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Twitter as an amplifier of antivaccine messages

Before 2005, I did pay attention to the antivaccine movement, but it wasn't one of my biggest priorities when it comes to promoting science-based medicine. That all changed when Robert F. Kennedy published his incredibly conspiracy-packed black whole of antivaccine pseudoscience entitled Deadly Immunity. Sadly, almost exactly ten years later, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. hasn't changed. He's still spewing the same antivaccine pseudoscience and conspiracy theories that he was spewing a decade ago, with no sign of letting up. One thing that has changed over the last decade is the social media…

Linux in Schools

This is an excellent guest post by Scott Rowed on the use of Linux in K-12 schools, including strong evidence that school districts that do not have students using the Linux operating system are placing their students at a disadvantage, as well as a description of one outstanding success story in British Columbia. Linux in Schools Scott Rowed What computer operating system should students learn at school? Most schools use MS Windows or Mac, but a number have switched or are in the process of switching to Linux. For schools the advantages are lower costs, greater security, no viruses or…

Deaths from vaccines in Japan?

Confusing correlation with causation. Post hoc ergo propter hoc. These are two of the most common errors human beings make. Indeed, they're natural errors that our brains appear hard-wired to make, and, without scientific training, it's virtually impossible to avoid making the conclusion that, because two occurrences correlate with each other they must be related or because and event precedes the onset of a condition (like autism), then that something must have caused that condition. One can see how, living in the wilderness, seeing patterns and causes quickly was likely to be beneficial more…

Homeopathy deconstructed in the FASEB Journal

As I mentioned on Friday, over the last few days I was in Chicago attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting. At least, that's where I was until last evening. Unfortunately, I got back home too late and was thus too tired to lay down some fresh Insolence, Respectful or otherwise, for your edification today. Fear not, though. I'll get to it. In the meantime, here's another blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you. Well, this is encouraging to see: A…

Prussian Blue, NAACP, what's the difference?

Hoo boy. Via The Poorman Institute and an anti-Holocaust denial mailing list that I belong to, I've learned of an analogy so breathtakingly bad that I have a hard time not blogging about it, mainly because it relates to a topic that I'm very interested in (Holocaust denial) and a related topic that I've written about before, namely the white supremacist, Hitler-admiring, Holocaust-denying pop tarts that make up the white nationalist singing duo Prussian Blue. Oddly enough, it comes in the form of a complaint about "racialist double standards" from conservative blogger LaShawn Barber, in which…

Monday Pets: Where Did Cats Come From?

Let me tell you a little story. When I was born my parents had two cats. One was named Garfield. The other...well, I don't remember what the other one was called. Not long after I was born, and little Jason was coughing up furballs, the doctors informed the parents that their little bundle of skin and hair was allergic to cats. It was then that teams were picked and lines were drawn. It was me or the cats. Luckily, the parents decided to keep me, and lose the cats. Imagine how much it would have sucked if they decided to keep the cats and lose me. I imagine if my younger brother had actually…

Perseverating on Perseverative Error: What Does The "A-not-B Error" Really Tell Us About Infant Cognition?

There's a very well-known experiment in developmental psychology called the "A-not-B task." The experiment goes something like this: you, the experimenter, are seated opposite a human infant. Within the reach of both you and the child are two boxes: box "A," and box "B." You hide a toy in "A," in full view of the infant. As expected, the infant reaches for "A" to retrieve the toy. You repeat the process several times. Each time you hide the toy in "A," and each time the infant reaches for "A" to find the toy. Experimental set-ups like this are extremely common in infant and animal studies.…

Advice for junior faculty at a research university

Chad just posted a bit of pre-tenure advice, including the very important advice to take all advice with a grain of salt. I would say that also applies to the rest of his advice, because I'm about to post contradictory advice. You should also take my advice with a grain of salt. Be aware that it comes from somebody who has been beaten into being very cynical about the system. On the other hand, you can learn from my mistakes. My advice here is specifically for faculty at a research University, most specifically Vanderbilt. It's primarily for physics and astronomy (indeed, primarily the…

The annals of "I'm not antivaccine," part 14: Vaccine "Trafficking" and beyond

If there's one good thing about the ongoing Disneyland measles outbreak that is continuing to spread, if there can be a "good thing" about an outbreak of vaccine-preventable disease that didn't have to happen, it's that it's put the antivaccine movement on the defensive. They are definitely feeling the heat. Their reaction to that heat can range from ever more vigorously proclaiming that they are "not antivaccine" in a desperate bid to convince the unwary and those not familiar with the antivaccine movement that they are not antivaccine, all the while softening their antivaccine tropes…

How is it that I hadn't heard of this antivaccine "warrior" before?

One of the depressing things about having dedicated over a decade of one's life to combatting pseudoscience and quackery is that, no matter how much I think I've come to be familiar with all the woo that can be out there and all the players promoting that woo, there are always new people popping up. It's impossible for one person to keep track of them all. Sometimes, however, there are, for example, antivaccine activists that I haven't heard of before whom I really think I should have heard of sooner than this. Such is the case with Kate Tietje, who blogs at Modern Alternative Mama.…

The central conspiracy theory of the antivaccine movement

Occasionally, there are issues that come to my attention that need more than just one blog post to cover. One such issue popped up last week, and it’s one that’s kept you all very engaged, with the comment count on the original post rapidly approaching 200. I’m referring, of course, to the alleged CDC “whistleblower” who’s supposedly blown the lid on a “coverup” based on Brian Hooker’s incompetent “reanalysis” of a ten year old study (Destefano et al) that failed to find a link between age at MMR vaccination and the risk of developing autism. More specifically, given that Destefano et al…

Oh no! My cell phone's going to kill me!

I'm very puzzled. Now, I know that my being puzzled isn't particularly unusual. I'm frequently puzzled. I can't figure out how, for example, anyone with the slightest bit of reasoning ability can do anything other than laugh when informed what homeopathy is and how it supposedly "works." I can't figure out why American Idol or Survivor is so amazingly popular. And I can't figure out why the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Center released this warning about cell phones: PITTSBURGH July 24, 2008, 07:13 am ET · The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to…

Gullible Gunners, episode IV

I've been having a discussion with Kevin Baker about his claim that self-defence in the UK is practically illegal. The discussion started when Carl Lindsay was convicted of manslaughter after killing an intruder who was trying to rob him. I wrote: Pro-gunners such as John Lott, Glenn Reynolds and John Derbyshire have written about the Martin case, apparently unaware of the facts that showed that the killing was not in self defence, and proceeded to make bogus claims that self defence was against the law in Britain. Claims which they have never…

Attacks on the FDA on Mercola.com

I forgot if I ever mentioned that I have an article out in the current episode of Skeptical Inquirer about Stanislaw Burzynski. I call it a "primer for skeptics," because that's what it is. So, if you subscribe to SI (Skeptical Inquirer, not Sports Illustrated), read. If not, get thee to a newsstand before it's gone. Thus endeth the plug and beginneth the Insolence. When last I discussed Stanislaw Burzynski, I noted that, among other things, the state of Texas appears far more interested in putting abortion providers out of business than it does in protecting its citizens suffering from…

The Burzynski Clinic continues to issue press releases. Still more hilarity ensues.

No matter how much I try, it seems that I can't escape blogging about Stanislaw Burzynski. Regular readers here are familiar with Dr. Burzynski, the "maverick" cancer doctor (he's not an oncologist) who claims that peptides he's isolated from urine and now synthesizes in his lab and manufacturing facility are highly effective anticancer drugs, so much so that he claims much better results with deadly cancers like glioblastoma than conventional medicine can produce. There are a number of reasons for my continually being sucked back into the Burzynski orbit, like a spaceship wandering too close…

In the era of Donald Trump, will the states save us from antivaxers?

It seems hard to believe that the Disneyland measles outbreak occurred more than two years ago. It was during the Christmas holiday of 2014 that an measles outbreak occurred centered at—of course—Disneyland, thanks primarily to unvaccinated children facilitating the spread of the highly contagious disease at the "Happiest Place on Earth." What made this particular outbreak so important, though, was that it provided the impetus Senator Dr. Richard Pan and Senator Ben Allen to introduce a bill (SB 277) into the California legislature for consideration. What made SB 277 unique and its…

The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved & Why It Endures

During the first few years of ScienceBlogs there was a lot of talk about religion. Yes, there's talk about religion now, but it's toned down in the wake of the ebbing of the publicity around The God Delusion. Naturally in the wake of the New Atheism a raft of conventional apologetics have been published, The Dawkins' Delusion being a typical example. More recently more nuanced books which wend the middle ground between militant atheism and conventional apologetics have taken center strage. Karen Armstrong's The Case for God approaches this from a philo-theistic angle, while Robert Wright's…

More on accomodationism

In the course of a long and often annoying back and forth with Jerry Coyne, Chris Mooney comes up with a succinct explanation of where science/religion accommodation comes from: Insofar as I’m an accommodationist, then, it’s not because I don’t see the incongruity between relying on faith, and looking for evidence, as bases for knowing. Rather, it’s because I know that many very intelligent people are struggling all the time to make their peace with this incongruity in their own way–a peace that works for them. And so long as they’re not messing with what our kids learn–or, again, trying to…

Religion & race - the nominal and the real

In my post below I mooted the issue of conflating race & religion. There were many interesting comments, and Ruchira Paul has offered her own response. I would like to elucidate a few points here and frame the issues in their proper context (or at least the context in which I meant to explore them). I have spoken of the various faces of gods before. My own personal interest is the cognitive level since that is the one which I believe is fundamental, the layer of religious experience with makes it nearly inevitable that supernaturalism will be the 'default' human modality, the necessary…

Why Gay Marriage Is Good for Everyone

This weekend in the Washington Post, there's an article about a couple who first met while serving in various capacities during WWII, who just celebrated their marriage in DC this weekend after a "62 year engagement." This would be a romantic story in any context - but it isn't a story of parted lovers who finally found each other again after decades apart. Instead, it is of two men who have lived a life almost wholly together, sharing work, family and community, but who lacked legal and social recognition. What's interesting about this story to me is not simply that it is a charming love…

Peter Duesberg, chromosomal chaos, and cancer: An intriguing hypothesis argued poorly

A lot of readers (well, a couple, anyway) have been asking me about the recent article by Peter Duesberg in the most recent issue of Scientific American entitled Chromosomal Chaos and Cancer. I suppose it's because I'm not only a cancer surgeon (which in and of itself is not enough to qualify me to comment on this topic) but rather because I'm also a cancer researcher and a molecular biologist (which, I submit, does make me qualified to comment on this topic). Peter Duesberg, as you may know, is the controversial scientist who is perhaps the foremost advocate of the discredited hypothesis…

The truth? You can't handle The Truth (when it comes to mammographic screening)!

Occasionally, there are topics that my readers want -- nay, demand -- that I cover. The topic of this post, it turns out, is one of them. It's a link to a TED Talk. I'm guessing that most of our readers have either viewed (or at least heard of) TED talks. Typically, they are 20-minute talks, with few or no slides, by various experts and thought leaders. Many of them are quite good, although as the TED phenomenon has grown I've noticed that, not unexpectedly, the quality of TED Talks has become much more uneven than it once was. Be that as it may, beginning shortly after it was posted,…

What is the Placebo Effect, and it it getting stronger?

I'm an anthropologist and a biologist, so really, I have no problem with the idea of a "placebo effect" in which people become convinced that they are being given an effective treatment and thus, because of that thought in their mind, improve. Editorial Note: I'm classifying this post as a "falsehood" because it does fit nicely with that series, though this was not on the original list of falsehoods. Also note, this is a hastily dashed off first draft, so please be ruthless in your comments so I may move ever towards the unattainable perfection. I doubt very much that this works for many…

Types in Haskell: Types are Propositions, Programs are Proofs

(This is a revised repost of an earlier part of my Haskell tutorial.) Haskell is a strongly typed language. In fact, the type system in Haskell is both stricter and more expressive than any type system I've seen for any non-functional language. The moment we get beyond writing trivial integer-based functions, the type system inevitably becomes visible, so we need to take the time now to talk about it a little bit, in order to understand how it works. One of the most important things to recognize about Haskell's type system is that it's based on type inference. What that means is that in…

Stepping Up Divison By Zero to Perfect Encryption

An alert reader sent me a link to a really dreadful piece of drek. In some ways, it's a rehash of the "Nullity" nonsense from a couple of years ago, but with a new spin. If you don't remember nullity, it was the attempt of one idiot to define division by zero. He claimed to have "solved" the great problem of dividing by zero, and by doing so, to be able to do all manner of amazing things, such as to build better computers that would be less prone to bugs. Today's garbage is in the same vein: another guy, this one named Jeff Cook, who claims to have "solved" the problem of division by zero.…

A Republican With Integrity

See, I can actually say nice things about Republicans (dogmatic conservatives, on the other hand...although I always did think Jack Kemp was honest and sincere, if crazy). Former Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey has called for a Democratic Congress. No, I'm not making this up. His statement, by way of Seeing the Forest, is below: THE NEED FOR A DEMOCRAT MAJORITY IN THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES IN 2007 I have found it difficult in the past several weeks to reach a conclusion as to what a citizen should do with respect to this fall's forthcoming congressional elections. I am a…

Plumage Color Influences Choice of Mates and Sex of Chicks in Gouldian Finches, Erythrura gouldiae

tags: evolutionary biology, mate choice, sex determination, genetic compatibility, behavioral ecology, Gouldian Finch, Erythrura gouldiae, peer-reviewed paper The three color morphs of Gouldian finches, Erythrura gouldiae. Image: Sarah Pryke, Macquarie University. Gouldian finches, Erythrura gouldiae, are small cavity-nesting passerines that are endemic to open savannahs adjacent to mangrove swamps in northern Australia. These finches eat a variety of native grass seeds, but to meet the increased energetic and nutritional demands of rearing chicks, they primarily eat insects when…

Report Reveals One-Third of US Birds are Endangered

tags: The State of the Birds 2009, ornithology, birds, endangered species, conservation, global warming, climate change, environment, invasive species, habitat loss Streaming video [6:31] According to the most comprehensive report ever published in the USA, nearly one third of America's 800 native bird species are endangered, threatened, or in significant decline, thanks to habitat loss, pollution, climate change, competition from invasive species and other threats. The shocking report, published by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, reveals that of the more than 800 bird species that…

From the Archives: King of infinite space: Donald Coxeter, the man who saved geometry by Siobhan Roberts

I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here. This one, of King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, is from December 11, 2006. ======= I'm reading a lot of science auto/biography these days, and generally enjoying it a lot. While generally not…

Interview with Guerilla Science on Revolutionising how audiences experience science

I wish I knew how many times per week I get pitched opportunities to "interview" brave, unconventional, innovative "scientists" on my blog. Too many to count, most weeks. The pseudoscience PR whirlpool is vast and slippery. But there's also the legitimate "Hey, somebody at my university just published this thing, maybe you want to talk to them" pitch. While often interesting, that's not really what I do on this blog. I don't really do science explainers. But once in a while, a pitch resonates. And such is the case with the pitch I got from Guerilla Science a few weeks ago. I'd heard of them…

On Settling Down

One of the peculiarities of the white race's presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. As a people, wherever we have been, we have never really intended to be. The continent is said to have been discovered by an Italian who was on his way to India. The earliest explorers were looking for gold, which as, after an early streak of luck in Mexico, always somewhere farther on. Consquests, and foundings were incidental to this search - which did not, and could not, end until the continent was finally laid open in a orgy of goldseekin in the middle of the last century…

On Not Regulating Thrill Rides

Elizabeth Williamson of the Washington Post has written powerful article on the failure of the regulatory system to ensure that amusement park âthrillâ rides donât kill or injure customers, primarily teenagers and children. She provides grisly detail on a topic weâve talked about here before: the inability and/or unwillingness of the Consumer Product Safety Commission to protect the public. After describing one series of identical accidents that occurred several times on the same ride, Williamson notes The CPSC has no employee whose full-time job is to ensure the safety of such rides. The…

Defense Day

Well today is my thesis defense day. For those who are unfamiliar with the process, this is how it works at least at my university. When you start out in a lab you do the experiments your boss tells you to do, with the goal of picking up a project. This usually involves taking up where another graduate student or post-doc left off, or reading the literature in your field and figuring out an important question to answer. Depending on how many years its been since your boss handled a pipette, he/she will suggest experiments that range from next to impossible to impossible. You spend a year…

Early Birds Shake Up Avian Tree of Life

tags: researchblogging.org, Early Bird Project, Tree of Life, avian evolution, deep avian evolutionary relationships, avian phylogenomics, location cues, Shannon J. Hackett, Rebecca T. Kimball, Sushma Reddy Basic topology of the evolutionary relationships between birds. Maximum Likelihood (ML) phylogram reveals the short internodes at the base of Neoaves and highlights certain extreme examples of rate variation across avian lineages. The phylogenetic tree was rooted to crocodilian outgroups (not shown). Branch colors represent major clades supported in this study: land birds (green),…

True or false: Vast majority of employers care deeply and passionately about their employees

Imagine testifying before a congressional committee as the head of the FDIC and you're asked "do the vast majority of banks care deeply and passionately about their customers?" Or as the head of the FAA and you're asked "do you think the vast majority of airlines care deeply and passionately about their passengers?" Or the head of a State Insurance Bureau and you're asked "do you think the vast majority of HMO's care deeply and passionately about their policy holders?" That's one of the odd questions posed to OSHA chief David Michaels,PhD, MPH at a hearing on March 16 before a subcommittee…

More use and abuse of IPCC 1990 fig 7.1(c)

[Guest post by John Mashey] This is a follow-up to the original falsification, flat-earth maps and dog astrology journal @ STW or cleaner version by Neverending Audit. It originally was a comment to be attached to WMC's Attacked! or WUWT: taking incompetence to a whole new level. Introduction The origin of IPCC(1990) Fig 7.1(c) may be historically interesting, but far less than the history of its later abuse, mis-use, and falsification, combined into a fine marketing campaign. - See pp.199-203 of FAR Chapter 7. Fig7.1(c) p.202, errs in its specific scale (Years before present) and the…

A baffling failure of peer review

A dismaying update: the paper in question contains a significant amount of outright plagiarism, and large chunks of text are taken literally from Butterï¬eld et al. 2006, "Oxidative stress in Alzheimer's disease brain: New insights from redox proteomics," European Journal of Pharmacology 545: 39-50. I hope we hear from Han and Warda sometime; they've got a lot of 'splaining to do. Mitochondria are fascinating organelles. They are the "powerhouses of the cell" (that phrase is required to be used in any discussion of their function) that generate small, energy rich molecules like ATP that are…

The Biggest Firework of them all: The Higgs!

"Give me a coin. <Takes Coin.> All right. Uh... heads, I win, tails, you lose. Right? <Flips coin.> Tails, you lose." -Ralph Kramden All things being equal, you're well aware that if you flipped a completely fair coin, you'd have a 50% chance of it landing on heads, and a 50% chance of landing on tails (ignoring the side, of course). Image credit: C. Nolan, A. Eckhart and Warner Bros. Pictures, retrieved from http://explow.com/Two-Face. So let's imagine that you flip the coin ten times, and you get seven heads and three tails. Are you worried? You shouldn't be; in order to tell…

Dark Money by Jane Mayer

The book is: Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right. Also by the same author: The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Here is my version of recent American political history: Everyone in America knows that if you want to identify the people or corporations, and the motivations, behind politics, you follow the money. Americans have historically differed in the degree to which they formulate this concept in their own minds as conspiratorial end-times ranting or shrug it off as just the way…

I'm 100% certain this is the way Trump's presidency will end

The Crisis We Await The exact way the Trump presidency ends is not clear. Anything could happen. Trump had zero idea of what he was getting into with this president thing, and the stresses must be amazing. Clearly, he is being driven over the edge by relatively minor day to day events. Nothing has yet actually happened in this administration. If you ignore self inflicted wounds and self generated drama, and all the protesting against Trump, the world has been pretty quiet. It is as though all the bad guys, all the individuals who do the things that become major international issues or…

"Your Theory Doesn't Do Everything!" And That's Okay.

"If we lived on a planet where nothing ever changed, there would be little to do. There would be nothing to figure out. There would be no impetus for science. And if we lived in an unpredictable world, where things changed in random or very complex ways, we would not be able to figure things out. But we live in an in-between universe, where things change, but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature. If I throw a stick up in the air, it always falls down. If the sun sets in the west, it always rises again the next morning in the east. And so it becomes possible to…

Statements from Two Behe Reviewers

There is an update below the fold with much new information Last week I wrote about the fact that Michael Behe claimed last week under oath that his book, Darwin's Black Box, received even more thorough peer review than a scholarly article in a refereed journal. Now more and more facts are coming to light. We only know the names of 3 of the 5 reviewers - Michael Atchison, Robert Shapiro and K. John Morrow. Atchison, I've already documented, did not review the book at all. He had a 10 minute conversation about the book over the phone, without ever seeing the text, with an editor who was…

What is the link between global warming and drought?

I'd like to give you a very small selection of references and discussions about the link between global warming and drought. Global warming probably has two major effects. First, more moisture gets into the atmosphere because warmer air passing over the oceans can take in more water. This can cause more rain and possibly more severe storms and flooding. But the atmospheric system also changes in another way. The hydraulic cycle, as it is called, intensified in both directions, wet and dry. If you live on the East Coast of the US and you move to where I live in the upper Midwest, you'll…

Empowering the individual does not equal ensmartening the individual

Imagine the following scenario. Two guys are walking down the street, in different cities. Guy A has two PhDs, one in quantum physics with a focus on dimensionality dynamics, the other in astrophysics with a focus on relativistic aspects of gravity and black holes. She has published dozens of peer reviewed papers on both topics and is a brilliant mathematician. Guy B never took a physics class but yesterday he finished reading large parts of The Elegant Universe. Suddenly, at the same moment, they each have an idea (they do not have the same idea ... they have different ideas) about how…

Advice for Aspiring Comedians

Tachyix asked, in a comment, if I had any advice for aspiring comics. I thought I'd move the answer up here to its own post. The most obvious answer is "don't do what I did", since I obviously didn't make it as a comic, but that answer would conceal an important truth. I didn't make it as a comic because I just didn't want it badly enough to keep working at it. So my first bit of advice is this - you either have to commit to it all the way, and have a real passion for it, or don't bother trying. And that's good advice primarily because the life of a comic, until you become a big name star, is…

Stem Cell Lies

Ted Baehr, Christian movie reviewer and propagandist, has an essay at the Worldview Weekend site where he rather brazenly accuses MIchael J. Fox and "liberal elites" of lying about stem cell research. In the process, he tells some whoppers himself. When is a lie not a lie? According to America's liberal, secular elite, a lie is not a lie when it comes from the mouth of a Hollywood star with a terrible debilitating disease or injury. Or, when it comes from some other sympathetic victim, such as the left-wing parent of a dead soldier (Cindy Sheehan) or a left-leaning widow trying to push an…

Statement on Teaching

One of the standard elements of most academic hiring and promotion applications, at least at a small liberal arts college, is some sort of statement from the candidate about teaching. This is called different things at different places-- "statement of teaching philosophy" is a common term for it, and the tenure process here calls for a "statement of teaching goals." I spent hours and hours on this, because I get a little obsessive about written work. It did get read closely by the ad hoc committee, at least-- at my first meeting with them, they asked a couple of questions about details of…

A Review of Questioning Darwin

I've had a chance now to watch Questioning Darwin. Twice. Short review: I liked it quite a bit. Now for the long review. I'm obviously a bit partial, since this film represents my television debut! I was one of the talking heads interviewed in the film, and it was a thrill to be in the company of people like Rebecca Stott, Steve Jones and James Moore, among others. I show up around forty-five minutes in, to say a few things about the Scopes trial and the importance of Sputnik in bringing the creationism issue back to prominence in the United States. It was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed…

Another Round on Science/Religion Compatibility

With all of my recent travels, I feel like most of the last few weeks have been spent either on the road or preparing to go on the road. I will be making another pilgrimage to New York next week, mostly business this time, but some pleasure as well. As a result, a lot of good blog fodder has been falling through the cracks. So, let's try to get caught up on a few things. The first orders of business are two recent posts from Michael Ruse. In the first, he once more offers his thoughts on the question of human inevitability in evolution. He writes: The problem is this. If Christianity…

How Not to Defend Evolution, Part Two

We now continue our discussion of Ian Hacking's wide-ranging essay on evolution and ID. We left off with Hacking having just completed several paragraphs on the uses of tree metaphors in human history. So far my main criticisms have been with the style, not the substance, of Hacking's essay. His points are good, but his writing style is confusing and offputting. Alas, now we come to more substantive criticisms. After praising Kitcher for his explanation of the aptness of the tree metaphor in evolution, Hacking writes: Nevertheless, it is useful to reflect on difficulties in the present…