If you’re planning to go to the Fifth International Volvox Conference, it’s time to get a move on. Early bird registration and, more importantly, abstract submission end Saturday. Registration is open (at a slightly higher rate) until July 13, but if you want to present a poster or talk, the June 1 deadline applies.
The meeting is July 26-28 in Tokyo and includes a July 29 excursion to the NIES microbial culture collection and the National Museum of Nature and Science.
The genesis of the next bestseller:
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Persecution complex? Image from an Evolution News & Views post on the Discovery Institute’s exclusion from the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in 2016.
In a previous post, I brought up Michael Egnor’s criticism of a blog post by Jerry Coyne. The post in question was criticizing the laughably bad argument by John Staddon that secular humanism is a religion. Tellingly, Dr. Egnor’s post does not address the substance of Dr. Coyne’s criticism at all. Seriously, not one word of Egnor’s response answers a single one of Coyne’s arguments.
The one and only portion of Coyne’s post that Egnor responds to is this:
[T]he editors screwed up by accepting a piece that makes very little sense, and arrives at its conclusion by some risibly tortuous logic… Why did the editors of Quillette publish this odiferous serving of tripe?
Egnor characterizes this as “seeth[ing]”, “rant[ing]”, “hate[ful]”, and “malic[ious]”. I won’t pass judgement on that characterization. The piece does make very little sense, and it does use some risibly tortuous logic, as I’ve previously pointed out. “Odiferous serving of tripe?” I guess you could call that seething and ranting, but it is a few words out of a much longer, mostly impassive post. Anyway, Dr. Egnor is entitled to his opinion, and that’s not what I’m here to talk about.
If you can’t beat ’em, define ’em out of existence!
Some members of the intelligent design community seem to have a genuinely hard time understanding that non-religious people actually exist. They don’t have convincing arguments for their religion, so they attempt an end run around reason by simply declaring that everyone is religious.
Journey into bullshitI have never blocked a comment on this site that wasn’t straight-up spam. This should not be construed as a promise that I never will; it’s my site, and I reserve the right to block anything for any reason. So far, I just haven’t seen the need.
Not that I haven’t had some pushback in the comments, but I generally prefer to let the criticism stand. Sometimes I answer it. Sometimes the arguments are so inane that I think they have the opposite of their intended effect. And sometimes they’re so gloriously bad that I want to make sure my readers see them. This one falls into the third category.
