Shameless self-promotion

As Shelley says, if we aim to make this place the place for the biggest conversation about science, we can’t be shy. Scienceblogs has cracked the Technorati Top 100, and we’re aiming higher, so it would be nice to get more links to that page. Pharyngula isn’t on the Top 100, but I figure all the squid pics will eventually allow me to destroy Cute Overload (oh, wait, nooooo…that’s another link contributing to the dominion of cute furry immature felines!).

Technorati also keeps a list of the Top 100 Favorited Blogs, so you can help us out there, too, by adding Pharyngula to your Technorati Favorites or
adding Scienceblogs to your Technorati Favorites, if you happen to have a technorati account.

As a special bonus, I’ll be programming my undead cyborg squid-human hybrids to avoid eating the brains of anyone with Pharyngula in their technorati favorites.

Browne on Darwin and friends

This is an excellent short article by Janet Browne (the Janet Browne who wrote the best biography of Darwin I’ve read, Voyaging(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll) and The Power of Place(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), both well worth reading) that discusses the reception of the theory of evolution by his contemporaries, and acknowledges the invaluable assistance of Huxley, Hooker, Gray, and Lyell. One important point is that opposition to his ideas was not driven by the crude Biblical literalism that we encounter so much today, but a more general conflict with a more enlightened religion that found no place for a personal god in a world where life was the product of rather callous and impersonal forces, and of course, with a religion that was a force for controlling people’s minds.

Scholars nowadays agree that The Descent of Man offered a far-reaching naturalistic account of human evolution but did not change many minds. The people who already accepted evolution continued to believe. Those who did not continued to disbelieve. Few readers wished to shrink the gap between mankind and animals quite so dramatically, however. If these ideas were accepted, wrote the Edinburgh Review, the constitution of society would be destroyed.

A lot of people seem to want to argue that it’s just fundamentalism that’s a problem—but that’s only one narrow aspect of the problem that’s common in the US. It was not a major issue in 19th century Britain.

(via Thoughts in a Haystack)

Religious credulity and the recent spate of godly ‘science’

I usually like Cornelia Dean’s science reporting, but this recent collection of book reviews put me off from the opening paragraph. She begins with the tired old claim that “scientists have to be brave” to embrace religion. Malarkey. I’ve never heard a scientist bring up the subject of religion, pro or con, at a scientific conference or associated informal gathering. You can be as devout as you want to be with no risk to your professional career (you may even find yourself an icon for the compatibility of science and religion!), and as for your personal life, being religious in a country in which 90% of the residents self-identify as religious, and in which religiosity has become a defining character of our political leadership, is hard to characterize as boldly bucking a trend. The rest of the review is an exercise in credulity.

[Read more…]

Uh-oh. Double trouble!

Ricky Santorum has us scientists down cold.

Most scientists unfortunately, those that certainly are advocating for this [embryonic stem cell research], and many others feel very little moral compulsion. It’s a utilitarian, materialistic view of doing whatever they can do to pursue their desired goals.

So, you see, scientists are amoral, with nothing to hold them back from pursuing their dreams of unbridled, raging power. I’m sure if we asked Li’l Ricky about atheists, he’d turn pale and tell us all kinds of horror stories.

Atheist scientists, of course, are absolutely the worst. Watch out—when my army of undead cyborg squid-human hybrids is assembled, I won’t hesitate to use it.

Think before morphing

Oh, good. I saw this WaPo article with a morphing animation of a lemur into SJ Gould, and I was mildly appalled—it’s a very badly done gimmick that doesn’t say anything about how evolution works, and actually grossly misleads the viewer on the morphological transformations that had to have occurred. Fortunately, I don’t have to deepen my reputation as a cranky internet curmudgeon by complaining about it— Carl Zimmer has done it for me.

Transforming grid coordinates is an interesting tool in describing the transformations between forms—D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson did it well—but you need to start with forms you know are linearly related and you’ve got to define and align anatomical features very carefully. Picking random photos of various primates and blending them ain’t it.