Alright, Orac, I’m trying to get some work done here this morning…so why’d you have to send me this clip of an atheist church to distract me with unseemly giggling?
One of the things you get in blogs that you don’t get so much of in science journals is the raving insane obsessed kook—can you believe Tara has to deal with wackos who disbelieve the germ theory of disease?
Of course you do. The people who argue against evolution are just as nutty.
…because Pam Spaulding at Pandagon had a kind word to say about James Lileks. Not his Bleat or Screed blog, fortunately, or for his regular column in the Strib which I find tediously twee, but for his masterful book, Interior Desecrations. You have to have lived through the 1970s to be able to understand how tacky things got for a while there—someday I’m going to have to dig up that old photo of myself in a polyester paisley print shirt and bell bottoms just to put the younger generation of readers here into shock.
While I’m in a “what were they thinking?” mood, I’ll mention one shock we had in this otherwise nice 1950s era house we own. The upstairs is carpeted bright red…no, scarlet, a flaming crimson color, which was discombobulating enough. In addition, though, one of the upstairs bedrooms was wallpapered in bright ♣ green shamrocks ♣ .
It was one of the selling points, actually. I figured if we ever had trouble making the mortgage payments, I already had the decor to open a bordello for leprechauns.
The Minneapolis police are getting a little too serious—they’ve started arresting zombies (those are some really good mugshots.) I think the fact that there was a zombie dance party at the mall might have tipped them off that there isn’t a real threat here.
The reason they were arrested is ridiculous.
Harteau also said police were on high alert because they’d gotten a bulletin about men who wear clown makeup while attacking and robbing people in other states.
What’s the matter with law enforcement nowadays? They can’t even tell clowns from zombies. Here’s a hint:
What are they going to do when the mad scientists invade Minneapolis next week—run around and start locking up dentists and undertakers?
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.
So Hank Fox sent along a couple of videos: one’s funny, and the other is “funny.”
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)
Don’t be surprised—it’s just another couple of clueless creationists bumbling into science they don’t understand, extracting single sentences out of context, and coming to faulty conclusions that contradict the actual results of the paper. Orac gets to have a little fun ripping up an easy creationist mark.
Who would have thought Wonder Woman sprang from such an unusual source?
Well, actually, I guess in retrospect that it was obvious.
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.
