Man, what a beautiful burn.
And he doesn’t just take on Falwell, it’s the whole rotten edifice of religion.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Man, what a beautiful burn.
And he doesn’t just take on Falwell, it’s the whole rotten edifice of religion.
This is a fascinating diagram from a zoology text of the 1930s—it’s an illustration of the effects of reproduction rate on the frequency of subsets of the population, and the author was using it to justify eugenics. Up into the 1960s, he was advocating sterilization of the feeble-minded to improve the human race.
Why, this guy must have been one of those evil Darwinists of the kind Michael Egnor, D. James Kennedy and the Discovery Institute deplore, and whose amoral ruthlessness those worthies have blamed on the teachings of evolution! Surprise: these sentiments were expressed by William Tinkle, a creationist, and one of the founding fathers of the organization that preceded the Institute for Creation Research, along with such well-known creationists as Henry Morris and Duane Gish. He completely rejected evolution, natural selection, and the idea that human beings were animals, and published his endorsement of sterilization of “defectives” while Secretary of the Institute for Creation Research. Read more about it at the Panda’s Thumb.
Oh, no — DaveScot can’t find Gonzalez’s article that he published in 2001 on the Scientific American website! It’s a CONSPIRACY! The Darwinist Establishment is suppressing his publications and rewriting history!
Uh, wait … no, it was a “technical glitch” that also made a couple of other articles inaccessible, and the editors aren’t at all interested in losing the Gonzalez, Brownlee, and Ward article.
It’s particularly ironic that the gang at Uncommon Descent, which has a reputation for hiding their
gaffes in the amazing UD memory hole after they’ve been exposed, should accuse Scientific American of the kind of perfidious rewriting of their files that they do quite routinely.
Lewis Wolpert has a pleasant interview in Salon today — I find most of what he says copacetic. I very much like his developmental biology textbook, but I’m afraid I found his recent popular book, Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), far too scattered and unfocused to be memorable. It’s a pleasant enough read — get it and you won’t regret it — but it was more like an agreeable conversation with an intelligent and eccentric fellow than a work that will either shake you up or strengthen your views…and that also comes through in the interview. He’s pretty much a sensible skeptic who doesn’t put up with much woo-woo nonsense.
There is one part that I didn’t much care for, that would probably prompt me to start an argument if this were a conversation:
You call David Hume your “hero philosopher.” Why do you like him so much?
First of all, I don’t like any other philosopher. I think philosophers are terribly clever but have absolutely nothing useful to say whatsoever. I avoid philosophy like mad. But David Hume does say such interesting and important things. He’s very good on religion, for example. I like him for that.
That’s just me, though. If I had my druthers, I’d have a philosophy of science requirement in place for our biology majors, as an essential piece of background in a good liberal arts education—biology has gotten so huge, though, that something had to go, and that’s one we aren’t even going to try to push into the curriculum, and I’m probably the only person in my discipline who’d consider it useful.
While I am sorry for the pain that his family now feels, we can all take solace in the fact that the extinction of the televangelist was all part of god’s loving plan.
Didn’t I just say “Woo hoo” yesterday? False alarm. Scarcely do I clear one set of major tasks away than another set rise up. I already mentioned that I was going to be the speaker at the Humanists of Minnesota banquet on Saturday evening. I neglected to tell you all that I’m leaving for the University of Michigan tomorrow to give the keynote at the Genetic Programming Theory and Practice Workshop.
I know virtually nothing about genetic programming, so this is a wonderful opportunity to learn something about it.
Since I’m certainly not going to be able to tell them a thing about genetic programming, I’m planning to tell them a little about my own skewed perspective as one of those metazoan-centric fans of developmental processes. I’m hoping they might learn a little something from me, and that we’ll all have some fun with ideas about embryos. Here’s my very brief abstract:
A developmental biologist’s view of evolution
The ongoing integration of molecular genetics, developmental biology, and evolution (the field of evo-devo) is stirring up new ideas and new questions. I will tell a few stories from the evo-devo literature that illustrate the importance of the principles of developmental plasticity and developmental constraint on evolutionary trajectories — showing that these are two competing and complementary forces operating on multicellular organisms. My argument is that the contingencies of developmental architectures may well be as significant a force on evolutionary histories as selection.
Next week I get to slack off. No, wait, there’s also…
A Christian game company has started a promotion for one of their games, and one gimmick is that they are offering a $10,000 prize to any atheist or agnostic who can replicate the unique literary style of the bible, which they purport is evidence of its divine origin.
For only $399, you can send your kids away to spend a few days this summer with Ollie North, professional traitor, frolicking about on a military base and pretending to be brave warriors with absolutely no risk. It’s the perfect activity for young Republican chickenhawks-in-training. It’s an organization called the “Freedom Alliance Military Leadership Academy”, and it claims to be training the next generation of American leaders.
That’s really all we need: a generation of leaders who think of war as a fun summer outing.
It’s clear, though, that the real intent of this exercise is to let Republican kids put “Military Leadership Academy” on their résumés—look at what they claim for their program:
Academy graduates are highly motivated, physically fit and goal oriented. Many have pursued careers in the military and as DOD civilians, such as the Navy Criminal Investigative Service, while others go to college or directly to the workforce.
The “Academy” is five days spent on a military base, making field trips to local military hardware, and the worst hardship the kiddies might face is a little rain. I don’t think the academy can take much credit for anything, unless Republicans are really that shallow and easily impressed by the word “military” on a CV.
Alistair McGrath came out with a book called The Dawkins Delusion? a while back, in response to The God Delusion, obviously. It seems to have sank without much of a trace, and what I’ve read of McGrath on the net has been tediously unimpressive — he’s another believer who mistakes criticizing Dawkins for a positive step in defending his faith — so I haven’t bothered to read it, especially since right now we’re flooded with good books on unbelief. I was sent a scathing critique of McGrath that I’ll cite here, though; it looks like his book is nothing but a long tirade against a straw Dawkins.
If anyone has any positive reviews of McGrath’s book, go ahead and post a link. As it stands, it’s a book I don’t have to add to my summer reading list.
