I’m never this organized, so I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m going to be in Denver on 3-4 July, and we’re actually getting it together to plan a meetup at the RockBottom Restaurant on 16th and Curtis in downtown Denver. I’ll be there around 5ish on Thursday, 3 July, and I’ll leave when you stop buying me beer.
We have changed the location to Wynkoop Brewing Company. Don’t get lost!
Mark your calendars!
Jeff, the Blue Collar Scientist, has just been diagnosed with liver cancer. Pay him a virtual visit and let him know that we expect him to get well soon and are quite pleased that modern science gives him good prospects for a long, productive, and happy life.
Is it biological or physical? It’s a little unfair, you ought to be able to just click “physics” for everything and get a perfect score, but I managed to get 12 out of 12 by the simple strategy of calling anything interesting biological.
There is a famous statue of a seated Charles Darwin in a strange place in the Natural History Museum in London — it’s tucked into a basement cafeteria. I visited it while I was there, and more unfortunately, Ben Stein posed with it in his awful movie.
It’s been moved!
Now it’s in a much more prominent place on a landing on a central stair, where you can’t miss it if you visit the museum. As you should.
There’s a Wilkins/Myers conversation up on Bloggingheads. The quality of the recording is horrible, and I have to apologize — we did a little experimentation and deviated from the usual bloggingheads recording proocol, and it’s clear now that we shouldn’t have done that. I recommend not watching it, just listen, if you must.
A few months ago, Laura King was riding a bus in Argentina with some nerd named Jeff Buckley, and they started talking about some weirdly amusing little blog called “Pharyngula”, which led to a long discussion of evolution, which led to a relationship*, which led to her now-boyfriend asking me to send her birthday greetings over the internet while she’s spending her special day working at a field station.
So…Happy Birthday, Laura King! May your every year make you smarter and wiser, and may you continue to contribute to human knowledge.
This brings back memories. Growing up in the Puget Sound area, every morning before school we would watch the local television clown, JP Patches, who would do jokes and skits and introduce cartoons. Every show would end with JP reading off the list of boys and girls who were having birthdays that day. I have become that noble clown now — it’s a good day for me.
*I hope. If I’m enabling some creepy internet stalker, I’ll feel awkward, for sure.
Good news for fairness, justice and equality: California has made gay marriage legal. It’s a small triumph for civil rights.
Now to celebrate, I don’t expect you all to run out and marry a same-sex partner — I think my wife would object, and I’m really not in the market — but wouldn’t you know it? The media is responding to this news with…stupid internet polls! How else can they possibly trivialize an important court decision, after all?
The LA Times is asking, “Did the California Supreme Court make the correct decision today?” (as if, perhaps, enough internet geeks squawk they will change their minds). MSNBC asks, “What do you think about the court decision in California that allows same-sex couples to marry?” — strangely, one of the possible answers to that one is “Don’t think so,” which doesn’t make much sense. It’s also currently leading.
I’m sure you gay readers can think of a more suitable way to celebrate this little bit of recognition, but the rest of us can settle for poking at a radio button on the internet. Do so gaily, OK?
And if you want to do something more substantive, promote equal rights legislation in your state, so that all 50 states someday offer this basic privilege to everyone.
Did someone declare this National Flaming Racist Idiot week, and I just didn’t notice until now? You have got to read Michael Medved’s latest foray into pseudoscience: he has declared American superiority to be genetic, encoded in our good old American DNA. Because our ancestors were immigrants, who were risk-takers, who were selected for their energy and aggressiveness. Oh, except for those who are descended from slaves.
The idea of a distinctive, unifying, risk-taking American DNA might also help to explain our most persistent and painful racial divide – between the progeny of every immigrant nationality that chose to come here, and the one significant group that exercised no choice in making their journey to the U.S. Nothing in the horrific ordeal of African slaves, seized from their homes against their will, reflected a genetic predisposition to risk-taking, or any sort of self-selection based on personality traits.
But, he hastens to add, modern African-American genetics have been leavened with the genes of recent, self-selected immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, so their unfortunate stay-at-home genes have a “less decisive influence”.
As is usual for Medved, a dullard incapable of any kind of thought beyond the superficial, he doesn’t think his thesis through. Wouldn’t this imply that Moslem immigrants to Europe, with their risk-taking willingness to move to new environments, are their true hope for the future? That the old blue-bloods of this country are less fit than, say, the Nisei? And if the descendants of African slaves are not successful go-getters because their arrival was coerced, what about the immigrants who were fleeing religious persecution, or all the Americans who are descended from indentured servants? Are there no successful entrepreneurs in Europe or Asia or Africa? Should we give extra bonus points to the descendants of nomadic tribes of warriors, like the Germans? It’s a very peculiarly narrow view of a kind of simplistic genetic determinism that ignores the complexities and the varieties of ways people got here to promote a ridiculous premise.
And it just gets sillier.
Senators Obama, Clinton and other leaders who seek to enlarge the scope of government face more formidable obstacles than they realize. Their desire to impose a European-style welfare state and a command-and-control economy not only contradicts our proudest political and economic traditions, but the new revelations about American DNA suggest that such ill-starred schemes may go against our very nature.
Uh, what? Republican policies are now part of our genetic nature, and the Democrats will be defeated by our capitalist genes?
This is Michael Medved of the Discovery Institute, an organization that has recently been raving about the evils of eugenics and the soulless Darwinian view of nature. Yet here he is, spouting off the kind of smug, invalid, pseudo-biological jingo that belongs in the Gilded Age and would be comfortable in the mouth of a robber baron trying to justify a war in Latin America. It’s nothing but handwaving rationalizations for an intrinsic superiority to our tribe, with a complete absence of evidence.
There was a brief flurry of surprise a while back that Richard Dawkins acknowledged the possibility of extraterrestrial life, and that it was even possible that aliens might have visited Earth — for some reason, creationists thought this was hilarious, although it’s actually a very clear element of scientific thought. We can admit a possibility — Dawkins even admitted the possiblity of a god in The God Delusion — but that does not imply that we think there is evidence for such a thing, and evidence is a necessary prerequisite for an idea to enter the purview of science. It was a little strange to see giddy creationists pointing out a commonplace statement, as if it somehow revealed a confusion in Dawkins’ mind, when it really just exposed the ignorance in their own.
Well, I expect a repeat performance now. A Vatican astronomer said intelligent beings could exist in outer space, and that this does not contradict their religion. To which I can only say, sure, big whoop, not a big deal — it’s just speculation.
Of course, being a Vatican astronomer, he’s got to go on and assert that these beings were created by God, and might be free of original sin, yadda yadda yadda. It’s pretty much all vapor, but I still expect a good creationist howl of protest.
I am stunned that this t-shirt could be proudly displayed anywhere anymore.
Now get this: the Atlanta Journal-Constitution is running an online poll that is asking, “What do you think of the Obama t-shirt?”, with two choices: “It’s racist” and “it’s fine”. You might be wondering why the newspaper would even have to ask…but here’s the kicker.
“It’s fine” is winning.
Do you think maybe we can shift the balance there? Or should we just let this indictment of Georgia’s racism stand?
