History
evolvingthoughts | December 7, 2007
Anyone who has access to COSMOS magazine, published in Australia, will be able to find an article of mine on what good philosophers of science are for science. If you have a copy, scan it and send it to me, will you? I haven't seen it yet.
Also, I have submitted a piece to Auckland Museum magazine MQ entitled "Buffon: An evolutionary thinker?". Kiwis should rush to the stands immediately.
I have to say that I value opportunities to write for non-academics (or else, why would I blog?). Suffice it to say that I think that philosophers are to science as ornithologists are to birds. We study…
oracknows | December 6, 2007This video would argue that the answer to the question in the title is no:
"I don't think anything predated Christians"?
What about Judaism? You know, the Old Testament, the book in which, Christians say, many prophecies of Jesus' coming were made?
I'd try to reassure myself that she's just more ignorant than average about history, but I'm not sure that she is.
(Via Pure Pedantry and Crooked Timber.)
Of course, this is the same woman who doesn't accept evolution and wouldn't commit to an opinion about whether the world is flat, as seen in this video:
Any bets on how long before we hear…
aardvarchaeology | December 3, 2007Virginia Hughes -- that bright, lovely and suddenly quite aptly named minion of our Seed Overlords -- has asked me to write something about parthenogenesis. (That's virgin birth, for you non-Greeks.) Now, I don't know anything about biological parthenogenesis. I just suspect that my wife may have that capability, since our daughter looks like a small copy of her with Rundkvist hair. But I can tell you the story behind the Dogma of Virgin Birth.
To a scientifically minded atheist like myself, the whole idea of religious dogmata appears absurd. I have various factual beliefs about the world,…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2007
Way back in the 1910s, when human evolution was poorly known, some trickster, probably Charles Dawson, its discoverer, set up a hoax: Piltdown man. This was enthusiastically accepted by many British experts because it made Britain, and in particular, England, a leading locale in human evolution. This was the era of Imperial honour and competition, shortly before these powers decided to compete more concretely. Nationalism has always been a factor in evolutionary hypotheses, ranging from Raymond Dart's southern ape, Australopithecus, in South Africa to objections to the discovery by Eugene…
oracknows | December 2, 2007I'm always loathe to criticize a fellow ScienceBlogger, but, as the resident World War II buff and tireless debunker of Holocaust denial, I couldn't let this one pass.
While perusing the Last 24 Hours feed yesterday, I came across a most curious statement in a slapdown by Greg Laden of an attempt by Bruce Chapman to spin an appearance of John West at the University of Minnesota as anything other than an utter disaster. The debate was over who were the true advocates of eugenics, Christians or scientists, the argument being made that more advocates of eugenics in the U.S. in the early part of…
oracknows | December 2, 2007Apparently Jack Dempsey was his generation's Chuck Norris, who, as we know, doesn't read books but stares them down until he gets the information that he wants. Here he is in a 1934 Modern Mechanix article boasting how he can "whip any mechanical robot":
Of course, I still think it would hurt like hell to try to punch steel, regardless of how good a boxer you are.
clock | December 1, 2007Allan Stewart Konigsberg was born at Brooklyn, New York on this day in 1935. By age fifteen he was selling one-liners to New York gossip columnists. He dropped out of college and sold jokes to several prominent comics of the day, and started doing standup comedy himself in 1960. Five years later, under the name Woody Allen, he wrote and acted in "What's New, Pussycat?".
All men are mortal. Socrates was mortal. Therefore, all men are Socrates.
I will not eat oysters. I want my food dead - not sick, not wounded - dead.
If it bends, it's funny; if it breaks, it's not funny.
It's not that I'm…
pharyngula | December 1, 2007Yesterday, I hopped into the black evo-mobile and made the long trek to Minneapolis to witness another creationist make a fool of himself. As is my custom when traveling alone, I like to crank up the car stereo until the road noise is beaten back, and the soundtrack for my trip was first, NPR's Science Friday, and then Richard Einhorn's Voices of Light, which I'd received in the mail earlier this week (thanks, Richard!). This was a mistake. This would have prepared me for science, complexity, and beauty, but all I was going to get at the end was ideological stupidity, simple-mindedness, and a…
clock | November 30, 2007Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on this day in 1835. The picture is from his visit to Nikola Tesla's lab:
oracknows | November 28, 2007Max Hastings apparently disagrees with the disgust that I and many others expressed over Holocaust denier David Irving's recent appearance at the Oxford Union.
I'd almost agree with him, except that (1) I highly doubt, from reading the accounts, that any real "debate" occurred and (2) I don't think the Oxford Union exercise did anything to show students that there are "dangerous people" out there. If anything, Irving may have succeeded in making himself look like less of a threat to many. Actually, Hastings was correct to liken the Irving/Griffin appearance to that of Iranian President…
omnibrain | November 27, 2007Check out this Discussion led by Charlie Rose with guests Eric Kandel, Aaron Beck, Steven Roose & Peter Fonagy:
Here are some interesting home videos of the Freud family as well.
aardvarchaeology | November 27, 2007From about 1845 to 1930, Sweden saw massive emigration to the United States. According to one estimate, about a third of the country's population left. In 1900, more Swedes lived in Chicago than in Gothenburg. Many factors conspired to send people on their way: population expansion, a lack of agricultural land, failed crops, economic recession, and the simple pull of the virtual population vacuum beyond the American frontier, the pull of enormous opportunity, as industrialised Europeans encountered the Stone Age societies of the native Americans.
The emigration left its share of…
oracknows | November 27, 2007If you've been a regular reader here, one thing you know about me is just how much I detest Holocaust denial. What I detest even more, however, is when a Holocaust denier wraps his Nazi apologia and anti-Semitism in the cloak of free speech, particularly when he tries to claim martyr status while doing it. The ever-odious David Irving is particularly good at this, particularly when he flaunts the law of another country and enters it, knowing that there is a warrant for his arrest for denying the Holocaust, and then is shocked--shocked, I say!--that the police actually arrested him and that…
aardvarchaeology | November 26, 2007Reading a good paper by Sten Tesch (in Situne Dei 2007) about porphyrite tiles scavenged from Roman ruins and re-used as portable altar slabs in 11th century Scandinavia, I was reminded of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins. It's a really good story about relics, up there with the cross of Jesus being tens of meters tall if all its alleged fragments were actually genuine.
St. Ursula is most likely a fictional character, but according to legend she was a Christian British princess who went on a pilgrimage to Rome before her planned marriage to the pagan Roman governor of Armorica. Early…
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2007
This paragraph:
This shared failing is no surprise, because the very notion of physical law is a theological one in the first place, a fact that makes many scientists squirm. Isaac Newton first got the idea of absolute, universal, perfect, immutable laws from the Christian doctrine that God created the world and ordered it in a rational way. Christians envisage God as upholding the natural order from beyond the universe, while physicists think of their laws as inhabiting an abstract transcendent realm of perfect mathematical relationships.
Codswallop.
While it is true that the…
aardvarchaeology | November 22, 2007
The other day, I started writing my Östergötland book in earnest, and I'm really enjoying myself. Here's a snippet of today's work.
The oldest known territorial unit in Östergötland is the härad district (etymologically, "army council"), of which the province originally had eighteen. This division is generally taken to have been established at a single event in the Viking Period. There is little evidence to allow us to date that event closer, and it may have taken place after AD 1000 [the end-point of the period under study]. Most likely the härad division event had something to do with the…
pharyngula | November 19, 2007Today is the anniversary of the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, which, even if the content weren't gloriously beautiful, would deserve eternal recognition as an exemplary reminder to speech makers of the virtues of brevity.
You should at least read it today.
pharyngula | November 18, 2007People had some peculiar ideas in 1932. Try reading this wonderfully detailed diagram of evolution (if you've got the bandwidth, download the 3212x8748 pixel version).
The vertical axis makes sense: it's a logarithmic scale of geologic time. It's not quite right, since it has life arising about 1.6 billion years ago, when we now have good evidence that that occurred more than twice that long ago. I'm not going to complain about that — science does march onwards, and it probably represents the best estimates of that time.
The horizontal scale is a real problem, and is revealing something about…
aardvarchaeology | November 16, 2007I'm on a guest blogger roll. Here's something about 11th and 12th century metalworking finds from Sigtuna near Stockholm by my friendly colleague Anders Söderberg. He and our mutual friend Ny Björn Gustafsson are making sense of stuff that usually ends up with burnt daub in large anonymous sacks that nobody ever opens. Impressive work!
The excavation of the Trädgårdsmästaren block in Sigtuna 1988-90 hasn't yet been published, but the dig is of tremendous archaeological value since it covered 1100 square meters and spans about 270 years, from the founding of the town in the late 10th centiry…
aardvarchaeology | November 15, 2007[More blog entries about skepticism, christianity, religion, atheism, jesus; religion, kristendom, jesus, ateism, skepticism, skepsis.]
Guest blogger Jim Benton, scourge of faiths big and small, pokes a few innovative holes in the logical fabric of Christianity.
Introduction -- Joseph, the 'Five Rocks,' and the Problem of Communication.
This article began as a series of four comments at Debunking Christianity in response to the second of a series of essays by a relatively new member named Joseph. Joseph is an ex-minister and counselor in a conservative Christian denomination who had found his…