Some travel awards will be granted to students and postdocs attending the Fourth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2017) in St. Louis. Applications are due July 1, 2017. If you are planning to attend the meeting as a student or postdoc, you really should apply.
Don’t forget, abstracts for the Fourth International Volvox Conference (Volvox 2017) in St. Louis are due this Friday, June 16, 2017.
Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers has been interviewing his fellow FreeThought Bloggers, and Sunday afternoon was my turn. It was supposed to be a group chat, but no one else showed up, so I got to ramble about Fierce Roller for a full half hour. Apologies for the vertical format on my end; I’ve been having audio problems with Google Hangouts on my laptop, so I had to use my phone.
Dr. David Kirk, Professor Emeritus at Washington University in St. Louis.
I just found out from Jim Umen, who’s organizing the Fourth International Volvox Conference, that David Kirk is planning to attend. This is great news; we’ve been wanting Dr. Kirk to come since the first meeting in 2011, but it hasn’t previously worked out.
Cdesign proponentsists often complain that critics attack straw man versions rather than their actual arguments. That must be really frustrating; as I’ve said before, if you have good arguments, you don’t need to misrepresent your opponents’. Here, for example is Casey Luskin on Evolution News & Views:
Many critics of intelligent design have promoted false, straw-man versions of ID, typically going something like this:
“Intelligent design claims that life is so complex, it could not have evolved, therefore it was designed by a supernatural intelligence.”
Yesterday, I wrote that the move to a new web host cost us our comment whitelists. Now I see that the Preview button is no longer working on comments. So if you like to use fancy html tags in your comments, you’ll have to preview them somewhere like this, or risk being mocked when you forget a closing tag.
Discounted registration for the Volvox 2017 meeting has been extended to June 16th. This is a pretty good deal as scientific meetings go: $550 for faculty includes registration, most meals, and a shared room. Registration for postdocs and students is $100 less, and there are travel grants available. If you’ve been debating whether or not to go, it’s decision time: prices will go up $100 after the 16th.
As an unexpected and unintended consequence of FreeThought Blogs kicking our old hosting service to the curb, apparently our commenter whitelists have been lost. Fierce Roller is set that I have to approve your first comment, but after that your comments post automatically.
At least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. Without the whitelist, though, WordPress thinks everyone is a first-time commenter (I had to approve a comment from Aeravi yesterday!). So I’m sorry for the inconvenience, but even if you’ve commented before, your next comment is likely to be held in moderation until I see it. So far, I’ve never blocked a comment that wasn’t straight-up spam, so comment away!
I was hosting a co-PI this past week, and we watched Arrival Sunday night. This will include only minor spoilers, but I’ll put my impression below the fold anyway.
Here are a few of the things that would or do support intelligent design, according to various authors on Evolution News & Views:
If evolving multicellularity is complicated. — Cornelius Hunter, Anne Gauger
If evolving multicellularity is simple. — Unsigned Evolution News & Views article
If the human and chimpanzee genomes are very different. — Denyse O’Leary, Casey Luskin, David Klinghoffer, Anne Gauger
If the human and chimpanzee genomes are very similar. — Cornelius Hunter
If life is uncommon in the universe. — David Klinghoffer
If life is common in the universe. — David Klinghoffer
So intelligent design is in the enviable position of being supported equally well by mutually exclusive predictions. Heads I win, tails you lose! Now we can add Kirk Dunston to that last entry (“Could Atheism Survive the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life?“):
