Prepare yourself for the true religious wars: I’m asking for advice on a new laptop.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Prepare yourself for the true religious wars: I’m asking for advice on a new laptop.
The godless seem to be making some people desperate and angry and worried — the stupid arguments have just been flooding in, and I’ve had to exercise some restraint, or every day would be a day for yet another long “religiots are nuts” post. So I’ve saved them up and will throw them out with fairly short commentary here. You’ll see what I mean: bad arguments and pious indignation seem to be the only fuel they’re running on right now.
Here’s an interesting essay on why people don’t accept evolution: it’s not simply a consequence of a conflict between religious teachings and the conclusion of science, but is also a conflict created by the nonintuitive way that evolution works — that a very small selective force operating over long periods of time can generate dramatic outcomes, often with no obvious, linear progression from one point to another. It’s well-said, but not an entirely new idea (thermodynamics and information theory seem to often throw people for a loop, and creationists seem utterly baffled by genetic algorithms)— we’ve often commented on how the concepts may be difficult to grasp, but once the ideas of thinking in terms of populations without individual change sink in, it does become obvious. It’s also one of those fields where, although some find it hard to believe, a solid understanding of basic math and statistics are indispensable.
The essay also feeds into an argument that some of us have made: education and learning all help correct the problem, it’s not just a matter of trying to accommodate people to a different worldview. Being able to turn on that little light-bulb of understanding is key to getting people to accept good science.
Scientists love empiricism and evidence-based demonstrations, so elderly urologists flaunting their erections seems like an effective presentation technique in the right context. And here I’ve always just relied on boring ol’ PowerPoint.
Everyone reads Genesis, the racy bits in the Song of Solomon, the various Jesus tales in the Gospels, and when you’re really stoned, Revelation. But what about those more obscure chapters, where some old time prophet with a funny polysyllabic name raves against extinct city-states and tribes who haven’t followed his preferred bizarre ritual?
Don’t waste your time slogging through archaic language to read them in the Bible. Let Jay Pinkerton do your summarizing and interpreting for you.
There is some crazy stuff in those books, I tell you.
We got back from Madison later than I’d expected yesterday, and it’s no fun to have to scramble to compose a lecture in a car, and then rush to assemble the data after midnight for an 8am class. But I have survived! Now I have to go drink a few liters of good black coffee, and while I do that, you can catch up on the godless goings-on that I missed.
It’s time for the latest Humanist Symposium. I’m not a humanist myself and have mixed feelings about the philosophy (which can be summed up as “not enough squid”), but it’s a good part of our godless community.
The Carnival of the Godless addresses the theme of morality this time around. I wish we could just strip the issue of morality from the discussion altogether, but we can’t…because the religious falsely claim to have a moral system based on their superstitions.
The Freethinker Sunday Sermonette discusses the recent polls that show the declining popularity of Christianity. Simple reason: people can think scientifically.
This is mere satire, but it would be much more interesting if Ben Stein were to challenge Newton, rather than Darwin. It would be just as absurd, but I think physicists need more abuse than just a few flaky zero-point energy guys and the New Agers using the word “quantum” in every sentence.
And hey, where are all the chemistry abusers? Won’t someone criticize Boyle and Lavoisier?
Somebody recorded the Hitchens talk, and has uploaded the first parts of it to YouTube. I’ve put what’s currently available below the fold; this only covers about half of the talk, I estimate.
I know there has been a lot of talk about his state of sobriety, but it’s all baseless. He looked perfectly normal up there on the podium, and there was no sign of impairment that I could detect. Judge the man by what he says, not his imagined blood alcohol level.
We’re about to leave lovely Madison, Wisconsin and the Freedom from Religion Convention. So here’s a short summary: it was a good meeting and I was impressed with most of the speakers; Christopher Hitchens “pissed off” most of us as he promised to do, and the organization of the meeting could have been greatly improved.
Now the details.
I read an interesting article in the New Yorker the other day. It followed the research of neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his work on patients in vegetative states. In some patients, when he gave the verbal command to “imagine you are playing tennis,” their brain regions lit up on an fMRI indistinguishably from your average walking, talking, and recognizably conscious human being asked to perform the same task. Moreover, the patients were able to sustain this activity (so presumably the tennis imagination) for over thirty seconds suggesting some degree of focus.
The article goes on to discuss implications. It points out that Owen only found a few patients in vegetative states with this ability. Others were not at all responsive. It was a pretty good indication that the patients who were able to follow his command had some sort of retention of cognition that others did not. However, they were not diagnosed incorrectly. The question then becomes: if the criteria by which physicians diagnose vegetative states applied to these patients, do we need a better test?
