Poor Erskine College. They recently had a successful volleyball season, then two of their players came out as gay — which shouldn’t be a problem, except that Erskine is in South Carolina, right there in the front flap of the Bible Tightie-Whities, and trustees and administrators and community supporters freaked out. What to do? Easy. They turned to the Bible and issued a statement.
American Atheists is doing it again: they’re attending CPAC. I’m at a loss — this is simply incoherent, and sends the message that the atheism movement is so broad it is meaningless, it can encompass any philosophy, including explicitly anti-humanist ones. So why bother?
And weirder still, look who they’re sending.
Isn’t it nice of a Southern Baptist minister to expose his ignorance with a question?
via Twitter:
For instance, why would there need to be a God if we just evolved, are really just animals, and that everything happens purely by chance? If the entire universe is just a random set of events and a collection of beings with no purpose, then having a Creator is unnecessary.
Otto West: Apes don’t read philosophy.
Wanda: Yes they do, Otto. They just don’t understand it.
Michael Egnor read my post on how medical publications avoid using the word “evolution”. He just didn’t understand it.
Vantrú, the Icelandic atheist organization, has unilaterally decided co-opt all the children born in that country and automatically enroll all Icelanders as atheists. I guess that means the percentage of atheists in Iceland will leap from roughly 10% to nearly 100%.
Last year, Creation Ministries International announced a new documentary called “Evolution’s Achilles’ Heels” which was supposed to be revolutionary and like no other creationist movie. Did anyone see it? Anyone? I didn’t, but I just ran across some notes on it, so I rummaged around the web to find out what happened.
And it’s about time. Soon is a dishonest hack, one of the climate change deniers who exploited his prestigiously titled position as a researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics (Oooh! Sciencey!) to claim authority in attacks on more credible climate scientists, and he’s been very popular on the denialist side of things.
Now his own boss is admitting that he violated disclosure principles by failing to reveal his industry connections. You might be wondering what connections, and how much did he get?
Here it is. I haven’t watched it, so maybe it sucks.
Man, I hate TED talks. I know there are some good ones, but like anything, 99% of them are crap, and the garbage gets gobbled up with the same fervor as the jewels.
So I get this blurb from a book publisher, promoting a new book coming out about evolution, by some guy whose main claim to fame seems to be that he’s a “TED all-star” (I looked a little deeper: he’s also a businessman who runs a biotech investment company). The email was titled “George Clooney’s wedding isn’t just unfair, it’s unnatural selection”, which set off alarms all over the place — klaxons and those whoop-whoop howling noises I’d hear from the fireboats on Puget Sound. (Actually, every morning my inbox produces a cacophony of bullshit, so this is nothing suprising.)
I was curious, though, so I read it instead of hitting delete.
It’s also MDs who avoid the “E” word. A survey of the literature found an interesting shift in usage:
The results of our survey showed a huge disparity in word use between the evolutionary biology and biomedical research literature. In research reports in journals with primarily evolutionary or genetic content, the word “evolution” was used 65.8% of the time to describe evolutionary processes (range 10%–94%, mode 50%–60%, from a total of 632 phrases referring to evolution). However, in research reports in the biomedical literature, the word “evolution” was used only 2.7% of the time (range 0%–75%, mode 0%–10%, from a total of 292 phrases referring to evolution), a highly significant difference (chi-square, p < 0.001). Indeed, whereas all the articles in the evolutionary genetics journals used the word “evolution,” ten out of 15 of the articles in the biomedical literature failed to do so completely. Instead, 60.0% of the time antimicrobial resistance was described as “emerging,” “spreading,” or “increasing” (range 0%–86%, mode 30%–40%); in contrast, these words were used only 7.5% of the time in the evolutionary literature (range 0%–25%, mode 0%–10%). Other nontechnical words describing the evolutionary process included “develop,” “acquire,” “appear,” “trend,” “become common,” “improve,” and “arise.” Inclusion of technical words relating to evolution (e.g., “selection,” “differential fitness,” “genetic change,” or “adaptation”) did not substantially alter the picture: in evolutionary journals, evolution-related words were used 79.1% of the time that there was an opportunity to use them (range 26%–98%, mode 50%–60%), whereas in biomedical journals they were used only 17.8% of the time (range 0%–92%, mode 0%–10%).
