You can get a jump on the class—I’ve posted a list of the textbooks you’ll need on the class website.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
You can get a jump on the class—I’ve posted a list of the textbooks you’ll need on the class website.
A reader wrote to Francis Collins about the use of his name to promote D. James Kennedy’s upcoming ahistorical anti-evolution program, and Collins wrote right back. He’s doing exactly the right thing.
(Oops, no — Collins doesn’t want to be quoted on this, so I’ve removed the email. He’s unambiguous in stating that he was interviewed about his book, and that was then inserted into the video without his knowledge.)
Good for him, and that’ll teach me: just when you think there are no further depths to which a creationist will sink, there they go, plumbing ever deeper. Kennedy and his crew are apparently putting together the video equivalent of a quote mine.
I apologize to Dr Collins for assuming he was a party to this creationist video, and I hope he sues those frauds.
But when you do shed your speedo, don’t throw it in the water—it’s bad for dolphins and other living things. Read about the poor dolphin who tried to wear a speedo—it took an emergency depantsing team to rescue him.
(via One Good Thing)
The Inoculated Mind twists a Calvin and Hobbes comic to make a point about debates with creationists…I don’t know if I should endorse that kind of tinkering with Holy Writ.
Oh, yeah…this Friday, 25 August, at 8ET, I’ll be interviewed on the Infidel Guy. Don’t let me forget!
New Kid on the Hallway tried to give up on blogging, but now she’s back…with an interesting set of excuses for why she needed to resume. See, if you’ve been carrying on an internal dialog about you’d get so much more done if weblogs would disappear, it isn’t true.
The Raw Story reveals that D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries will be a hosting a program that blames Darwin for Hitler. Orac has going to have to resurrect an entire zombie Wehrmacht to handle this one: look at the unholy corps of creationists he has assembled to defend this outrageous claim:
The one-hour program features Ann Coulter, author of Godless; Richard Weikart, author of From Darwin to Hitler; Lee Strobel, author of The Case for a Creator; Jonathan Wells, author of Icons of Evolution; Phillip Johnson, author of Darwin on Trial; Michael Behe, author of Darwin’s Black Box; Ian Taylor, author of In the Minds of Men, and Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project.
I’m sure you all remember that “It Works, Bitches” comic—you can now get it on a t-shirt.
How can I be tagged with the Random Quotes meme? I’ve had this set of random quotes set up to appear on my site for years—it seems redundant to ask me to go through someone else’s quote file and pull out five that I like. Since Janet did it, though, I’ll go along…only I’m going to insist on using my own file, and just giving you the first five that pop up.
Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.
Stephen Jay Gould
Your sweet little book is a bizarre collection of out-of-context quotations, misquotations, misleading quotations, non sequiturs, errors of fact and just about every other dirty intellectual trick known to man.
Tim O’Neill, on the JW’s anti-evolution book
The cosmos is a gigantic fly wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.
H.L. Mencken
From now on in America, any man lucky enough to get a BJ knows to pull the shade; for there is probably a Republican outside peeking in the window.
…anyone who writes about “Darwin’s theory of evolution” in the singular, without segregating the theories of gradual evolution, common descent, speciation, and the mechanism of natural selection, will be quite unable to discuss the subject competently.
Ernst Mayr
Here, I’ll make it easy for you. Click here to get 5 random quotes from my file. Now you can do it, too.
Hank Fox just dropped me a line mentioning an older article he’d found, as something I might want to blog about. Yes, it was—I wrote about it sometime ago, and here it is again. The article Hank found is also worth reading, with a strong conclusion:
Despite all its fine words, religion has brought in its wake little more than violence, prejudice and sexual disease. True morality is found elsewhere. As UK Guardian columnist George Monbiot concluded in his review of Gregory Paul’s study, “if you want people to behave as Christians advocate, you should tell them that God does not exist.”
It’s a very cool article—it had the religious up in arms, because it flat out demonstrates that belief in God does not confer any social advantages, and is actually a net detriment to a culture.
