Culture Wars
tfk | April 26, 2010Jerry Coyne, in the throatclearing before an otherwise reasonable dissection of wankery on the Huffington Post, brings the ahistorical and gratuitous FAIL:
I’m coyneing the term “New Creationism” to describe the body of thought that accepts Darwinian evolution but with the additional caveats that 1) it was all started by God, 2) had God-worshipping humans as its goal, and 3) that the evidence for all this is that life is complex, humans evolved, and the the “fine tuning” of physical constants of the universe testify to the great improbability of our being here—ergo God.
Two main thoughts…
tfk | April 21, 2010I'm in the Washington Post's book review blog today, offering my take on a chapter from conservative pundit S.E. Cupp's forthcoming book. I haven't seen anything but the 4th chapter ("Thou Shalt Evolve"), but the book as a whole seems like an odd project. Not least that a book titled Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity would be penned by a self-described atheist. In other words, when the title calls it "our religion," she isn't including herself.
I first learned of Cupp's existence in January, from a Salon.com profile which presented her as a possible bright light…
tfk | April 19, 2010Long-time readers know I've been trying to reduce my the number of RSS feeds I monitor, so it takes a lot to make me add a new blog to my reading, but You're Not Helping is filled with win. The authors' take on the importance of tone is filled with win, for instance.
And their take on TFK? Dead on:
Josh Rosenau is an enigma, a chimera of sorts. That’s because, sometimes, he says some great stuff. Other times? Not so much. We guess you could say he’s kinda like us.
It's true. Sometimes this is a shitty blog, and sometimes it's less shitty. Sometimes the things I think make it shitty are not…
tfk | April 14, 2010James Kidder is doing yeoman work. You see, Casey Luskin of the Disco. 'Tute took a look at the new Smithsonian Institute exhibit on human origins, and wrote:
Did you get that? Ignoring the fact that transitional fossils are often missing even among taxa whose records are very complete, now Darwinâs defenders argue that their theory âpredicts gaps in the fossil record.â How convenient!
Kidder then points out that this is a dumb argument by pointing to specific transitional fossils that we know about and that really do help us understand transitions in human evolution. Huzzah!
But that's…
tfk | April 14, 2010So there's no confusion, I'm entirely down with the skeptical movement. I'm on the board of Bay Area Skeptics (the oldest local skeptic group in the US), I'm helping organize SkeptiCal: The Northern California Science and Skepticism Conference (register now). I've hosted the Skeptics' Circle blog carnival. Yay skepticism.
I've also jumped on the recent stories about the Pope's role in covering up rape by priests. I do that not as a skeptic, not as a scientist, not as an agnostic, not as a Democrat, not as a fan of Firefly and The Wire. I do it as a person concerned about the wellbeing of…
tfk | April 13, 2010Remember a few months back when Kevin Padian was all "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists"? Then a buncha people said that Padian (an atheist) was making cracks about atheists, "othering" atheists, &c? Good times.
One of the arguments that emerged from that was just how many atheists really do claim some sort of broad incompatibility between science and religion. In the context of the current fighting over science's relationship to religion, this is actually not that interesting a…
tfk | April 13, 2010Michael at "The Bible is the Other Side" is upset. He's been reading about the suppression of research on evolution acceptance among the American public, and doesn't like what he sees. In particular, he doesn't like yours truly, and the way people like me talk about science literacy:
There is a myth propagated by radical left leaning evolutionists that you can have a PHD and have papers published in mainstream science journals and have discoveries that save lives but if you doubt evolution then your an illiterate in science.
Oh my stars and LOLcats! This is so adorable that if I had a…
tfk | April 12, 2010Shorter Ned Ryun, former Bush speechwriter and twin son of disgraced former middle-distance runner and Congressman Jim Ryun: An American Armada:
Conservatives must defeat the socialists who are propping up our banking system and forcing all Americans to pay money to private health insurers. To do this, they must form an armada of sorts, in which each sacrifices his or her own wellbeing for the greater good. An armada or cadre, if you will, of heavily armed, poorly defended attackers willing to destroy their enemy (the American government) at all costs, even their lives. Only through such…
tfk | April 12, 2010Shorter Sam Harris: FAQ :: How can you derive an âoughtâ from an âisâ?:
No.
This is not quite how he'd probably shorter himself, but that's not the immediately important issue. The immediately important issue is that he thinks we could get from "is" to "ought" by saying that actions which produce the worst possible suffering for all sentient beings are bad actions, and we ought to do something else. In other words, the "ought" Harris manages to derive (by various assumptions) is that we should not do the very worst thing possible.
As a reply to his critics (cf.), this goes nowhere special…
tfk | April 12, 2010PZ asks "Am I to be the next enemy of the NCSE?":
No.
This has been your April 13, 2010 edition of simple answers to stupid questions.
Most of the rest of the piece is not really worth addressing, but I'll note a rather serious error in PZ's opening paragraph:
I'm a little worried. Jason Rosenhouse wrote about this new paper by Peter Hess, the Faith Project Director (I'm already rolling my eyes) of the NCSE, and I learn that the first failing of Intelligent Design creationism is that it is blasphemous.
No. Hess asks, "What are the central theological failings of intelligent design?" and…
tfk | April 10, 2010Not a joke: How are the heads of the Catholic Church and Massey Energy similar?
Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI, is in trouble. Increasing evidence is emerging that he quashed internal investigations and discipline of priests accused, and even convicted, of pedophilia. This is very bad. Every new revelation about then-Cardinal Ratzinger's actions have had him closer and closer to the circle of people stating directly that the Church should not defrock abusive priests. The most recent documents including his signature underneath the argument (written in Latin) that a priest should…
tfk | April 9, 2010At Bill Dembski's blog, Clive Hayden reads my law review article and finds it to be "inaccurate," "prideful," and "a kind of disconnected cluster of arguments that reads like a brainstorm (concerned with quantity of arguments over quality), that could only persuade the uninformed."
Meanwhile, an email correspondent affiliated with a natural history museum writes:
I wanted to write and congratulate you (and thank you) for the very concise and well-written "legal" paper on the trajectory of ID after Dover (in the Saint Thomas Journal). Very nicely done!
Given that Hayden inaccurately describes…
tfk | April 2, 2010I've never written a law review article, and my first stab at the genre turned into a bit of a beast to wrangle. While most of the papers in the journal ran to perhaps a dozen pages, mine weighs in at 68, in which I offer a brief exploration of evolution for the lawerly set, a review of creationism's legal and social history, a short defense of the Kitzmiller decision striking down ID in public schools, and a review of current anti-evolution efforts, especially so-called academic freedom laws. For all that, I think it hangs together nicely, a tribute to the students at the University of St…
tfk | April 2, 2010The Discovery Institute Media Complaints Department issues a missive about a University of Arizona panel on creationism. Amidst the usual whinging about the failure to include the mainstream scientists and historians who totally support ID, we get Disco. hanger-on David Klinghoffer's insistence that:
whatever else may be said for or against ID, it's clearly at odds with a literal reading of the Bible.
This is interesting. Bill Dembski has insisted that ID is simply "the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated," after all, and Dembski is purported to know something about ID.
I'll also note…
tfk | April 1, 2010So the other day Sam Harris was asked to speak to the TED conference, and he presented what he believes to be a basis for scientifically validating morals and values. This is interesting, as most people who've studied the issue have concluded, for pretty compelling reasons, that this is not the sort of thing that's really possible.
Now, I haven't seen Harris's talk, as I don't care for watching YouTube and it's not a form well-suited for evaluating what would be, if true, a fairly radical discovery. The thing is, skepticism gives you a toolkit for addressing such circumstances. When…
tfk | March 25, 2010This morning the Templeton Foundation announced the winner of the Templeton Prize: Francisco Ayala, a former priest and current biologist who testified against creation science in the '80s and now continues to demolish "intelligent design" â the madness that creation science became. In the comments to PZ's grudging acknowledgment of the wisdom of the choice, Bill Farrell anticipates the creationist response:
Ohhhhhh, Ayala has been "mean" to Stephen Meyer over "Signature."
Send in the attack gerbil, Disco Tute!
And while Casey himself has yet to reply, David Klinghoffer has sallied forth to…
tfk | March 22, 2010Casey Luskin, Disco. DJ and legal eagle sparrow asks "When Is it Appropriate to Challenge the [scientific] 'Consensus'?"
Simple answer: When you can make a convincing scientific argument.
Casey disagrees, joining Jay Richards â Prodigal Son of the Disco. 'Tute â in arguing that:
we must carefully examine the scientific, sociological, rhetorical, and political dynamics of a debate to determine if the consensus deserves our assent, or our skepticism.
This actually combines several errors. First, one can be skeptical of something which deserves assent, and indeed to which one does assent.…
tfk | March 22, 2010
It's like he's been reading my mind. He's even nearly re-derived Intelligent Falling. But upside down!
tfk | March 18, 2010Shorter Richard Sternberg: Beginning to Decipher the SINE Signal:
If science fiction weren't fiction, ID would be really good science.
In responding tangentially to our earlier criticism of him for employing arguments of a paranoid schizophrenic nature which treated movies as if they were evidence of how science works, Sternberg pens an essay in which we're to pretend that we find monoliths on Earth's two moons and they send us crazy signals that make our computers suddenly intelligent.
He quotes a hypothetical critic replying:
We think youâre a nice guy, but your arguments are insane.…
tfk | March 13, 2010One of my colleagues from Scienceblogs.com.br contacted me a week or so ago to talk about creationists and global warming deniers, and I just checked and his story for Brazil's largest paper is online. Frankly, I think I gave him one of my juicier quotes:
"Dos negacionistas do aquecimento global, a maioria é motivada principalmente pelos negócios e pela polÃtica. Um número chocante de pessoas parece se opor à ideia porque não gostam de Al Gore. Muitos trabalham em empresas petrolÃferas ou pertencem a indústrias que teriam de pagar pela mitigação do aquecimento", diz Rosenau. "Então…