IT’S STILL ALIVE! Once again, the never-ending open thread has topped the 1K mark, and is now being closed…to be reborn here once again, I’m sure.
I’m trapped in an old Hammer film with Christopher Lee!
I’m getting a sudden surge of hate mail, and most of it seems to revolve around the Daniel Hauser case. I assume something I wrote has been reposted somewhere frequented by morons.
Anyway, these are a bit weird. Some people really hate chemotherapy, I think, because it has them extremely upset. So upset that I’ve put some examples below the fold, because they use very naughty language.
How strange: he was a little younger than me (but not much!), so it’s sad to learn that the King of Pop has died of a heart attack. He had real talent.
Die young, leave a strange corpse.
The list of winners of iPods of various flavors from Creation Science Evangelism:
Third place: Kirby Hobley, who created a post on the atheist sub-group of Reddit.
Second place: Richard Haynes, of Atheist Nexus.
First place: PZ Myers of you know where.
Good grief, the atheists won a clean sweep! It’s brilliant marketing, reaching deep into the very community that will most fiercely mock his message.
Last week, I received an ominous email from Stuart Pivar.
Dear PZ,
The work of my lab has been subject to questions and harsh criticisms, some reasonable, some not. The scientific ones are dealt with in a new book On The Origin Of Form, Evolution by Self-Organization, an alternative to the natural selection paradigm, This is a substantially expanded presentation of the self-organization model previously published.
I welcome your assessment. If you are convinced now of its plausibility, as are many others, I solicit your participation in the dissemination of the idea for further investigation. A copy is on its way. Meanwhile, please see www.ontheoriginofform.com
SP
Uh-oh. Pivar, you may recall, is the fellow who tried to sue me for FIFTEEN MILLION DOLLARS two years ago, all over my review of his book, Lifecode. That tends to damp my enthusiasm for any more books from him.
I did not reply. He sent me an update a few days later, anyway.
Dear PZ,
The new book presents a model of self organization amplified well beyond that shown previously, addressing, among many other issues, the reasons that the idealized models are inconsistent with parts of observed embryology. Many prominent scientists have now accepted the plausibility of the model.
If you plan to comment publicly kindly view this new material. You will probably find the premise plausible
as well.see www.ontheoriginofform.com
Stuart
Plausible? It must have undergone significant revision, then, since in its earlier incarnation, it was best described as surreal and absurd. Then the book arrives in my mailbox; you can even preorder it on Amazon now, and just look at the encomiums published on the cover!
“Stuart Pivar’s book, On the Origin of Form, contains ideas that deserve full scientific scrutiny, especially in light of the turmoil roiling evolutionary biology at present. Pivar is presenting, in a series of brilliantly rendered graphical diagrams that show his interpretation of how modifications of a torus shape can generate a vast panoply of biotic form, a new theory of morphogenesis…. This is a seismic event for science. Conventional evolutionary biologists are right to be very worried about this, because it has the potential to trigger the complete collapse of Modern Synthesis Biology.”
–Mark A. S. McMenamin, PhD, Paleontologist, Professor of Geology, Chair of Earth and Environment, Mount Holyoke College“This is the discovery of the connection between the laws of physics and the complexity of life.”
–Murray Gell-Mann, PhD, Distinguished Fellow, Santa Fe Institute, Nobel Laureate
Oh freakin’ boy.
I’m really not being mean and trying to banish a fellow science blogger to some barren, frigid desolation — hey, that’s where I live! — but she’s volunteering to leave New York for a month to live in Antarctica. All you have to do is vote for her essay, and presto, maybe they’ll ship her off to somewhere near the south pole. Cool.
I have just received a message from The Almighty Lord on twitter, re the kinds of expletives people use when excited.
Strangely enough, you’re right. People shout My Name when they have sex, because I am all one can think of when they’re orgasmic.
This is all wrong, a myth that another patriarchal myth has promoted to his advantage. I have carried out extensive empirical research in this area for approximately 35 years, and not once have I encountered a woman who shouted out any deity’s name at any time during sex. However, I have discovered one consistent phenomenon, a remarkably robust pattern of behavior that I’ve seen over and over again, in almost ten thousand encounters. There is one name that godless women frequently evoke at the height of passion.
Mine.
Next time some sneering, mocking Christian asks you what atheists say during sex, you’ve now got the data: they moan “…PZ…”. Who are you going to trust on this, some imaginary ghost in the sky or Science?
Thanks to all of your helpful clicking, I have just received this message from Eric Hovind of Creation Science Evangelism:
Congratulations, you logged the most clicks to CreationMinute.com and won an Apple iPod Touch complements of Creation Science Evangelism.
Good work, gang! I hope it’s full of creationist videos. I’ll have to bring it with me on my trip to the Creation “Museum” in August (I’ll fill you in on more details on that development later, when they’ve firmed up a bit more.)
Some people have asked for a thread to laugh over the latest Republican hypocrite: Governor Mark Sanford of South Carolina, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, often considered a likely Republican candidate for president, has been caught with his pants down. He had an affair with an Argentinian mistress, and lied to his staff and public about his prolonged absence, saying he was hiking the Appalachian trail.
I hope it was an awesome six days in Argentina. It’s cost him his political career, his marriage, and his credibility. Maybe he and John Edwards should get together and form a club.
I’ve been away all day, shuttling family about, so I’ve been trying to catch up the ongoing drama in the conflict between those simpering accommodationists and us mean new atheists. If you’ve got a little time — there is a bit of tl;dr about it all — read Sam Harris’s exchanges with Philip Ball. Sam Harris we all know; Ball is a very reputable science writer who is also very much one of those “I’m an atheist, but…” fellows. It’s an infuriating conversation because, as usual, rather than talking about what us “New Atheists” actually think, Harris has to constantly go back and address the blithe misconceptions of the accommodationist.
But Harris’s conclusion in particular is worth reading anyway.
I realize that my tone of chastisement has probably grown very tedious and could be mistaken for hostility. But I can’t help but feel that there is a great asymmetry between our points of view – both in how fully they have been thought out and in their degree of the moral seriousness. I see the perpetuation of ancient tribalism and ignorance (read “religion”) to be a grave problem, and the source of much unnecessary suffering in the world; you claim that the problem is either not very serious or that it is unavoidable–in either case there is not much to be done. You do not seem to see what an astonishing number of the world’s conflicts and missed opportunities arise from people’s false knowledge about God, and when specific instances are pointed out to you, you deem them to be inevitable (if it’s not religion it would be something else), or you defensively say, well of course I object to that instance of religious stupidity: parents shouldn’t withhold blood transfusions from their children!… But the truth is, a comprehensive response to the problem of religious ignorance is possible, and a piecemeal response is totally unprincipled and bound to seem so. Our world has be shattered, and is reliably shattered anew with each subsequent generation, by irreconcilable claims about God and his magic books. Until we stop enabling these competing delusions–by our silence and by our silly attempts to change the subject–we will have no one to blame but ourselves when medieval ideas come crashing into public life–as they do, and will, to our great detriment.
It’s a weird thing to argue with an atheist who claims religion is unavoidable (Oh? So what’s so special about you?) and isn’t that bad or is actually beneficial (So why aren’t you going to church for your health?), but they’re out there and they are irritatingly inconsistent.
Then there’s the mischaracterization of outspoken atheists and the apparent contempt for theistic scientists. Here’s another example of that attitude.
We should not overlook the New Atheists’ support for science, progressive views and legitimization of non-belief as a viable alternative. Unfortunately, their record is also marked by an intolerance of religious people and the alienation of potential progressive allies.
That always baffles me. So if I say that I’m proud to be an atheist, I think theism is a profound fallacy that is incompatible with scientific thinking, that’s intolerance and then these religious allies are going to get pissy and decide evolution isn’t worth defending anymore? That’s an awfully broad interpretation of intolerance, and an extraordinarily dismissive opinion of the theistic evolutionists. I guarantee you that no matter how rude a New Atheist might be to religion, Ken Miller will never give up on teaching evolution or trying to explain science to creationists. The accommodationists can stop trying to scare us into silence with these goofy, unrealistic threats.
Mano Singham makes a similar point.
The accommodationists argue that it is a mistake to insist that science is antithetical to religion because if science is determined to be an intrinsically atheistic enterprise, then even so-called moderate religionists will turn away from science and not support efforts to oppose the teaching of religious ideas such as intelligent design in science classes. This kind of mistaken solicitousness for the sensitivities of religious people, the fear that they will take their ball and go home if others are mean to them, is not new. During the run up to the Scopes Monkey trial in 1925, there were many accommodationists of that era who did not want Clarence Darrow to defend Scopes because they felt that his scorn for religious beliefs would alienate potential religious allies. We now view Darrow’s performance in that trial as one of the high points in opposing the imposition of religious indoctrination in public schools.
There is no downside to godless vigor. Nobody has come up with a reason yet why we should sit down and shut up.
