Chris Mooney did send me a copy of the new paperback edition of The Republican War on Science, so it’s official: he’s now the man who tried to kill me twice.
At least I can testify that a Mooney attack is survivable. I toughened myself up since the first edition with a regimen of Coulter and Wells, and if anything, Mooney is understating the tactics of the Right.
Why don’t you return the favor and write a seizure-inducing book, too?
Yeah, I think PZ would probably be able to write a book that caused massive outrage overload. I’ve also always thought that he’d make a good NPR commentator, but I can already imagine the deluge of pretentious, indignant, “I am so ashamed of NPR” letters that would clog the NPR mailrooms in the following week, so it isn’t likely that it’s going to happen.
Heh, I’d bet at least 3/4 of those letters would say “PZ advocates using brass knuckles and steel-toed boots on Christians — Shame on you, NPR”.
This guy (http://helives.blogspot.com/2006/08/dissonance-as-way-of-life.html) refers to PZ Myers as “alpha attack-dog”: “And all the while they make these arguments about the primacy of peer-review, we are supposed to, out of courtesy, be silent about the fact that their alpha attack-dog “scientist” has not published a peer-reviewed scientific paper this millennium.”
You know, before reading that, I never actually thought that anyone took seriously all of those millenium and century jokes that conveniently present themselves as a result of our being six years into this shebang.
The world is a darker and dumber place for me now, thank you.
OMG, you haven’t had a journal article published since 2000? For shame ;-) Even I’ve had a couple of published papers since then (granted, I did grad school just a couple years ago and the papers were based on my thesis; I was still in undergrad in 2000).
At least you report on and teach about current research. The IDists still use papers from the ’60s.
If by the ’60’s, you mean the 1860’s, you are correct.
Umm, King (Dutch for Earth Pig-the only noun I know in Dutch I think)
I believe that our host has published several peer-reviwed papers this millenium, and that the reference to a singular lack of scientific accomlishment refers to the Discovery Institute’s Michael Behe, everyone’s favourit biochemist.
Speaking of the Coultergeist, it’s amazing how being a Christian Right harpy gets you special treatment at the retail level. I have an article at The Atheist Experience that’ll tell you what I mean.
Some people don’t seem to understand the working conditions, and expectations for faculty, at primarily undergraduate institutions… Faculty research at such institutions is not conducted in the same “crank out the papers, bring in the money” spirit as at research universities; it not so much an end in iteslf as a means toward keeping the faculty up to date in their scholarly knowledge and most especially, giving students a chance for a taste of what science really is, not the cut-and-dried version they get from lectures and textbooks. That’s something liberal arts colleges are a lot better at doing for undergraduates than research universities are, and it’s no coincidence that the colleges graduate a disproportionate number of students who go on to earn Ph.D.’s in science.
Personally I find PZ’s acquaintance with a broad range of literature, and even more his ability to explain the contents of those papers to a general audience with remarkable clarity, to be a model of the qualities faculty at such institutions should possess. I’ve been in that role, and I know that it’s a lot harder than it looks to the peanut gallery (and that he’s a lot better at it than I ever was.) I have little doubt that his students are quite lucky, and hopefully some of them may even realize that. ;)
And besides that, despite what these rules about publication quotas would suggest, it’s quality, not quantity, that counts.
Behe has churned out a lot of crap in peer-review that is only ever cited when someone is ripping it apart. Behe does things like this: http://www.proteinscience.org/cgi/content/abstract/13/10/2651
Yes, let’s assume the thing we’re trying to prove! That’ll teach those Darwinistic materialists who deny our ontologically richer array of explanations! I’m not sure how that piece of crap made it through peer review.
OMG, you haven’t had a journal article published since 2000? For shame ;-)
No, actually PZ has had several articles since the turn of the millenium, but “David”, whom I assume is David Heddle, is too ignorant to use a citation index. I provided one example in the comments over there which I knew PZ had talked about on his blog.
For a self-proclaimed physicist, the failure to understand how to use a citation index is pretty damning.
Just for grins I went over there and put my $0.02 in as well. What a maroon Heddle is.
P.S. Doesn’t the very heavy religious content at Heddle’s place kind of, umm, go just a bit badly with the official party line that ID is not religious?
This guy refers to PZ Myers as “alpha attack-dog”:
They make it sound like it’s a bad thing….