Sorry. I just couldn’t resist. This week’s Tangled Bank has an ancient Greek theme, so I think it’s entirely appropriate to have King Leonidas summon you to Tangled Bank #84. Don’t worry, there isn’t much carnage involved.
One other thing about Stuart Pivar’s book: he has collected a few endorsements. They are a little strange. One is by Robert Hazen, a chemist, and if you read it, it’s more like a review of a paper in which the reviewer is trying to state some things he finds plausible about the work. In this case, he likes the idea of the fluid-filled plastic models for making “a more rigorous mathematical exploration of the relationships among such variables as length, width, viscosity, forces, and resultant segmented morphology”, which is fair enough. I don’t think Pivar has demonstrated the competence to carry out such a study, and the fundamental flaws in the rest of the work do not justify any confidence in him.
Another endorsement is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. A funny thing…I’ve written to several of the people Pivar cites as supporting his work. Tyson replied, and has said that part of the quote is an out of context reference to a completely different subject, and that another part is a fabrication. He has asked that Pivar remove his name from his website, which he has not done. Tyson’s name is also prominently used on the back cover of his book—I don’t see that going away, either.
Almost two thirds of the book is taken up with copies of articles and book chapters by other authors. I wonder if Pivar got permission from the authors and publishers before using their work wholesale like that?
Everyone say hello to the Angry Toxicologist. Do so calmly, with no sudden moves — he’s angry.
(I like angry.)
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in Kent, Washington. It was a middling-sized town of 15,000 people way back then, and I rather like small town living, but I didn’t like Kent, and I can trace my dislike to one specific event.
Hey, is Michael Korn still running around free right now? I just got a flurry of email from someone calling himself “Concerned American-Christian” <geologists4truth@yahoo.com>, and I have a suspicion that it’s Krazy Korn himself, since he’s so obsessed with the subject.
And of course Korn is free and able to fire off these crazy diatribes—the police aren’t sure he constitutes an official threat. I bet the Boulder biology faculty are especially careful to lock their doors at night, and are feeling a little jumpy about sudden loud noises, too.
A Yale student, David Light, was arrested after firing a gun a few times inside his fraternity house. The reaction of some students was noteworthy.
“He’s a perfectly normal person,” he said. “He’s not a crazy guy. To be honest … things always get blown out of proportion when it comes to arrests with firearms.”
Not a crazy guy?
The New Haven Register reported Tuesday on its Web site that the weapons seized from Light’s residence included a .50-caliber rifle, AR-15 assault weapon, a Russian M-91 infantry rifle, a 12-gauge shotgun, various pistols and bomb-making materials, including a large bottle of mercury. Light reportedly did not have permits for any of his weapons.
Can we all just agree right up front that keeping an arsenal of lethal weapons in your room at college is not normal? It might be normal in Baghdad, but not New Haven, Connecticut.
(via IvyGate)
Speaking of looney, unbelievable opponents of the Evo-Atheist Hegemony, Jeffrey Shallit knocks the stuffing out of a blithering apologist for superstition, Peter Berkowitz. When an anti-atheist claims that people like Richard Dawkins are arguing that “we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist,” you know that they either haven’t even looked at any of our arguments or are simply cheerfully lying.
I don’t think creationists are necessarily stupid (just ignorant, misinformed, wicked, or … but let’s not start that again), but I do make exceptions for individuals. There are some that say things I find incredibly stupid. Here’s an example.
It’s not as good as we might have hoped — it was commuted to a life sentence, rather than expulsion from Libya — but at least they aren’t going to be executed. Effect Measure has the story.
As I mentioned before in my review of Stuart Pivar’s LifeCode: The Theory of Biological Self Organization, I’m actually sympathetic to the ideas of developmental structuralism. This is the concept that physical, mechanical, and chemical properties make a significant and underappreciated contribution to the acquisition of organismal form; genes are not enough, do not carry a complete specification, and what we have to consider is interactions between genes, environment, and cytoplasm. Good stuff, all of it — and I’d like to see more work done on the subject. In my review, though, I had to point out that Pivar hadn’t actually addressed any biology, and that his modeling was little more than an extended flight of fancy, unanchored by any connection to any embryology.
Now Pivar has put out a new version of his book, Lifecode: From egg to embryo by self-organization. I’m sorry to say it doesn’t address any of my criticisms, and is even worse. This is not a scientific theory, and it isn’t even a collection of evidence: it’s a jumble of doodles. I read through it all this afternoon (there really isn’t that much to read), and I have to conclude it says nothing about the development or evolution of biological organisms, although it is relevant to something else.
