History
oracknows | April 24, 2008Yesterday, I did a rather long post that used as its introduction an assertion by bioethicist Arthur Caplan in a review of the anti-evolution propaganda movie Expelled! that the claim that Darwinism led more or less directly to the Holocaust is a form of Holocaust denial. In my post, I concluded that I don't agree with that assertion and that likening Ben Stein's claims in the movie actually weakened his otherwise excellent article that appropriately pointed out the inherent immorality and dishonesty in the way the movie links Darwinism to the Holocaust. To my surprise, Dr. Caplan actually…
oracknows | April 23, 2008I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan.
Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument:
The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…
aardvarchaeology | April 23, 2008
The former Cistercian abbey of Alvastra in 1639.
My brother in arms against pomo nonsense, human/cultural geographer Clas Tollin, has put half the manuscript of his forthcoming book on-line beforehand (fully illustrated, in Swedish). The title is StorgÃ¥rdar, egenkyrkor och sockenbildning i Omberg-TÃ¥kernomrÃ¥det under äldre medeltid, "Manorial farms, private churches and the genesis of parishes in the Omberg-TÃ¥kern area in the Early Middle Ages". (These are the Swedish Early Middle Ages, dating from about AD 1100 to 1250.) Hugely useful to me as I'm doing fieldwork and writing about the…
evolvingthoughts | April 22, 2008
One of the enduringly evil things done by Hitler and the Nazis was to pick a minority - Jews - and blame them for all the evils that had occurred in German society. Of course, all these evils had causes quite unrelated to the Jews, mostly caused by the overweening ambitions of the German militarists and industrialists who pushed the German speaking nations into the Great War. As Hitler was of the same ilk as those who caused the problems, he obviously couldn't blame his own kind. So he blamed the Jews.
Now, Ben Stein is doing exactly what Hitler did - picking a "minority" view and blaming…
evolvingthoughts | April 22, 2008
Or, "Ive been a baaaddd boy, Abbott"
The Dante's Inferno Test has banished you to the Second Level of Hell!Here is how you matched up against all the levels:
Level
Score
Purgatory (Repenting Believers)
Very Low
Level 1 - Limbo (Virtuous Non-Believers)
Moderate
Level 2 (Lustful)
Very High
Level 3 (Gluttonous)
Moderate
Level 4 (Prodigal and Avaricious)
Low
Level 5 (Wrathful and Gloomy)
Moderate
Level 6 - The City of Dis (Heretics)
Very High
Level 7 (Violent)
High
Level 8- the Malebolge (Fraudulent, Malicious, Panderers)
Very High
Level 9 - Cocytus (Treacherous)
Low…
terrasig | April 20, 2008I never will forget the look on the faces
Of the men and women that awful day,
When we stood around to preach their funerals,
And lay the corpses of the dead away.
We told the Colorado Governor to call the President,
Tell him to call off his National Guard,
But the National Guard belonged to the Governor,
So he didn't try so very hard.
- Woody Guthrie, Ludlow Massacre (1944)
US Senator Ken Salazar (D-Colo) has commemorated today's 94th anniversary of the Ludlow Massacre by introducing a bill (PDF) to designate the coalminers tent colony as a National Historic Landmark. Unless you…
oracknows | April 19, 2008I suppose I shouldn't be surprised, but I am somewhat. As loony as the President of Iran Ahmoud Ahmadinejad is, as much of an Energizer Bunny of Holocaust denial and host of a conference for Holocaust denial as he is, even I didn't think he would go this far. But, thanks to Mark Hoofnagle and Screw Loose Change, I learn that he has. I should have seen it coming:
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The United States said Wednesday it was "speechless" after Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad voiced doubts about the accepted version of the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
"I am not sure…
esiegel | April 17, 2008What is the future of this website? I'm going to be creating videos for the web about the Universe. I'll be answering questions ranging from what the Universe is like today to how it got to be that way. I'm going to address every step that we know of, from the Big Bang up to the present day.
And I'm going to do it naturally, by telling the story as the Universe tells it directly to us. I call this project Genesis. Check out the teaser trailer below, and tell your friends, because this is coming in January.
pharyngula | April 17, 2008Find out for yourself. Darwin Online has acquired a huge digital collection of Darwin's papers, everything from book drafts to personal letters, and has them scanned and available on the web. There they are in all their scribbled, crossed out, penciled over, rewritten glory — historians and antiquarians will drool over these, but me, I prefer the neatly typed versions.
The collection of family photos is pretty darned cool, though.
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2008
In an amazing display of misjudgment, Paul Newall of the (otherwise) excellent site The Galilean Library has interviewed me about my views on the philosophy of biology. There are some serious folk interviewed there, so of course I feel like a fraud, but hey, you all know I love the "sound" of my own voice. There's also a lot of interesting material there for those who want to know more about the history and philosophy of science, and history and philosophy in general. Go visit it even if you don't want to hear more of your favorite silverback.
evolvingthoughts | April 13, 2008
Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students.
Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin Libet on the fact that conscious choices occur after the brain has already begun a task.
oracknows | April 13, 2008Well, I'm here in sunny San Diego and about to head on over to the convention center to check out the day's festivities and to make sure to check out a friend's poster this morning. (If anyone reading this is attending AACR, you might recognize me by the Plexiglass box full of multi-colored blinking lights and the bad attitude who will have a propensity to whip out a laptop and blog if he finds interesting science to blog about.) The flight sucked, as usual. I was stuck in the middle seat, and the guy on one side of me looked like a bodybuilder and was suitably wide. It occurred to me that…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2008
Following on from my demonstration that Darwinism is entirely responsible for anti-Semiticism back on 1 April, comes this discussion of how Darwinism has even infected the morals of anti-Darwinians, via John Lynch; in this case Maciej Giertych, one of the pro-ID "scientists" interviewed by the film Expelled, and a notable and vocal anti-Semite. Obviously he is influenced by the evil Darwinism, and not from any long-standing tendency in Poland to attack, kill and generally persecute Jews well before Darwin published. And of course poor Ben Stein and Mark Mathis - this makes the clear message…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2008
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit.
Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with five majors and no departments. It set me thinking: why has it come to this? It's not unique to the university I work at - all around the world, the humanities, and in particular the "core" humanities like philosophy and history, have been increasingly wound back in favour of science, technology,…
evolvingthoughts | April 4, 2008
Evilunderthesun is a German language blog that recently did two things: totally demolished the "Nazism was caused by Darwin" trope, with generous quoting of mich, and educated me that the word for April fool in German is Aprilschmerz, which I really like.
Tometheus (Prometheus' and Epimetheus' little brother, responsible for bringing egotism from the gods, I think) quotes my list as one of its favourite Aprilschmerzen.
It's good to be appreciated...
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
grrlscientist | April 2, 2008tags: Hymenoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Ant species (but which one, Alex?)
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
The ants run away ..
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
Thus ends the AMNH subway art series. In short, I photographed all of the tile mosaics (uptown-bound platform, entrances and stairways), several…
grrlscientist | April 1, 2008tags: Hymenoptera, photography, subway art, AMNH, NYC, NYCLife
Ant species [detail]
as portrayed in tiles on the walls of the West 77th street entrance to the NYC subway stop (A-B-C)
at 81st and Central Park West. (ISO, no zoom, no flash).
Image: GrrlScientist 2008. [wallpaper size].
Read more about the AMNH tile artworks and see the AMNH tile artworks photographic archives -- with all the animals identified.
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
I have yet to see the film Expelled, because it hasn't come to Australia yet, but I have become absolutely convinced that Ben Stein is correct. Darwinism causes antisemitism. I have therefore conveniently listed all the cases known of this below the fold. I'll stick with those in which Jews were killed or which led up to justifying such killings. I have of course had to correct the Darwinian fake history, which I have done with strikeouts and italic insertions so you all can see how perfidious these Darwinian revisionists are.
38CE: Thousands of Jews were killed in Alexandria, under Darwin…