July 19, 2007
During my absence it seems that Larry Moran, one of my favorite science bloggers, has declined an invitation to join ScienceBlogs. Outrageous!
Though I find it regrettable, I fear he now has to be crushed. I mean, if one blogger is allowed to turn down such an invitation and get away with it,…
July 19, 2007
I see that my fellow bloggers have not been idle during my absence. Matt Nisbet has another one of his Dawkins bashing posts up. This time his champion is philosopher Phillip Kitcher.
Nisbet quotes Kitcher as follows, from a recent podcast of Point of Inquiry:
DJ Grothe: Did you write the book…
July 19, 2007
Okay, I'm back. Did I miss anything?
England ended up being a lot of fun, though it didn't start out that way. For reasons I won't try to explain here, Dominic and I took different flights. His landed early. Mine was two hours late.
We had flown through the night, so it was now early Monday…
July 5, 2007
On Sunday I will be flying across the ocean to participate in the 2007 British Combinatorics Conference, at the University of Reading. If you peruse the book of abstracts, you will see that I will be delievering an edge-of-your-seat barn-burner of a talk entitled, “Decomposition Theorems for…
July 5, 2007
The Center for Inquiry offers up this excellent summary (PDF format) of the nature and goals of Intelligent Design Creationism. Its author is philosopher Barbara Forrest, whose expert testimony in the Dover trial played a significant role in the successful outcome of the case. Think of it as the…
July 2, 2007
In his post on atheism and civil rights, Ed Brayton takes me to task for my assertion that books like those written by Dawkins and Hitchens are not the cause of the public image problem faced by atheists. I had written:
Atheists don't face a public image problem because of the books of Dawkins…
July 2, 2007
Rereading my post from Friday, I notice that I never actually answered the question I posed in the title. Is atheism a civil rights issue?
Happily, other bloggers have stepped into the breach. Mike Dunford gets us started:
Atheists, unfortunately, do face a great deal of discrimination. Actually…
July 2, 2007
The only parts of the museum I have not reviewed are the bookstore (pretty much what you'd expect) and the men's room (impressively clean). So what conclusions should we draw?
Is this the end of civilization as we know it? No. But it is one more symptom of the disease that has been growing ever…
June 29, 2007
The only thing left was the big planetarium show. I managed to hook up with my posse on line, and together we went inside. Alas, we ended up sitting in the front row. This meant that even when we took advantage of the tilt back feature of the chairs, it was difficult to see some of what was…
June 28, 2007
My SciBling Matthew Nisbet says no. I think he really means it, since he put the title of his post in all caps.
Matthew writes:
One of the common claims that has been amplified by the Dawkins/Hitchens PR campaign is that “atheism is a civil rights issue.” (For an example, see the comments section…
June 28, 2007
There was one final movie to be viewed. This one dealt with dinosaurs and dragons. I think the point was that dragon legends have their origin in the experiences people had interacting with dinosaurs. If this is correct, then all those secular geologists who say people and dinosaurs were…
June 27, 2007
Blogging over at The Huffington Post, my SciBling Chris Mooney has an excellent post up on the subject of global warming. He is responding to this op-ed from Emily Yoffe, a writer for Slate. Yoffe was trying to present herself as the calm, clear-thinking purveryor of common -sense against the…
June 27, 2007
Ken Miller has now published his review of Behe's latest. He did an excellent job. I think he really nailed some of Behe's more egregious mathematical errors:
Behe, incredibly, thinks he has determined the odds of a mutation "of the same complexity" occurring in the human line. He hasn't. What…
June 27, 2007
We now come to what one helpful museum employee described to me as “the climax of the museum.” The previous exhibits took us through the first four of the seven C's (Creation, Corruption, Catastrophe, Confusion). Now, with one further fifteen minute movie, we would get the final three (Christ,…
June 26, 2007
Today's New York Times has a series of articles up about various aspects of evolution. One that caught my eye was this essay by paleontologist Douglas Erwin. It discusses various challenges to the Neo-Darwinian synthesis. Not the silly, brain-dead challenges of the creationists and ID folks, but…
June 26, 2007
Let us now ponder more closely a few of the specific exhibits at the big museum.
One surprising item in the exhibits is the blunt contempt for human reason. We are constantly told that apostasy begins when human reason is elevated above God's word. Placards on the walls contrast the conclusions…
June 25, 2007
You might also enjoy having a look at Professor Steve Steve's account of his trip to the Creation Museum. Many pictures.
June 25, 2007
After leaving the theater it was time to enter the museum proper. The nice fellow at the door scanned the barcode on my ticket to verify that I wasn't trying to sneak in. He advised me that I should allow at least two hours to see all the exhibits, then invited me to go on in.
The museum is laid…
June 24, 2007
P.Z. Myers has a very helpful post up explaining the biological details behind the Michael Behe quote mine I reported on here. Basically, Behe's treatment of the subject was even worse than I realized. Recall that Behe was arguing that straightforward reasoning from Darwinian principles led…
June 23, 2007
You might think that our corrupt and incompetant Attorney General would find it difficult to find a sympathetic audience these days. But you'd be wrong:
Gonzales is scheduled to deliver a 45-minute speech at the Seattle Westin Hotel's Grand Ballroom on the Justice Department's efforts to protect…
June 23, 2007
Along with the rest of my crew, I entered the theater. Not just any theater, mind you, but a special effects theater. This meant that at certain points during the film your seat would vibrate ominously and a small spritz of water would shoot out from the seat in front of you. More on that later…
June 22, 2007
Due to some conflicts between MapQuest's directions and my map of Kentucky, I was nervous during the final leg of my drive to The Creation Museum. After all those hours of driving, the only thing that would have been worse than actually having to walk through that pathetic monument to human…
June 21, 2007
A new ID book, a new selection of yummy delicious quote mines. Michael Behe's The Edge of Evolution (EoE) offers quite the smorgasbord
I'm not surprised that Jerry Coyne would have such a visceral negative reaction to anything Michael Behe writes. He was the victim of one of the more egregious…
June 15, 2007
From tomorrow through next Wednesday I will be on the road. First up: A trip to the big creationism museum. Then, a visit to a friend and collaborator who live in Bowling Green, KY to talk about math and whatever else it occurs to us to discuss.
Alas, I will be away from a computer for most of…
June 15, 2007
So after writing that last post and fretting that Coyne had provided the ID bloggers with ample fodder for demonstrating the intemperance of their critics, I decided to look around to see if any of the ID blogs had responded. And sure enough, William Dembski has already weighed in on the subject.…
June 15, 2007
Ronald Reagan famously defined the eleventh commandment to be, “Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican.” I'm a big fan of the spirit, if not the substance, of that statement. Generally speaking, I try to avoid criticizing my own side. The way I see it, there are dozens of bloggable items…
June 15, 2007
This past Wednesday I saw Michael Behe's talk at the Washington D.C. offices of the Discovery Institute. The talk, alas, was staggeringly dull, and I frequently found my attention wandering. Unlike Thomas Woodward, who was lying through his teeth at almost every turn and plainly knew next to…
June 10, 2007
Woodward closed by gushing about Ralph Seelke, who is a biologist at the University of Wisconsin, Superior. His web page carries a large disclaimer that his views do not represent the views of the university. That's never a good sign. The site also has various pro-ID articles and links. He…
June 10, 2007
We left off with Woodward about to launch into his favorite talking points. Let's have a look.
Number One: Haeckel's Embryos. Woodward spent a few minutes gushing about how Icons of Evolution author Jonathan Wells represented a “great success story” of ID. He referred everyone to an essay over…
June 7, 2007
As so often happens, this write-up requires more space than I expected it to when I sat down to begin writing it. I had intended this to be the last part of my write-up on Woodward's presentation, but, having written steadily for the last two hours and seeing no end in sight, it is clear to me…
