guest post
evolvingthoughts | September 10, 2008Another guest post by Thony Christie
John recently provided a link to a review of Steve Fuller’s newest book by Anthony Grayling. On the whole I find Professor Grayling’s comments excellent and applaud his put-down of Fuller but then in the last section of his review he goes and spoils it all, at least for me, by seriously abusing the history of science. As I recently took Rodney Stark to task for his misuse of the history of science in the cause of Christianity I feel obliged in the interest of fairness to do the same to Grayling. Just because I think he is on the right side does not give…
evolvingthoughts | September 8, 2008
Ten things you don’t know about the Earth - Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy considers the following propositions:
1) The Earth is smoother than a billiard ball.
2) The Earth is an oblate spheroid
3) The Earth isn’t an oblate spheroid
4) The Earth is not exactly aligned with its geoid
5) Jumping into hole through the Earth is like orbiting it (including, digging to China)
6) The Earth’s interior is hot due to impacts, shrinkage, sinkage, and radioactive decay
7) The Earth has at least five natural moons. But not really
8) The Earth is getting more massive
9) Mt. Everest isn’t the biggest…
evolvingthoughts | September 6, 2008
Thony Christie, a regular commenter on this blog, is also a historian of science, and he sent the following guest post that I thought well worth publishing.
Commentator “Adam” asked John’s opinion on a book he is reading, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success by Rodney Stark, saying that he himself was not knowledgeable enough to judge this work. He then produced three short quotes from the book as representative of Stark’s thesis. John dismissed the quotes in his usual pithy style; From what you quote, it is about 100% wrong.
Actually…
esiegel | February 14, 2008
Three awesome things are going on today for you, and I invite you to check them all out:
The latest Carnival of Space is live, where you have your choice of 23 different astronomical topics to choose from. Of course, my post this week on galaxies and how they're made is on there, too!
Pamela L. Gay, cohost of Astronomy Cast, blogger of Star Stryder and all-around great person, saw a press release this week about whether we need dark matter and dark energy. The answer, of course, is yes, but since I'm an expert on that stuff, she came to me and asked me to give my analysis of the…
evolvingthoughts | November 4, 2007
[A guest post by palentologist and geologist Chris Nedin]
It's taken the best part of 50 years but it's finally here! 50 years after the International Geophysical Year (1957-8) that took a global geophysical view of the globe, one of the outcomes of that global geophysical view has just been published – the Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map (Korhonen et.al. 2007) (the BBC has the story and an annotated copy of the map here).
The map shows magnetic intensity readings of crustal rocks from around the world, combined on a single map for the first time.
Magnetic intensity is what's left after…
evolvingthoughts | April 9, 2007
This is a guest post by Carl Bajema, a retired evolutionary biologist, first posted on the Richard Dawkins website on Darwin's birthday.
Happy 198th Birthday Charlie Darwin from Carl Bajema...
Organisms with their intricate adaptations for surviving and reproducing could not have evolved by chance alone. Both creationists and evolutionary biologists agree with this conclusion. Charles Darwin understood that the designs we observe in nature could not have been produced by undirected random processes alone.
Selection was widely understood before Darwin's time to be strictly a negative…