Another of the virtues of rural living: the coverage of my area by google maps/earth/etc. is pathetic. The rest of you, though, better watch out.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Another of the virtues of rural living: the coverage of my area by google maps/earth/etc. is pathetic. The rest of you, though, better watch out.
The culture wars are proceeding as expected, and Ben Stein’s reputation is following a predictable trajectory.
Popular character actor and mendacious old fool Ben Stein has a little movie coming out about how “BIG SCIENCE” doesn’t want you to know the truth about evolution. Stein salutes the scientists who are bad enough to question Darwinism in his upcoming documentary Expelled, about an unscrupulous Nixonite hack who parlays his unlikely pop cultural fame into an inexplicable career as an entertainer/propaganist. Rex Sorgatz asks, “do you remember when Ben Stein wasn’t bat shit crazy?” Actually, uh, not really.
Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Saudi police arrested and strip-searched an American businesswoman for the crime of visiting a Starbucks with a male colleague.
“Some men came up to us with very long beards and white dresses. They asked ‘Why are you here together?’ I explained about the power being out in our office. They got very angry and told me what I was doing was a great sin,” she told the Times.
It could be worse. In Iraq, women who violate “Islamic teachings” are tortured and murdered. The “Islamic teachings” that are so important that violators must be tortured and beheaded involve wearing a headscarf.
You can imagine the reaction, then, when the Archbishop of Canterbury suggests that England ought to legally recognize Sharia law. It’s foolishness with well-meaning intent — let’s help the waves of Islamic immigrants acclimate — but it’s also a perfect example of why even moderate religions are dangerous. What he proposes is outrageous appeasement, an accommodation to a primitive religious tradition, when what ought to be said is that the uniform application of secular law is what a civilized society demands, not a patchwork of piecemeal laws which apply differently to different people, and especially not the corrupting insanity of irrational, hateful, vile nonsense like Islam.
Perhaps the Archbishop was concerned that if he didn’t support the Islamic version of irrational insanity, people might notice that the Anglican church is also a bastion of irrational insanity. Let’s hope that instead this will help open people’s eyes and get them to wonder, “why the hell do we even pay attention to old fools whose only claim to authority is their position in an antiquated ecclesiastical hierarchy?” Go away, archbishops and imams — you harm our culture.
Greg Laden has provided som lengthy commentary on the Rue-Myers debate.
They really didn’t have to taser him. Just waving the weapon at him was enough to quiet him down.
At some time, a recording of our ‘debate’ will be available online, so I won’t try to do a play by play now. I will say that I found this one pretty much impossible to prepare for — there was no way this debate could be shoe-horned into a good vs. evil or smartness vs. ignorance conflict, making it a much more complicated discussion, rather than a television wrestling storyline. We’d had a few conversations in email and there were several points of disagreement, and in fact Dr Rue showed those points in a slide, but you know, he had good reasons for all the stuff he got wrong. I read his book, Everybody’s Story: Wising Up to the Epic of Evolution(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), which is actually very good: he doesn’t advocate the abandonment of religion, but rather the evolution and transformation of religion to incorporate the best of modern science in its cosmology, rather than the best of Babylonian science from the first millennium B.C. We have our differences, but I couldn’t help but feel that I’d be quite content if all the reactionary religious nuts would convert to Rue’s religion, even if they did fall shy of the perfect ideal of atheism.
So we had a discussion rather than a debate, a discussion that revolved around some of our differences, but our intent was more mutual enlightenment than mutual evisceration. We got good probing questions from the audience, too, so I think a lot of us had our thinking caps on. I had a good time. I had two dark ales afterwards to celebrate a pleasant evening.
Some of you loyal readers were there, feel free to chime in with your impressions in the comments. Maybe it looked completely different from the bleacher seats…?
P.S. Greg Laden was there, and he made some really good points about how morality isn’t a product of religion at all in most cultures. We should have dragged him up on the stage to give his perspective, but maybe he’ll expand on that on his blog.
Fresh from his recent reappearance on KKMS, where he debated me with a new strategy which gave him a slight chance of winning (i.e., one in which I was not present), Geoffrey Simmons is now crowing victory. It’s very strange. Why would anyone with any sense think that demanding a ‘debate’ in which one is unopposed and has a sympathetic moderator and which suppresses audience input is in any way anything but an act of cowardice and intellectual bankruptcy?
This is posted on Evolution News and Views, the Discovery Institute’s version of Pravda, but since they don’t bother to link to any of my articles to which they specifically refer, and since they don’t take comments themselves, I see no point in linking to them. Here is the complete text of Simmons’ vainglorious howl of triumph.
Against Stupidity, God Himself Is Helpless – Old Jewish Proverb
Before the recent KKMS (MN radio) debate, Dr. P.Z. Myers blogged on Pharyngula that he would decimate me. Within minutes of the show’s conclusion, he blogged that he accomplished his goal, never conceding a single point from an hour long show. It is worth one’s while to read his blogs and those that follow as they readily speak to the character of these folks, much moreso than I could ever do. Richard Dawkins was also quick to compliment the professor and add to the feeding frenzy. Again, no concessions. They had their hearing aids turned off before the show even started.
Other than winning points for outright rudeness and making up fiction, what part of the debate did this tax-paid professor win? Could it be the five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals that represent intermediate species between land animals and the quadrillion-cell whale with unexplained tons of blubber, communication skills that span thousands of miles, a windpipe separate from the esophagus (unheard of in land animals), segmental decompression, a heart the size of a Volkswagon, ability to dive thousands of meters deep or eat a krill diet? Or, was it the fact that a sperm and egg cell can unite to form a 10-75 trillion cell human being without going through 10-75 trillion trial and errors? Perhaps it was my misunderstanding of their ways of critiquing the theory of evolution? To me, it’s like having your brother correct your homework. Lastly, where is the rule that says one has to have an alternative and provable explanation for the origin of life before one can criticise Darwinian thought? Cannot a child point to the leaks in a dam and warn people of an impending flood without any knowledge about dam construction? Their rule, this requirement, doesn’t exist.
– Geoffrey Simmons, M.D.
Author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links
So much, so wrong.
We all had our hearing aids turned up, I assure you. How else could we laugh at Dr Simmons’ remarks?
For a perfect example, look at his claims here: he claims the whale fossil series consists of “five or so fossil pieces from dog-size animals”. Go ahead, look at any summary of the fossil evidence for whales; there are far more than 5 pieces, and the size of the animals ranged from a 100 pound deer-like beast to, well, whale-sized. You can also find nice diagrams of nasal drift — remember, Simmons claimed there was no evidence of blowholes in the fossils. There were no concessions to Simmons because Simmons was wrong on every point.
I’ve read his books, and as usual, he resorts to the litany of complexity to make his case. He doesn’t stop to consider how all that complexity arose, just its existence is all he uses to claim justification for his claim of Intelligent Design creationism. That doesn’t fly, Dr Simmons. We have mechanisms that generate such complexity and refine noise into functionality that do not require intelligent intervention. Sure, single-celled zygotes develop into organisms with many trillions of cells. We can study that and find lovely developmental mechanisms behind it; we can watch mitoses occur; we can find the molecular interactions that lead to differentiation. Telling me that there are lots of cells there does not support your apparent contention that they all poofed into existence with the assistance of a meddling cosmic superbeing, either phylogenetically or ontogenetically.
Oh, and little children who call up the National Guard and demand that we evacuate the town because the dam is leaking when they’ve never seen the dam, know nothing about how the dam is constructed, and have no evidence that it is leaking other than that the crotch of their pants are suddenly wet, are not brave heroes. They’re petty liars seeking attention.
Our little grievance with a certain paper in Proteomics has made it to the attention of the Chronicle of Higher Ed. Some of the new info (there isn’t a lot) is right here:
Michael J. Dunn, the editor of Proteomics and a professor at University College Dublin’s Conway Institute of Biomolecular and Biomedical Research, told The Chronicle that “it’s not our policy to promote creationism” and added that the journal might retract the article.
As was the case with a less-well-known journal that inadvertently published a creationist paper (The Chronicle, September 24, 2004), the paper in Proteomics had passed peer review. In fact, one of the reviewers for the mitochondria paper, said Mr. Dunn, “does a lot of reviewing for our journal.”
Maybe they ought to lighten that reviewer’s workload, because something slipped by him or her. Or maybe, as some have speculated, something got inserted after the review.
Guillermo Gonzalez’s appeal of his tenure denial went before the Iowa State University board of regents this morning.
To no one’s surprise, his appeal was denied. Seriously, this was a no-brainer; it would have been grounds for suspicion if the board of regents had overruled the opinion of his peers to force Gonzalez on the physics and astronomy department.
Now Dr Gonzalez needs to quit trusting the blandishments of the Discovery Institute and get to work on reconstructing his career. Peter Irons wrote me this morning and asked what odds I’d give on Gonzalez getting tenure; I’d have said they were incredibly long. Now the next question for the betting people out there: what are the odds that he’ll revise his tenure strategy to land a job with academic credibility vs. taking the easy way out and going to some joke of a Bible college and trying to get rich off his ‘martyrdom’?
Go read this first rate summary of an ID meeting by one of its unsympathetic attendees. It’s genuinely bizarre. The talks by the ID proponents are frankly, complete garbage (not that the account is that blunt), which explains the message everyone got afterwards.
A few days after the meeting ended, we all received an email stating that the ID people considered the conference a private meeting, and did not want any of us to discuss it, blog it, or publish anything about it. They said they had no intention of posting anything from the conference on the Discovery Institute’s web site (the entire proceedings were recorded). They claimed they would have some announcement at the time of the publication of the edited volume of presentations, in about a year, and wanted all of us to wait until then to say anything. These actions made me aware of the extent to which the ID movement was willing to bear false witness in order to achieve its goals, and that kept me from falling prey to my empathy for the underdog.
A stealth science meeting? I’ve heard of requests to embargo discussion outside of a meeting until publication — which is reasonable, since many journals are jealous entities who demand that their submissions be virginal and unpublished anywhere else — but that’s not the case here. After reading the account, it’s clear that they’ve got no science and bad science, and really just want to control the release of information, so they can massage their PR and generate false impressions of scholarly work.
