I’ve finished Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), a book I’ve mentioned before and promised, with considerable misgivings, to read thoroughly. I didn’t like his ideas, I thought he’d expressed them poorly before, but I’d give his book on the subject a fair shake and see if he could persuade me.
My opinion: it’s dreck.
The Missouri House of Representatives has passed a bill that would impose new rules on state colleges to “protect diversity” that includes this most interesting clause:
The BBC has another article on Ken Ham’s creationism museum, and guess what they say?
Petersburg, Kentucky, is in the middle of North America. It is supposedly within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population.
Aaargh, no. Kentucky is way over on the eastern side of the US. It is not within a day’s drive of two-thirds of the US population. Is Ham telling everyone this nonsense as a test of how credulous the media might be? Because he’s doing a good job of demonstrating that journalists will swallow anything.
At least this time they included the modifier “supposedly”. It’s progress, I suppose.
If you missed it when the Bell Museum showed it, you’ve got another shot now: the Anthropology Club at UMTC is showing Flock of Dodos on Thursday, 19 April.
This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone’s attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This particular irritating fool has not only been morphing his username to get past my filters, but has at least once imitated a regular here, a particularly obnoxious and contemptible strategem that guarantees that I won’t ever be lifting the ban.
When you see a car labeled with creationist slogans parked, don’t you expect to see a dozen guys with floppy shoes and big red rubber noses pop out of it?
(I think the fellow in this picture is mocking the car, so don’t laugh at him if you see him in public.)
First the ideologues came for evolution, making it uncomfortable for teachers to teach it, even when it is not only legal, but mandated by state education standards. What will they suppress with indirect social pressure next?
How about those bits of history the fascists and the religious find objectionable?
Schools are dropping the Holocaust from history lessons to avoid offending Muslim pupils, a Government-backed study has revealed.
It found some teachers are reluctant to cover the atrocity for fear of upsetting students whose beliefs include Holocaust denial.
As I said in the previous post, this struggle in which we’re engaged is more than a fight against a few specific clowns — it’s for a broader ideal of striving towards a truth, against those who want to twist perception of reality to support short-sighted, selfish, and silly beliefs. It’s not just science, it’s history, politics, culture. If you side with the primacy of faith over reason in science, there is a long list of other virtues you will also be sacrificing on your altar.
Mike’s Weekly Skeptic Rant has a good rant on the subject.
Here is a criticism of evolutionary biology:
…it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory … We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory.
If a Bill Dembski or a Michael Egnor or a Ken Ham had said this — and it is exactly the kind of thing they would say — we’d be throwing rotten fruit at them and mocking their ignorance of how science works. Nothing is proven, it’s all provisional, but we do have an incredible amount of evidence in support of biology. This fellow is also deeply wrong about what we can do in the lab, and is overlooking the fact that not all science is something you do on a bench. Those statements are the kind of destructive nonsense the Discovery Institute uses, propaganda sown explicitly to spread excessive doubt where we should have very little, so that their vapid and useless ‘alternative’ theory looks a little more attractive. That quote is a stupid statement that ought to be ripped apart on the evolution blogs.
I’ve just learned that a very nifty old book has been posted at Project Gutenberg: At the Deathbed of Darwinism, by Eberhard Dennert. It was published in 1904, a very interesting period in the history of evolutionary biology, when Haeckel was repudiated, Darwin’s pangenesis was seen as a failure, and Mendel’s genetics had just been rediscovered, but it wasn’t yet clear how to incorporate them into evolutionary theory. In some ways, I can understand how Dennert might have come to some of the conclusions he did, but still … it’s a masterpiece of confident predictions that flopped. It ranks right up there with bumblebees can’t fly, rockets won’t work in a vacuum, and no one will ever need more than 640K of RAM…he specifically predicts that ‘Darwinism’ will be dead and abandoned within ten years, by 1910.
Today, at the dawn of the new century, nothing is more certain than that Darwinism has lost its prestige among men of science. It has seen its day and will soon be reckoned a thing of the past. A few decades hence when people will look back upon the history of the doctrine of Descent, they will confess that the years between 1860 and 1880 were in many respects a time of carnival; and the enthusiasm which at that time took possession of the devotees of natural science will appear to them as the excitement attending some mad revel.
The Strange Maps blog (a very interesting browse, if you like peculiar maps) has a map illustrating the state of US evolution education in 2002. It’s not surprising; the Fordham Foundation regularly publishes detailed summaries of state science standards, and you can take a look at the data for 2005 and 2006, if you don’t mind getting a bit depressed. Now what we need to do, though, is reassess state standards and get everyone up to A+ performance. Florida is about to go through that wringer, under the thumb of the odious Cheri Yecke, who tainted our standards process here in Minnesota last time around. Minnesota is going to be going through a standards re-evaluation soon, too, without Yecke … maybe we can bring our standards up a bit more, too.
One other interesting feature of that link: most of the Strange Maps articles seem to get on the order of 10 comments. The evolution education map has over 400, with a painful number of loonies babbling against evolution. That’s another measure of our science education problem.
On a completely different note, another map at that blog caught my eye: a cartogram of the world’s population. It puts those Canadians and Australians in their place with respect to the U.S., but what’s that strange, huge mass bulging up in Europe and Asia? How dare they dwarf us!
