These things are always a gross oversimplification, but go ahead, take the Worldview Quiz. It uses 23 questions to put you on a two-axis grid with Carl Sagan in one corner, and Pat Robertson in another. Guess which one I call “neighbor”?
Your rating on science vs. non-science: 10
Your rating on progress for humankind: 10
Your position on the worldview spectrum: (10,10)
Here’s my score and some definitions.
The discussion page for the Wikipedia article on the Discovery Institute has a couple of interesting flags up on it:
The subject of this article, Discovery Institute, has edited Wikipedia as
User:216.163.84.151 (talk ⢠contribs).
The subject of this article, Discovery Institute, has edited Wikipedia as
Truthologist (talk ⢠contribs).
What it all means is that somebody at the Discovery Institute, using the pseudonym “Truthologist” (hah! Irony strikes again!) has been busily revising the entry describing the Discovery Institute. Since Casey Luskin has previously put Wikipedia “on notice”, it’s not surprising that they’d sneak around to try and make changes, but it certainly is pathetic.
Some people find the connection evades their understanding, but Ian has found it.
You can get the audio for Dawkins’ talk at the University of Kansas now.
Here’s another tetrapodomorph fish to consternate the creationists. These Devonian/Carboniferous animals just keep popping up to fill in the gaps in the evolutionary history of the tetrapod transition to the land—the last one was Tiktaalik.
This lovely beastie is more fish than frog, as you can tell—it was a marine fish, 384-380 million years old, from Australia, and it was beautifully preserved. Gogonasus is not a new species, but the extraction and analysis of a new specimen has caused its position in the evolutionary tree to be reevaluated.
Yes! You can now read the complete works of Charles Darwin free, online. Since an original copy of The Origin will set you back roughly $50,000, last I heard, this is a really good deal.
I’ve just been informed by Karl Mogel that we’re all doomed. A creature of immense size has been spotted on Google maps—it’s an insect longer than a football field, and it is devastating Germay.
Despite all the discussion, no one is talking about the important issue: how to get rid of it. From my knowledge of giant monsters, I can say one thing: don’t nuke it. It will only make it stronger.
What we really need to do is to rouse a giant lizard from the Sea of Japan and lure him to Europe.
Did the internet get stupider while I was away this past week? I mean, it’s gratifying to my ego to imagine the average IQ of the virtual collective plummeting when I take some time off, but I really can’t believe I personally have this much influence. Maybe the kooks crept out in my absence, or maybe it was just the accumulation of a week’s worth of insanity that I saw in one painful blort when I was catching up.
What triggers such cynicism is the combination of Deepak Chopra, Oliver Curry, and now,
William Tucker. Tucker wrote a remarkably silly piece in the American Spectator in which he drew deeply faulty conclusions from human genetics to support a thesis rife with misogyny and foolish chauvinism on human evolution. It was like a piece on evolutionary psychology written by someone who didn’t know any genetics at all.
Hang on to your hats—we’re going to see a factoid from one magazine article balloon up into a declaration of the superiority of the male species (I use “species” here both ironically and mockingly).
Deepak Chopra is incredible. After sticking his foot in his mouth once already with an awful article on genes, he then proceeds to kick himself in the teeth, followed by an attempt to turn himself inside out. No, I’m sorry, I simply can’t read the Huffington Post as long as this clown graces its pages…and I’m ashamed that he can misrepresent himself as knowledgeable about science and medicine in this country, and that people buy his books. Quacks ought to be tarred and feathered (metaphorically) and run off, I think.
It’s always good to see foreign governments promoting sensible motions like this:
That this House shares the concerns of the British Centre for Science Education that the literature being sent to every school in the United Kingdom by the creationist religious group Truth in Science is full of scientific mistakes and fails to disclose the group’s creationist beliefs and objectives; and urges all schools to treat this literature with extreme caution.
[links added by me.]
The BCSE is a good new group organized to combat the slowly growing creationist movement in the UK, while Truth In Science is one of those ironically named theopseudoscientific outfits that recently got some attention because it mailed a “resource pack” of two DVDs (source of one is the Discovery Institute, and Focus in the Family for the other) and creationist literature to every school and college science department head in England—they’ve got some money!
Here in the US, I’d expect to subsequently some pandering government toad promoting some motion applauding an action like that of “Truth in Science”—it looks like the first response in the UK is to condemn it, and condemn it accurately.
