Culture Wars
tfk | February 13, 2007The inimitable Dave Springer broadens his anti-science screeds to include the science of climate change, claiming he's "exposing the lies." He claims a NASA page demonstrates "frank admissions of broken atmospheric models, [and] declining atmospheric temperatures."
Of course, that's the opposite of what you'll find.
What you actually find there is a demonstration of tropospheric temperature (temperature in the lowest 5 miles of the atmosphere) rising steadily over the last decades, exactly as predicted by models. You'll also see a graph of declines in stratospheric temperature (between 9…
tfk | February 12, 2007Via Mousie Cat, we learn that Monkey Girl author Ed Humes has a bone to pick with the Wall Street Journal. Humes book has received high praise for its coverage of the Dover trial, even earning the coveted scorn of the DI's bitching and moaning media complaints division.
The Wall Street Journal review was less positive. The reviewer, Pamela Winnick, was only identified as "an attorney and former reporter for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette."
Alas, that is but part of the story. She has also lectured at the Discovery Institute (a major player in the events described in the book, and not a…
omnibrain | February 11, 2007As an academic your currency is your reputation, and how often your papers get cited (well assuming they aren't citing you for making up data). The inevitable result of this are battles of ideas being fought out at conferences, in special issues of journals and in review articles. If you discover something interesting and the mechanisms are not clearly visible (as they usually are not - especially in something like psychology!) other scientists begin to attack you - especially if your new idea challenges theirs!
In the science of the brain there are a few debates that immediately come to…
tfk | February 9, 2007In a post that Billy D. titled Dembski’s pseudo-mathematical posturings, he manages to complain that:
The combination of ignorance and arrogance on the part of this individual is staggering.
Astoundingly, "this individual" is not meant as a reference to himself. It is a reference to an entirely accurate critique of his work by a professor of religious studies. Yes, William Dembski, M.Div. and professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, is playing a game of credentials. He is, to be clear, playing a game of credentials with Scott Paeth whose PhD comes from the Princeton Theological…
tfk | February 8, 2007The DI Complaints department replies to my post calling them on their lies about Haeckel.
Alas, they couldn't be bothered to link to my post, where their readers could have looked at actual evidence presented, not just their words. The image they presented is not Haeckel's, nor is it, as its caption asserts, a "version of Haeckel's drawings."
Thus, it does not disprove the claim that "'You don't find' Haeckel’s embryo drawings in modern textbooks," as the DI insists "Olson confidently asserts. 'There's no trace of [them] other than a mention that Haeckel once upon a time came up with this…
tfk | February 7, 2007
The image above is Haeckel's famous drawing of embryos, a series of images which he presented to illustrate his now discredited notion of recapitulation. He fudged the details to make the whole thing look more convincing, which was undeniably a bad choice.
This figure was reproduced by some textbooks as an interesting and historical demonstration of broad similarities between related species especially in their early development, a pattern more similar to von Baer's laws than Haeckel's ideas. Nonetheless, creationists like Jonathan Wells like to complain about teaching evolution because of…
tfk | February 5, 2007A few days back I criticized two posts at Cato's blog, one about vouchers, the other an argument by Andrew Coulson about how we could end the wars over creationism. Coulson replied. In response to my observation that he tended to treat evolution as anti-religious, Coulson replies:
Evolution isn’t so much anti-religious as un-religious. While it is possible (indeed common) to simultaneously understand evolution and be religious, it is not necessary to be religious once you understand evolution. The existence of humanity can be explained by purely natural causes, so “God the Creator” becomes…
tfk | February 3, 20071994: Rwandan hate radio compares Tutsis to cockroaches.
The director of the human rights organization, African Rights, Rakiya Omaar, was following the events from northern Rwanda.
"In Rwanda they referred to Tutsis as cockroaches," explains Omaar. "They were not human beings. This is very important to understand, [there are] very close parallels to what happened in Hitler's Germany. [They said,] 'Don't worry, you're not killing humans like you. You are killing some vermin that belongs under your shoe. You're killing cockroaches.'"
2007: American hate radio compares liberals to cockroaches.
tfk | February 1, 2007What does a guy have to do to get onto Dinesh D'surrendermonkey's Enemies List?
Have I not been sufficiently vocal in demanding liberty and freedom? Are there policy positions of his which I agree with? Surely he isn't merely picking a few famous people to criticize rather than really putting together a comprehensive list. When one compiles a list like this, the important thing is to really focus. Compare D'Souza's list with Nixon's detailed accounting of who he didn't like (and why):
Arnold M. Picker, United Artists Corp., New York; Top Muskie fund raiser. Success here could be both…
tfk | January 28, 2007Cato defends children's liberty to be wrong. This is not the first time that Andrew Coulson has advanced this line of argument. Essentially, his claim is that the only way to end the wars over creationism would be to let children learn whatever they want in schools that their parents pay with other people's tax dollars. Doing otherwise, he insists, would be "illiberal, undemocratic, divisive, ineffective, and counter-productive." That "someone who agrees wholeheartedly that a natural process of evolution is the best explanation of how human beings came to be" finds this argument…
tfk | January 25, 2007Roddy Bullock repeats some questions, as if they get more interesting the millionth time:
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches outer space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A scientist.
Question: What do you call a person who hypothesizes an unseen intelligent being and searches inner space for confirming material evidence?
Answer: A religious nut.
What he's trying to do in repeating this pair of questions twice, is to suggest that the search for extraterrestrial life is the same as what IDolators do. And so long as you ask the…
tfk | January 23, 2007
On this Blogging for Choice Day, we are asked to tell why we are pro-choice.
For me, the answer is simple: women are people, and as such deserve to have control of their own bodies. Like Lindsay, I find this claim remarkable only in that others find it remarkable.
That's why I'm pro-choice, and that's why I think that the basic framework of Roe v. Wade makes sense. A fertilized egg starts out as a growth in a woman's uterus. The decision to remove it is as morally consequential as the removal of a pre-cancerous polyp. At the end of a pregnancy, you've got an independently viable human…
tfk | January 22, 2007Here is your Tuesday assignment. Read this post and this article in today's Times:
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking — the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick — are far more common than people acknowledge.…
tfk | January 22, 2007The DI answers some questions:
Question (2): "Has DI taken a stand on the enforcement of the 'church / state establishment' rules banning from public schools and colleges the teaching of evolution if it is being taught as a religion?"
We do not believe that teaching evolution is necessarily unconstitutional.
Given that Epperson v. Arkansas held that forbidding such teaching is unconsittutional, it would seem that we can go well beyond saying that teaching evolution is "not necessarily unconstitutional." It is in fact a constitutionally protected right of science teachers.
In that 1968 case…
omnibrain | January 22, 2007Normally I'm all for ripping PETA a new one, but there are all sorts of problems with this ad, which (among others) has appeared in Time Square and in the NYT.
It seems that the Center for Consumer Freedom, who is sponsoring the ads and bills itself as a grass roots organization, is actually a front for big tobacco and the fast food companies.
From Wikipedia:
The group defines its mission as fighting against "a growing cabal of food cops, health care enforcers, militant activists, meddling bureaucrats, and violent radicals who think they know what's best for you, [who] are pushing against…
tfk | January 21, 2007Few heed Operation Rescue’s call for abortion protest:
Kansas’ largest city braced Friday for a possible repeat of massive abortion protests in the wake of Operation Rescue’s nationwide call for demonstrations.
But while abortion opponents dubbed the four-day event a “cry for justice,” that cry largely fell on deaf ears on Friday afternoon.
Only a few dozen abortion protesters picketed outside the clinic of Dr. George Tiller…. Abortion rights supporters, and even the media, at times outnumbered the protesters.
The conservative revival in Kansas kicked off in 1991 with an unexpected outpouring…
tfk | January 21, 2007At the core of my disagreement with Sam Harris (and with our own Jason Rosenhouse) is the role of religion in making religious authoritarianism bad. I argue that authoritarianism (and extremism in general) is the issue, while others think that religion should be the focus. To bolster my argument, I've been quoting Reinhold Niebuhr's comment that "Religion is a good thing for good people and a bad thing for bad people."
I found that quotation in an interview with Chris Hedges. Hedges wrote War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, in which his discussion of war's place in society verged on the…
tfk | January 21, 2007At Billy Dembski's place, GilDodgen quotes Denyse O'Leary:
Bear with a simple lay hack here a moment: Why must we know a designer’s intentions in order to detect design?
If the fire marshall’s office suspects arson, do the investigators worry much about WHY?
Surely they investigate, confirm their finding, and turn the information over to other authorities and interested parties, without having the least idea why someone torched the joint.
ALL they need to be sure of is that the joint did not torch itself, via natural causes.
Let's say, first of all, that we are not talking about a bush that…
omnibrain | January 20, 2007Ok... this is just silly ;)
I guess the wikipedia people think so as well - spoil sports!
tfk | January 19, 2007Jason Rosenhouse replies to Josh Rosenau. Skimmers are likely to get confused. I replied in his comments, and he replied again, and we'll probably both reply a lot.