Quite a few people have written to me asking what’s wrong with richarddawkins.net…they can’t get through to it, and get DNS errors. No worries, everyone—it’s good news. They’ve been experiencing ever-escalating levels of traffic, so to cope with the incoming hordes, they’ve just migrated to a new and better server. Give the network a little time, you should be able to get to it in the next day or two.
Cool: here’s a duck with four hindlimbs.
I have to gripe about the description, though:
A rare mutation has left eight-day-old Stumpy with two extra legs behind the two he moves around on. … The mutation is rare but cases have been recorded across the world.
No, no, no. This is almost certainly not the result of a mutation, and it’s one of my pet peeves when the media makes this wrong assumption, that every change in a newborn is the product of a genetic change. This is the result of a developmental error, not a genetic one, most likely caused by a fusion of two embryos in a single egg.
(via Apostropher)
Nathan Newman asks a good question about Mitt Romney’s rejection of the godless:
And at some level, why shouldn’t a person’s religious beliefs be relevant?
They should be. However, when one holds a minority belief about religion, one that is widely reviled, then it is to one’s interest to insist that religion be off the table. That’s a purely pragmatic concern. In addition, I think there’s an element of resentment: we atheists have been told so often to sit down and shut up and keep our opinions out of the debate, even by people who don’t believe in religion themselves, that we tend to get a little cranky when we see people of faith indulging themselves in a class of criticisms denied to us, or that trigger howls of protest when we say them.
There is also a sound principle involved. In the next election, I’ll be voting for a religious person for president—there won’t be any atheist candidates, and if there were, they wouldn’t stand a chance. I cannot demand that the candidates believe in a certain way, but I can still insist that they govern as a secular leader. That’s the best I can hope for.
But Newman is right that that doesn’t mean we need to lay low.
I think it’s a profound mistake for atheists to demand that such religious debates be taken out of the public sphere, since they will never be taken out of voters’ minds. Instead, us progressive atheists should be engaging in that faith-based discussion more vigorously, laying out our belief systems and helping make voters comfortable with our viewpoint as part of the menu of “religious” options, not in order to convert them but just to integrate it into the terrain of debate that people are more familiar with.
Otherwise, atheism will just remain the unspoken Other, which voters will inherently (and rightly) distrust because they just won’t know what it means personally to the politician involved. So I’m all for a religion in public life debate — and I’m prepared to argue for why progressive atheism leads to the kinds of public policy voters should want. But if we don’t make the case, we can’t expect Christian voters to want anything other than what they are familiar with.
I think debating in order to convert people would be a good thing to do, actually — a large voting bloc of vocal atheists would do wonders for the body politic. I think the issue is one of framing the argument in a positive way: not, don’t vote for Candidate X because she is a [Catholic/Mormon/Pagan/whatever], but do vote for Candidate Y because she is a rationalist who holds sensible secular values. Romney was playing the blind, stupid politics of exclusion rather than promoting the virtues of his ideas.
Edward Humes, the author of Monkey Girl, has an excellent op-ed in the Lawrence Journal-World.
The talk-radio version had a packed town hall up in arms at the “Why Evolution Is Stupid” lecture. In this version of the theory, scientists supposedly believe that all life is accidental, a random crash of molecules that magically produced flowers, horses and humans — a scenario as unlikely as a tornado in a junkyard assembling a 747. Humans come from monkeys in this theory, just popping into existence one day. The evidence against Darwin is overwhelming, the purveyors of talk-radio evolution rail, yet scientists embrace his ideas because they want to promote atheism.
These are just a few highlights of the awful and pervasive straw-man image of evolution that pundits harp about in books and editorials and, yes, on talk radio, and this cartoon version really is stupid. No wonder most Americans reject evolution in poll after poll.
This is really why scientists either get angry or dismiss creationism as a joke: the proponents are annoyingly ignorant of the ideas they are arguing against, so there is no reason to take them seriously. My first clue that someone is a babbling fool is when they start calling it “Darwinism”—then I know that I’m going to be wasting my time, because the first thing I have to do is clear the army of straw men out of the room, and even then, the joker probably isn’t going to pay any attention to what I have to say about evolution, because he still has that cartoon version of biology taught to him by his preacher whirling around in his head, complete with calliope music.
This is also the second time in a week I’ve heard talk radio brought up in this argument. I wonder if that’s an angle we haven’t been pushing hard enough—I know in those few instances where I’ve accidentally tuned in to some ranter on the AM side of the dial, I just go “Gaaaaa!” and turn it off. Maybe I shouldn’t do that; maybe some of us should be calling up the talk radio stations and offering to go on and discuss the non-cartoon version of evolution.
As I might have guessed, it seems to have been rather unimpressive. No genuinely outré exhibits, just more average work with bible verses slapped on. He does observe that quote-mining the bible means these kiddies are going to burn in hell someday, which does add a little frisson of horror to the exhibit, but since it’s just as much an unsympathetic fantasy as the Christian belief that we godless people are hellbound, I’m afraid it’s still not enough reason to have compelled me to drive across the state to see it.
Hooray, I just finished grading a stack of genetics exams (they passed, mostly), so I’ll let you all celebrate with a quick and dirty Carnival of the Godless and the Oekologie Carnival. I think I’ll just go to bed.
…annoyingly hard to pick. You people just named almost everyone, and some of you seemed to name everyone in a single comment. It’s not like there was a runaway leader; it’s more like there’s this huge base of commenters that everyone likes. This is a good situation for the blog as a whole, but doesn’t make it easy to single out anyone.
So this time I’ve compromised and picked the top two, secure in the knowledge that there are many more from the Pharyngula pool who will be acknowledged in the future. They are:
Their names will be enshrined in a sub-page in the next day or two, and more will join them on a monthly basis.
Revere reminds us of the low esteem in which atheists are held, and specifically, that we are regarded as much less trustworthy than Mormons, a question brought up by the candidacy of Mitt Romney of Massachusetts (24% would refuse to vote for a Mormon for president, while 53% are against the idea of an atheist president). It’s hard to feel much solidarity with our Mormon countrymen, though, when one of their more prominent representatives can say something like this.
We need to have a person of faith lead the country.
It seems to me a little odd that people can have temper tantrums over a campaign worker criticizing Catholics, while a presidential candidate outright disenfranchising everyone in the country who rejects the nonsense of religious belief doesn’t seem to be stirring much concern at all. All together, everyone: Mitt Romney is a bigot who does not deserve to be in public office.
Here’s an excellent and useful summary of the appendix from a surgeon’s perspective. Creationists dislike the idea that we bear useless organs, remnants of past function that are non-functional or even hazardous to our health; they make up stories about the importance of these vestiges. Sid Schwab has cut out a lot of appendices, and backs up its non-utility with evidence.
The study I cited most often to my patients when asked about adverse consequences of appendectomy is one done by the Mayo Clinic: they studied records of thousands of patients who’d had appendectomy, and compared them with equal thousands who hadn’t. (Back in the day, it was very common during any abdominal operation to remove the appendix. Like flicking a bug off your shoulder. No extra charge: just did it to prevent further problems: took an extra couple of minutes, is all.) The groups were statistically similar in every way other than presence of the worm. There were no differences in incidence of any disease. It’s as convincing as it gets, given the impossibility of doing a prospective double-blind study.
I have a personal interest in this: I was nearly killed by my appendix at the age of 9, and had it removed. I haven’t missed it since.
Blake Stacey just asked me to pick on Scott Adams and the Dilbert blog some more—he wants practice taking potshots at fools. Well, Blake, I did a quick browse through the latest entries at the Dilbert blog, and I had a hard time finding anything with even a tiny germ of substance to attack. He spits up a lot of froth, you know, and there has to be at least a hint that he’s taking a stand on something in order to have an argument.
I did see that he is now calling what he does “philosotainment“, which I translate to mean “really stupid philosophy for the feeble-minded.” You might have more luck getting a philosopher like Wilkins to take umbrage at his diminution of a significant field of human endeavor. Or more likely, he’d refuse, as I do, on the grounds that it is impolite to interrupt someone in the middle of masturbation. Sorry.
