jlynch | January 21, 2007I was wondering what posts of mine over the past year have received the most hits; What do people link to and what do the comment on? The "top twenty" posts are given below the fold and it is interesting to note that they can be characterized into three major categories: "anti-science" [1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 15, 20] or posts about religion, atheism and/or Dawkins [7, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 17, 18]. This really boils down to issues relating to science and religion, with only two other topics (the
backscatter x-ray being used at airports ["airport porn"] and a strange beastie in Maine) cracking…
jlynch | January 20, 20071912 - Birth of Konrad Emil Bloch, German biochemist, Nobel laureate
1926 - Death of Camillo Golgi, Italian physician, Nobel laureate
jlynch | January 18, 2007
The Dismantled Ship
In some unused lagoon, some nameless bay,
On sluggish, lonesome waters, anchor'd near the shore,
An old, dismasted, gray and batter'd ship, disabled, done,
After free voyages to all the seas of earth, haul'd up at last and
hawser'd tight,
Lies rusting, mouldering.
Walt Whitman (1888)
jlynch | January 18, 2007I'm looking for the source of a quote, attributed by Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (p. 31) to Thomas Jefferson. Dawkins writes:
Thomas Jefferson - better read - was of a similar opinion: 'The Christian God is a being of terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust.'
I cannot find a citation online for this quote, and Dawkins does not provide one. The Jefferson archive at Virginia (which has over 1,700 items online) has a single document (a letter to William Short) which contains the phrase "a being of
terrific character, cruel, vindictive, capricious and unjust". In…
jlynch | January 17, 2007PZ provides a link to a review of The God Delusion by theoretical cosmologist Steven Weinberg and approvingly provides two quotes. I want to alter part of one of them a little:
Are we to conclude that opinions on matters of [evolutionary biology] are only to be expressed by experts, not mere [lawyers] or other common folk?
Many of us involved with fighting creationism have argued for years that expertise is important in scientific matters. That's why lawyers like Phil Johnson need to demonstrate their knowledge of evolution before they are taken seriously. Any one can express an opinion, but…
jlynch | January 17, 2007A day or so back, I posted on an AP article which declared that "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." The original research article is now online. Let's look at the abstract, shall we?
Between 2003 and 2005, the Pestera cu Oase, Romania yielded a largely complete early modern human cranium, Oase 2, scattered on the surface of a Late Pleistocene hydraulically displaced bone bed containing principally the remains of Ursus spelaeus. Multiple lines of evidence…
jlynch | January 17, 2007
[Photo: Michael Price, 2007]
My ex-student Mike Price has a nice article up at Geotimes about Jerome, a once-booming mining town in Arizona that was described as "the wickedest town in the West". It now has a population of 350.
jlynch | January 16, 2007Bush apparently is disappointed that Saddam Hussein's execution "looked like it was kind of a revenge killing." How it was any less vengeful than the 152 executions he signed off on while governor of Texas is a mystery to me.
jlynch | January 15, 2007
Bora is pleased to announce that The Open Laboratory is now available for purchase as an e-book or dead tree. Relive the finest moments of science blogging in the comfort of your armchair. Thrill, as yours truly expounds on Darwin and Marx without the aid of a safety net (or spell-checker). 336 pages of sheer blogging delight ... batteries not included.
jlynch | January 15, 2007
AP is reporting that a "skull found in a cave in Romania includes features of both modern humans and Neanderthals, possibly suggesting that the two may have interbred thousands of years ago." A paper to appear in Tuesday's PNAS (and not online yet) will argue that the ~40,000 year old skull raises "important questions about the evolutionary history of modern humans,"
jlynch | January 15, 2007
Gorgeous image, courtesy of APOD
Any readers got good McNaught photos to share?
jlynch | January 14, 2007
I wonder whether Rupert Murdock's head exploded after seeing this on Fox last night during the Eagles/Saints game. And where's that right-wing blog rage on this corruption of our children during primetime?
jlynch | January 13, 2007Today in 1978, the logician Kurt Gödel died in Princeton, New Jersey. Gödel, of course, is remembered for his incompleteness theorems but also took the ontological proof for the existence of God serious enough to express his own version of it in modal logic.
Strangely, Richard Dawkins does not mention Gödel's version in The God Delusion, and instead restricts himself to discussing Anslem's version presented in Proslogium (over 900 years earlier) which Dawkins describes as "infantile". For that matter, he also doesn't mention versions of the ontological argument developed by, for example,…
jlynch | January 12, 2007Apparently a YEC named "Frosty" trumps the American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Academy of Sciences every time.
"Condoms don't belong in school, and neither does Al Gore. He's not a schoolteacher," said Frosty Hardison, a parent of seven who also said that he believes the Earth is 14,000 years old. "The information that's being presented is a very cockeyed view of what the truth is. ... The Bible says that in the end times everything will burn up, but that perspective isn't in the DVD." (…
jlynch | January 12, 2007Rob Crowther over at the Discovery Institute seems to be a little upset and is accusing evolutionists of arrogance. Commenting on this post by Steve Reuland over at the Panda's Thumb, Crowther opines:
You seldom see this kind of arrogance outside of academia. And you would never see scientists making such proclamations to the general public. Or to doctors. Not if they didn't want it noted on their permanent record.
The bottom line for Reuland and other dogmatic Darwinists is that scientists are Darwinists because they're smarter than you. And biologists are more likely to be Darwinists…
jlynch | January 12, 2007Ah, the start of another semester. That exciting time of the year when you meet new students, make new goals, and invariably curse at the copy machine as it refuses to churn out syllabi for you. Such is mid-January in academia.
Or rather it will be on Tuesday. That's when it all kicks off here at ASU.
This semester I'm teaching two courses. The first is my Origins, Evolution and Creation course that I have been teaching since 1998. Every year I get students from varying religious and educational backgrounds and we examine the evidence for creationist claims (after spending some time…
jlynch | January 12, 2007
The Moment
The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,
is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can't breathe.
No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It…