We have some musical talent among our readers. I was sent lyrics and a link to …
BRAINY PRIMATE BLUES words and music by Bruce Woollatt
Sometimes I wonder why
we ever left Olduvai.
It’s a mystery to me
why we didn’t stay in the trees.
Well a million years ago we should have thought the whole thing through
’cause a million years have gone and we’ve got those Brainy Primate Blues.
Listen to Brainy Primate Blues here.
The Wellcome Trust has published a short pamphlet to inform young students about evolution. I haven’t had a chance to look at it carefully yet, but it looks like an interesting combination of a fairly wordy presentation and lots of color and flash. You can download a pdf of Evolution: The Big Picture for yourself; would it be a useful tool to catch student’s eyes and get the basics across to them?
Out of 16 pages, 4 are dedicated to the conflict between science and religion. It doesn’t come right out and say that religion is bad, and it even makes the usual waffley about how some scientists accommodate religion in their lives, but their point-by-point comparisons of how religion and science generates ideas come down hard on religion, and they do pin the blame for the creationist antipathy to evolution on religion. It’s not exactly ferocious on the subject, but at the same time it would cause an uproar if it were distributed in US public schools, I’m afraid.
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:
