History
oracknows | September 13, 2006For an unforgettable perspective on the tragic events of five years ago, watch this video. No further comment by me is necessary.
The video speaks for itself.
razib | September 10, 2006Apropos of my comment about sex & civilization, a reader brought up Sparta, and over @ 2 Blowhards there's a nice post, Case Studies in State Formation - Sparta:
There was an extreme egalitarianism on the surface in Sparta, where all men ate in messes and dressed identically until getting married in middle age. Indeed, the Spartans called themselves the homoioi, those who are alike. While egalitarianism was a very strong trend throughout the Greek world during the archaic and classical eras, in Sparta the appearance of egalitarianism was deceptive, at least in a politically. Spartan…
oracknows | September 10, 2006Yesterday, I posted about a story indicating that a Danish newspaper had published some of the cartoons from the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon contest, pointing out how, when the original Danish cartoons poking fun at Islam were published, we saw riots, death threats, and demands for punishment. When Iran, supposedly to make fun of the Holocaust and the West's supposed "double standard" with respect to the Holocaust, holds a contest and publishes a bunch of anti-Semitic cartoons, the reaction is largely a worldwide shrug of the shoulders and some fairly minor protests. Some of the collective yawn…
oracknows | September 9, 2006Here's something very telling:
A Danish newspaper has printed cartoons about the Holocaust commissioned by Iran after cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad triggered violent protests.
The newspaper - Information - published six of the cartoons, which are on display in the Iranian capital, Tehran.
Several of the cartoons contrast the plight of the Palestinians with that of the victims of the Holocaust.
Editor-in-chief Palle Weis said he had thought carefully about publishing the cartoons and said it was not a stunt.
He told the BBC the cartoons accompanied a news story about the exhibition. He said…
terrasig | September 8, 2006Next month, the family Pharmboy is headed down to Beluthahatchee, Florida, to help celebrate the 90th birthday of famed human rights legend, Stetson Kennedy, the subject of some Woody Guthrie lyrics put to music by Billy Bragg and Wilco. Among ScienceBloggers, I've learned that Janet and Steinn are big Billy Bragg fans and Josh is a big Woody Guthrie fan, so it seems apropos to celebrate Mr Kennedy here. This is one post I've been meaning to move over here from the old blog, where it first appeared on 15 May 2006.
[I'm currently on the road and I've somehow screwed up the code for…
stcynic | September 5, 2006I saw this column by Tom Flannery in the Worldnutdaily and was planning on writing a critique of its many false claims, but Jon Rowe beat me to it. That's not a big surprise since we've done that often. Flannery attempts to make a common argument among the religious right, that the French revolution turned to despotism while the American revolution did not because ours was grounded in "Judeo-Christian principles" while theirs was grounded on the primacy of reason (or atheism, in some versions of the argument).
The argument is quite silly and betrays some rather obvious historical ignorance.…
terrasig | September 4, 2006"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country," said Samuel Gompers, founder and longtime president of the American Federation of Labor. "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day...is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."
Put simply, the struggles of the American labor movement have given me the luxury of being a scientist, having such a thing as "…
evolvingthoughts | September 3, 2006I only just saw this today - here's a nice (and more informed) discussion of my use of Aquinas on design. It seems I relied on the term "designedly" a bit too much, when it should be about why the cause of something causes that outcome and not another. I misread by reading Aristotle himself into the medieval period.
I shall now go smack my knuckles.
oracknows | September 3, 2006John Wilkins over at Evolving Thoughts has posted an excellent brief summary of the history of the eugenics movement. In the process, he makes a strong argument that it was genetics far more than evolution that influenced eugenecists and that the entire eugenics movement was based on the concept that evolution was being thwarted by human society and thus needed "help" (a process that is far more like "intelligent design" than natural evolution). Moreover, he gives examples of scientists who pointed out that, for example, weeding out eugenics through selective sterilization was totally…
oracknows | September 1, 2006The latest edition of the History Carnival has been posted at Frog In A Well.
Even though I've been on vacation and blogging (not to mention blog traffic) has been light other than reposts, someone actually submitted something I posted, thus keeping someone linking to me in my absence. I hope the lack of activity is due to lots of people being on vacation at the end of August and my relative lack of new material and that things will perk up after Tuesday. In the meantime, I'm taking it easy and counting down the few remaining days of vacation.
In actuality, though, the only reason I didn't…
oracknows | August 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 30, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
oracknows | August 29, 2006While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…
pharyngula | August 28, 2006Wilkins pins the blame where it belongs: on on a medieval hierarchical concept that Darwin actively negated. It's a very thorough take-down, not that fans of D. James Kennedy will even notice.
evolvingthoughts | August 28, 2006I won't comment on the execrable link made by that execrable TV show. Some things aren't worth the effort. But those whose minds aren't made up may still have a sneaking suspicion that somehow evolutionary theory was responsible for some part of the Holocaust. After all, that sneaking suspicion is what the unDiscovery Institute wants to implant.
So, what's the real story?
There are several ways in which evolution might have made it possible for the sort of racial eugenics that rationalised (not motivated - the German tradition of anti-Semitism goes back as far as Luther, and to the middle…
oracknows | August 26, 2006The other day, in the wake of D. James Kennedy's dishonest documentary Darwin's Deadly Legacy, which blatantly tried to blame the Holocaust and Nazi racial hygiene policies to Darwin's theory of evolution in a totally dishonest way. Particularly ridiculous was Richard Weikart's emphasison the observation that the Nazis used the term "selection" when doctors met each new train transport of Jews at the entrances to the camps to choose who would go straight to the gas chambers and who would survive a while to work, most likely to die in a matter of weeks or months of a combination of starvation…
stcynic | August 25, 2006There is a fascinating exchange going on over at Positive Liberty between Jon Rowe, Jim Babka and Gregg Frazer. There are two questions under consideration - to what extent is Calvinism opposed to revolution and to the notion of political rights in general; and on a larger level, does the Bible support the notion of political liberty? You couldn't ask for three more interesting people to debate the issue. Jon Rowe and Jim Babka are both libertarians, but one is a non-believer (for lack of a more specific phrase) and the other a devout Christian. And Frazer is a professor of history at a…
evolvingthoughts | August 24, 2006evolgen reports on debates in Nature about whether the term "prokaryote" is meaningful. Norman Pace argued that the term is a negative one ("privative" in Aristotle's sense), defined by what they do not have (which is to say, a nuclear membrane surrounding the genetic material). Now Bill Martin and Eugene Koonin have weighed in with a letter in which they say
Prokaryotes are cells with co-transcriptional translation on their main chromosomes; they translate nascent messenger RNAs into protein. The presence of this character distinguishes them from cells that possess a nucleus and do not…
pharyngula | August 24, 2006
This article is part of a series of critiques of Jonathan Wells' The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design that will be appearing at the Panda's Thumb over the course of the next week or so. Previously, I'd dissected the summary of chapter 3. This is a longer criticism of the whole of the chapter, which is purportedly a critique of evo-devo.
Jonathan Wells is a titular developmental biologist, so you'd expect he'd at least get something right in his chapter on development and evolution in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design, but no:…