationship with someone who does cat rescue, and she is happy to pass cats on to us for adoption. Still, I did come into contact with the Stalinist dog rescue folk shortly before we BOUGHT Mac: "I'm so…

So You Want To Be An Astrophysicist? Part 1: being an astro major

You are at university. Do you like stars, and stuff? Another rehashed blast from the past Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from a colleague's previous freshman seminar for our majors): Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative to astronomy, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like. If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude? Professional astrophysics/astronomy is not about looking at stars per se (except at occasional…

Yarn Theory

in which I triangulate on string theory and quantum gravity and ponder the "Trouble with Physics"... which is that physicists are hired the same way we pick apples at the supermarket. Look! Shiny! Big! Red! Finally, I finished Smolin's "Trouble with Physics". Hopefully in time for the paperback coming out... It is very good, in parts. Well worth reading, and will amuse some, interest others and infuriate the occasional technician. Fortunately I am not the first to review the book and I will lay no claim to being comprehensive nor unbiased. I had a brief and early fling with string theory…

So, you want to be an astrophysicist? Part 1.

You are at university. Do you like stars, and stuff? Another rehashed blast from the past Should you do astronomy as an undergrad? (the following is in part shamelessly cribbed from a colleague's previous freshman seminar for our majors): Do you like stars and stuff? If not, you probably should look for an alternative to astronomy, on the general principle that at this stage of life you should at least try to do things you actually like. If you do, good for you. Now, do you have the aptitude? Professional astrophysics/astronomy is not about looking at stars per se (except at occasional star…

Should I Wash My Dishes Before Putting Them In The Dishwasher?

As an anthropologist, I find the interface between technology and the larger culture in which it is embedded fascinating. You all know the old story of the family cook who habitually cuts the ends off the roast before slipping it in the oven. One day her child, hoping some day to be the family cook, asks why this is done. It turns out that nobody can remember, and the matter is dropped. But the question comes up again, at a later family dinner, this one attended by great grandma, who was the family cook a generation ago, and of course, she knows the answer. "Back in the day," she says, "…

More Evidence that Dobson is Lying

In all the brouhaha over James Dobson being given secret information, I have maintained all along that James Dobson is lying. He first claimed to be given information by the White House that was "confidential" and that he "probably shouldn't have" that made him endorse the Miers nomination, but he couldn't say what that information was. After threats of a potential subpeona to come before the Judiciary committee and reveal what he was told (quite a reasonable threat, I might add; the White House certainly has no business sharing secret information with supporters that is not also given to the…

The Melting of Earth's Northern Ice Cap: Update

We are becoming aware of two very important changes in the Arctic that you need to know about. These are separate thing but related, and both are almost certainly the outcome of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). They are: The sea ice that covers much of the Arctic Sea during the winter is normally reduced during the northern summer, but this year, the reduction has been dramatic. There is less sea ice in the Arctic Circle than recorded in recent history. The massive continental glacier on Greenland, the largest glacial mass in the Northern Hemisphere, has undergone more melting this…

Must Read Paper on fMRI -and- The Worst fMRI Science Journalism Ever

There is a must-read paper in Nature about the limits of functional MRI as an experimental tool by one of its pioneers, Nikos Logothetis. (Also discussed by Jonah and Vaughan.) This paper is pretty technical, but Logothetis hits the important points of what it is we think we are actually measuring using the fMRI. Also, he notes that the difficulty in interpreting fMRI data lies in the fact that you have to make assumptions about network architecture that may or may not be true. Other experiments are required to confirm the validity of these assumptions. Here is his good summary of the…

The Discovery Institute is desperately patching Meyer's mind-numbing magnum opus

As you've probably heard, Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute published a book last year calle Signature in the Cell. It stunk, it got virtually no reviews from the scientific community, although it was avidly sucked up by the fans of Intelligent Design creationism. One curious thing about the book is that it has sunk out of sight already, which is a bit peculiar and a bit disappointing for an explanation that was promised to revitalize ID. Remember Michael Behe's book, Darwin's Black Box? I'll give Behe credit, that one was well-marketed and got the brief attention of many scientists,…

Lobster Sticks to Interview

A couple of weeks ago we brought you the classic interweb hit from circa 2000 - Lobster Magnet. Well now we bring you what might be our greatest interview ever. Forget about Jane Goodall and eminent biologists, today we have the sacred words of Ben Apgar, co-creator of Lobster Magnet. When we caught up with Ben, he was unemployed and apparently Canadian. And now without further ado, we bring you the briny stylings of Ben Apgar and the secret history behind Lobster Magnet: Name: Ben Apgar Sex: M Height: 5'10" Weight: 160 lbs. Blood type: Unknown Song: Lobster Magnet By: Ben Apgar &…

Gun Control Debate with Mark, Pt. 2

This post is political. As always, physics readers who don't care about politics are encouraged to skip it. I've got an actual physics post going up tomorrow. Mark and I have been conducting a debate/discussion over gun control in the United States. For the first round, here's his post and my response. Here's his second round post, and this post is my response. First, let me summarize where the debate stands. We have four main topics as set forth in Mark's posts: gun violence in "ordinary" crime, gun violence in the context of mass shootings, suggestions for gun control, and miscellaneous…

Well, that didn't take long: The knives come out for Paul Shattuck

Yesterday, I wrote extensively about a new study by Paul Shattuck that seriously casts doubt upon one of the key claims of those arguing that mercury in childhood vaccines causes autism, namely the existence of an "autism epidemic." These claims are nearly always based on rapidly rising numbers of children being classified as autistic for special education. The findings of the paper, boiled down to their essence, is that it was diagnostic substitution that was largely responsible for this apparent increase. Before 1993, autism and autism spectrum disorders were not even one of the major…

Kevin in China #18 - a mandarin rat, another mystery frog that is NOT in the Atlas of Amphibians of China, and the Chinese-speaking Godzilla

Well, nobody in the comments here or here could help Kevin identify the mystery frog yet (if you are a herpetologist or fancy being one, take a look) and now Kevin caught yet another, even more mysterious frog. Can you help him identify it? Leave a comment here if you recognize what frogs are these. Anyway, if you are fan of the series of adventures of Kevin in China (and if not, you should start the series from the beginning - you WILL get hooked), the new field report is under the fold. Dongxi, revisited 22 August Didn't hear from Linsen about where I am to get a bus or taxi to Yichang.…

Let the War on Christmas Begin. Atheist style.

This week is Thanksgiving in the United States. This means that over the coming weekend many Americans will be putting up Christmas decorations in and outside their houses. Many children will be putting finishing touches on their letters to Santa. The shopping malls will start to fill and while economists examine and measure the retail sales bump for signs that the world will not end, we, as a nation, will come together to incrementally crank up the material contents stored in our homes and the corresponding mass of our public landfills. But what do Atheists do on Christmas? We declare…

Framing the Language Gene: FOXP2

You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online. Here is the summary of the article: Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…

Framing the Language Gene: FOXP2

You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online. Here is the summary of the article: Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Ed Yong

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Ed Yong from Not Exactly Rocket Science to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Where are you coming from (both geographically and philosophically)? What is…

Dr. Lipson versus Dr. Brownstein: Science versus antivaccine misinformation and fear mongering in my own back yard

It always irritates me when I discover a new antivaccine crank in my state; so you can imagine how irritated I become when I discover one right in my very city (OK, metropolitan area). When that happens, it becomes a bit more personal than my usual mission to refute antivaccine misinformation. So I was most alarmed when I discovered just such a beast because a former ScienceBlogs colleague now writing for Forbes, Dr. Peter Lipson, took the time to deconstruct a very ill-informed piece of antivaccine propaganda. The offending post appeared on the blog of a "holistic" physician named Dr. David…

How To Use Linux

This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily. At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on Linux is OpenSource, as opposed to proprietary AND it is…

Climate Change Denialist Tattoos Definitely Go On the Butt, Man!

Richard Glover has a very funny - and in many ways on-target analysis here. Don't get me wrong - as I've said many times before, I know a lot of people who don't take climate change seriously, but who also recognize for various other reasons that we can't burn fossil fuels the way we are. I believe in the big tent. But there is something to be said for even metaphorically making people take ownership of their politics - and the implications of their politics. I realize someone is going to be outraged by this - ah well, can't please everyone! I find it funny, not because I want to…

Digitizing the Library of Congress

I'm a bibliophile. I read books at an inordinate rate and have a tendency to buy them at an even faster rate. Here at Texas A&M I'm fortunate to have access to a library of more than four million volumes, a fantastic interlibrary loan service, and a breathtaking special collections library that among other things houses one of the largest and most comprehensive science fiction collections in the nation. I also very much love the aesthetics of the physical books themselves, and if/when electronic books finally displace the old paper copies it will be a sad day. But it could also be the…

The Republican War on Science

Chris Mooney is trying to kill me. It's true. He sent me this book, The Republican War on Science(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) (now available in a new paperback edition!), that he knew would send my blood pressure skyrocketing, give me apoplexy, and cause me to stroke out and die, gasping, clawing in futile spasms at the floor. Fortunately, I've been inoculating myself for the past few years by reading his weblog (now also in a new edition!), so I managed to survive, although there were a few chest-clutching moments and one or two life-flashing-past-my-eyes experiences, which will be handy if I…

Carlos Cerna will someday demand his Ph.D.

When you tie a university to a religious ideology, you create stresses that show that the modern search for knowledge is the antithesis of religious dogma. I keep telling people that science and religion are in opposition, and here's a perfect example: La Sierra University is a Seventh Day Adventist college. SDAs are fundamentalists and literalists (although, isn't it strange how different literalist sects all seem to come up with different…ahem…interpretations of the Bible?) who as a point of doctrine believe in a young earth and seven day creation. La Sierra has a biology department, as…

Annals of McCain - Palin, XXIV: hatemongering

A lot of pundits seem dismayed and surprised at the moral depths to which Dishonest John McCain's campaign has sunk in the last week. I have to disagree. There is nothing surprising about it. This is his MO: do whatever he thinks is necessary. McCain has a long history of lack of principle and probity, whether it is in his personal life (a vile and abusive temper, disloyalty to his first wife) or his public life (corrupt behavior in the Savings and Loan scandal, chicanery on behalf of gaming interests and much more). Where I do agree with his new found critics is the frightening nature of his…

Timing Fall Crops

It is hard as heck to imagine that one of these days, I'll be longing for a hot day again, and for the fresh food that accompanies it, but it always happens. It is also hard, deep in the dog days, to realize that right now is when you have to start thinking about your fall garden. That's probably why so many of us start out beautifully, but peter out when the cold comes, running out of fresh things months before we have to. Indeed, after a decade of working my farm, including the years when we ran a CSA, and many other years when we were gardening for ourselves, or raising perennial food and…

Science vs. Britney Spears

Last week, most of the attention of the media, Old and New, revolved around the question if it is McCain supporters or Obama supporters who are more likely to think that Britney Spears is teh hawt (dunno what the answer is, but I recall seeing some statistics about the overwhelming lead by the Red States in porn consumption, TV watching, numbers of adult establishments and number of visits to such establishments per capita, and this may or may not correlate with the perception of Britney Spears as attractive to certain subsets of the male population). But her name has also been mentioned a…

Christian Reconstructionism and the Founding Fathers

Jon Rowe has an interesting post up about a new book, available online here, by Gary North, the Christian reconstructionist. The book is called Conspiracy in Philadelphia, and North's primary thesis is that the constitution itself was an illegal document that overstepped the boundaries of the mandate given to those at the convention and replaced the Articles of Confederation without going through the process mandated under those Articles. His secondary thesis is that the constitution itself was a blatantly Godless and atheistic document that not only overturned centuries of tradition whereby…

Debating Creationists

The big debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham was tonight. Click here for the video. The whole thing is close to three hours, so get comfortable if you want to watch it all. I was watching it live, but about two-thirds of the way through I kept losing the signal. I would reload the page, but then I'd get an error message twenty seconds later. So I gave up. They were just starting the “questions from the audience” phase, and I was not optimistic that that would be worth wading through. P. Z. Myers has the live blog if you want the abridged version. I mostly agree with his comments.…

Worldcon Wrap-Up

We are back in Niskayuna now, where SteelyKid is using her new powers of bipedal locomotion to help me burn off some of the excess calories from the weekend in Montreal. She's only been walking for a couple of weeks, but she can really move. I'm pretty fried, even after napping for two hours earlier today (we dropped SteelyKid off at day care on the way home, so we could unpack and rest a little), and I have a few commitments that will limit my blogging time in the next few days, but I figured I ought to throw out a few things about the last day or two of Worldcon. -- The Hugo results were…

Should this student have been suspended?

This is a troubling story if you just read the right-wing perspective: a student at Hamline University (an excellent liberal arts college in the Twin Cities) was suspended for writing a letter to the university administration. That shouldn't happen, I'd say — we want to encourage free speech. Even if the student seems to be a bit of a far-right nut, and if the letter was supporting that lunatic idea that school massacres wouldn't happen if everyone were carrying a concealed weapon, people should have the privilege of expressing their opinions. So I read John Leo's opinion piece on the issue…

The Biodiversity + Pokemon-ish Project: It's a go.

Don't you think it's twisted that so many kids know what this creature is, but so few can go about naming the birds in their backyard? - - - Well, I had briefly talked about this before, more as a whimsical train of thought, but there you have it - we're going to give it a go. Not sure what I'm talking about? Well, basically, this was inspired by a letter published in Science in 2002, entitled "Why Conservationists Should Heed Pokemon.." It starts: According to E.O. Wilson's Biophilia hypothesis, humans have an innate desire to catalog, understand, and spend time with other life-forms.…

God and Theologians and Scientists and Dawkins

I saw two more reviews of Dawkins' new and widely discussed The God Delusion recently. Both were critical about the book. Both had points that I thought were very well made. One review is by Terry Eagleton, in the London Review of Books. The other is by Marilynne Robinson, in the November 2006 Harper's (not on-line). (Interesting to the Scienceblogs community itself is my completely different interpretation of Eagleton's review than PZ's.) Eagleton starts by saying this: Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have…