The permanent thread could use a little amusement, and this video offers it. Ask a scientist whether they believe in god, and what you get is an I-can’t-believe-you-asked-me-that look; ask them about their work, and they get all enthusiastic and passionate. That’s fairly universal among any group of scientists.
(Current totals: 11,090 entries with 1,137,575 comments.)
He’s done it again. It’s another comic that mocks biologists. It’s entirely true, but that’s beside the point — he’s exposing us! And yes, I know that he’s married to a parasitologist, which just means he’s been given direct insight into the mind of a biologist and will be using that information against us.
This could be trouble. Weiner shouldn’t be surprised if he’s walkin’ down the street sometime and a gang in labcoats whispers up behind him in their Priuses and pelts him with viscera. We’re a dangerous bunch, you know.
Anderson Cooper nailed Andrew Shirvell. Shirvell has been on a long-running crusade against a fellow named Chris Armstrong, creating a blog called “Chris Armstrong Watch” (always a bad sign), picketing his house, monitoring his facebook page, making wild accusations that Armstrong is abusing his power, etc., etc., etc. Shirvell is the perfect picture of insanity. He’s so out of control that he was invited to appear on CNN, presumably because crazy haters make good copy.
Shirvell acknowledged protesting outside of Armstrong’s house and calling him “Satan’s representative on the student assembly.”
“I’m a Christian citizen exercising my First Amendment rights,” Shirvell told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “I have no problem with the fact that Chris is a homosexual. I have a problem with the fact that he’s advancing a radical homosexual agenda.”
Of course Shirvell is a Christian fanatic. He’s also dishonest: browse his blog and you can tell he is just freaking out over the fact that Armstrong is gay…it’s all he talks about. He’s a militant radical gay activist who hates God, Christians, the unborn, and wants to have gay sex with everyone but Andrew Shirvell.
The scary part is that Armstrong is just the student body president at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, a position with almost no power. Shirvell is an assistant attorney general for the state of Michigan. Let’s just hope that that is the peak of his political career.
We often get remarks from people that the Pharyngula comments are a cesspool, that I ought to moderate more, that people use intemperate language and even profanity in their discussions…and, you know, I just roll my eyes and ignore these silly bluenoses and their prissy airs. We’re adults here. I am not a playground monitor. I’m more of a distracted barkeep.
But I also think those critics are all wrong. They tend to focus on a few four-letter words and an angry tone that some of us exhibit, and overlook the content. And it’s the content of the message that matters. I just ran across a discussion of real problematic language from the right wingers, and I think it puts everything in perspective.
Here’s one example, from the odious Ann Coulter. Now whenever Coulter is brought up here, there will always be a few pathetic jokes made about how she’s a man, she has an adam’s apple, stupid stuff like that, but I can also always rely on the commentariat here to slap those down promptly. She’s a woman, OK? A tall, slender woman, and physically she’s not unattractive (psychologically, though, she’s a horror), and it’s annoying to see her targeted for her sex. But guess what? Ann Coulter doesn’t mind doing a little stereotyping of her own.
My pretty-girl allies stick out like a sore thumb amongst the corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagons they call “women” at the Democratic National Convention.
Notice that she used no profanity, and that you can scrutinize each word independently and find nothing that a good Christian could object to. Put them all together, though, and what you’ve got is an obscenity far nastier than anything said here.
I’m not going to impose censorship on Pharyngula as long as I can trust the commenters here to call out that kind of bigotry.
I told you I’ve got my development class blogging, and here’s the update for this week.
Hannah’s blog discusses recent observations in blind cavefish.
Lisa’s Ledger is about a new Alzheimer-associated gene.
Development from a naiad is on a brief break while the author does some extracurricular traveling.
Kele’s Science Blog goes above and beyond the call of duty to describe a classic paper on digit reduction in amphibian evo-devo.
Rev. Frost goes all neuro and describes experiments exploring cerebral palsy.
Weekly Developmental Biology Updates needs updating.
Developmental Biology visits the work of Tyrone Hayes and describes the plasticity of sex determination in frogs.
Don’t be shy. They’ve been told to welcome comments and to brace themselves for possible criticisms.
Larry Moran is as exasperated as I am with these so-called allies who accuse the Gnu Atheists of ignorance of the ‘sophisticated’ modern arguments for gods and the rationality of theists. We keep being told we’re know-nothings who are simply unaware of the great stuff that believers actually believe, yet somehow, these defenders of the faithful never quite manage to continue their train of thought and tell us what those great ideas are. So he has issued a simple challenge:
I challenge all theists and all their accommodationist friends to post their very best 21st century, sophisticated (or not), arguments for the existence of God. They can put them in the comments section of this posting, or on any of the other atheist blogs, or on their own blogs and websites. Just send me the link.
Try and make it concise and to the point. It would be nice if it’s less than 100 years old. Keep in mind that there are over 1000 different gods so it would be helpful to explain just which gods the argument applies to.
I’d be looking forward to the replies, if I wasn’t confident that what he’ll get instead is a lot of evasions.
(via Greg Laden)
Stuart Pivar has replied to my criticisms. He’s very quick. It’s too bad he isn’t rational.
Dear Dr. Myers,
My paper, “The Origin of the Vertebrate Skeleton,” published in the International Journal of Astrobiology, does not describe what is observed in embryology. I never made this claim. The references in the paper illustrate and support the historical context. Namely, attempts to represent in drawings the missing historical stages lost by the phenomenon called condensation (the attrition of initial stages by the addition of terminal stages over eons, see Ontogeny and Phylogeny, Stephen Jay Gould, 1977).
By analogy this phase is the reconstruction of a missing first reel of a long movie. The model is a hypothetical construction, common in cosmology, geology and atomic theory, to account for historical or unobservable events. It is the only accurately predictive model of morphogenesis ever published.
For further explanation my proposed model, see: www.syntheticlifelab.com.
Sincerely yours,
Stuart Pivar
Yes, I know those drawings could not be derived from embryology, because nothing in the embryo resembles them. But that disclaimer still leaves wide open a significant question.
Where is the evidence for his “reconstruction”?
It’s not in embryology, it’s not in molecular biology, it’s not in systematics, it’s not in paleontology. It’s just, boom, plopped on the page in a series of fantastic sketches. If you’re doing science, the central part of any paper is a description of how you derived your conclusions, and that is completely missing. With that level of rigor, Brian Froud’s books could be called scientific evidence for the existence of fairies and goblins.
The local newspaper would print out the names of all of the kids who made it onto the school honor roll, and my grandma would pinch my cheek and tell me what a good boy I was for studying hard. I do wonder how she would respond to making it onto the Playboy Honor Roll.
I think she’d say “Nehmen!” and wag her finger at me and tell me I’ll be getting no krumkake that day.
Lately, a certain faction within CFI (not the whole organization — I know several staff who disagree) has taken it upon itself to slam the Gnu Atheists as a gang of crude louts who know nothing about religion — they’ve criticized Richard Dawkins, and I’ve heard that both Jerry Coyne and I were named in a recent talk as bad for the movement. Both Coyne and Benson have already taken John Shook to task for his poor HuffPo article, which begins:
Atheists are getting a reputation for being a bunch of know-nothings. They know nothing of God, and not much more about religion, and they seem proud of their ignorance.
This reputation is a little unfair, yet when they profess how they can’t comprehend God, atheists really mean it.
It’s almost as if a god has decided to smite those who sneer at the ignorance of the unbelievers, though. In an awesomely well-timed survey from Pew, Americans were queried about their knowledge of religion, and these results are being reported all over the place: the group that knows the most about religion are the atheists/agnostics. This is no surprise — we’ve been aware of this for many years, and one of the things we’ve routinely experienced is the fact that in arguments, we almost always know more about our opponent’s religion than he or she does. Would you believe about half of Catholics are surprised to learn that transubstantiation is one of the tenets of their faith?
Dave Silverman has a good explanation.
That finding might surprise some, but not Dave Silverman, president of American Atheists, an advocacy group for nonbelievers that was founded by Madalyn Murray O’Hair.
“I have heard many times that atheists know more about religion than religious people,” Mr. Silverman said. “Atheism is an effect of that knowledge, not a lack of knowledge. I gave a Bible to my daughter. That’s how you make atheists.”
In your face, John Shook. Take that, faitheists of the CFI.
