OK, I’ve decided: I’m going to be at Darwin’s on Thursday morning, around 8ish. If you’re in the area, stop on by — no obligation, though, if you’re all busy I’ll just check my mail and guzzle some coffee before heading off to the airport.
There were lots of good suggestions, but really … how could I resist a place called Darwin’s?
Time is running an online poll to discover “the most influential people of the year” — I’d urge you all to vote for Dawkins, except that when you browse the list you discover it’s a collection of pop stars, models, sports figures, and the sparse sprinkling of a few politicians and random others. It’s a collection that will depress you with its triviality and banality.
Imagine that aliens visited our planet and asked for a meeting with the most influential people on earth, the people most representative of our values, and we sent along a delegation containing Perez Hilton, Kate Moss, Brad Pitt, and Dane Cook — I’d be embarrassed. I’d be so ashamed I’m not sure I’d be able to protest too much when they announced the planet was going to be demolished to make way for a new intergalactic expressway.
This is cool: Simon Conway Morris gave a talk at Baylor, and Cody was there. Conway Morris is a smart fellow who does some very interesting work, and now I learn that he’s also a charming speaker — even though I completely disagree with his conclusions, I wish he’d come a little farther north so I could listen to him. I’d most like to hear him talk about Cambrian and pre-Cambrian paleontology, but it sounds like he’s instead lecturing specifically on the ideas where he’s most wrong, his belief in the overwhelming power of natural selection (or perhaps, design) to drive convergence. Convergence happens, of course, but Conway Morris seems to favor sifting the evidence for similarities and ignoring the differences, and divergence happens, too.
I’m on my way to Boston for a day. A few people have written wondering if there’d be any free time to get together, and I’m afraid today is booked solid. The one possibility is tomorrow morning (Thursday), my plane leaves at 11:20, and I’ll probably just hang about in the coffeeshop nearest my hotel for a while, and if anyone wanted to join me, please do. I’m staying in the Charles Hotel on Harvard Square in Cambridge — if any Bostonians can recommend a decent coffee house with wireless access near there, I’ll be grateful, and I’ll also probably be there at 8 am on Thursday.
I just finished watching a copy of a three-part program that was broadcast in England three years ago — A Brief History of Disbelief, narrated by Jonathan Miller. All I can say is … wow. It’s less an advocacy of atheism than a kind of post-atheism, a historical and philosophical review of this strange, dying idea of “religion” that reveals the progressive growth of atheistic thought. It’s wonderfully dismissive. The real question isn’t how people can disbelieve, but how faith can survive and still linger on.
The most important battle in the history of mankind!
A bit more than a week ago, I mentioned this interview I did for a site called One Blog A Day. The comment thread on the interview has grown in a peculiar way — John A. Davison and his pet sycophantic monkey, VMartin, are babbling away in a most painfully lunatic fashion, cruelly egged on by wÒÓ†. It’s hard to beat this comment for delusions of grandeur:
Phil Plait has the stats: it’s 1.5 earth diameters, 5 times the mass, 2¼ Gs, and probably has a surface temperature between 0°C and 40°C. It’s big, it could be wet, and it’s only 20 light years away. You know what I’m thinking? It could be the Planet of the Squid.
Somebody get cracking on that transluminal drive.
Did you also attend this Intelligent Design quackery talk by John Marshall? Report in, please, and let us know how stupid it was (there is no doubt that it was stupid, we’re just interested in measuring the degree.)
Marshall is yet another M.D. who became a creationist because he looked objectively at the evid… oh, wait, no. None of them do that. It’s because:
But Marshall began to look into what he said were holes in the theory. And after becoming a Christian, Marshall found it hard to reconcile evolutionary theory with Genesis, the biblical account of how God created the earth and everything on it in six days. Marshall has since become a proponent of the view that there are some natural systems that cannot be adequately explained by natural forces, and therefore must be the result of intelligent design, or ID.
Isn’t it curious how religion is such a powerful force for inoculating people with appalling inanity?
