I's an ego thing, sure, but it's also a handy way of seeing what one did this past year. Here are what I think of as the substantial posts of Evolving Thoughts from 2008. Sorry for the lateness - it's a longish list. I (and my guest blogger) have been real busy this year...
Religion and Creationism
- Desecration, blasphemy in public, and manners
- Why are there still monkeys?
- Can a Christian accept natural selection as true?
- Does religion evolve?
- The heat of religion
- The religious we have always with us
- Agriculture and the rise of religion
- The origins of agriculture now extended
- Darwin, God and chance
- Fun with Christians and worldviews
- Is Christianity healthy?
Biology
- Measuring extinctions
- Barcoding and classification, again
- How is a species like a soup can?
- Not the end of evolution again!
- Colbert, spiders and cohesion species
- New work on speciation
Philosophy
- Is information essential for life? No.
- Why not information?
- Mechanism, informationism and Ockhamism
- What is a basic concept?
- What philosophy of science and "postmodernism" have in common
- Whewelling
- What is a species?
- What is a theoretical object?
- Is there a species rank?
- How to get an improbable outcome
- On ontology and metaphysics: substance abuse
- Sudden impact: Darwin on cognition and a leap of faith
- Physicists undertake stamp-collecting
- Resolved: religion is the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality that we face today
- The greatest threat: antimodernism
- Is postmodernism retreating?
- A lucky man
- The different epistemologies of science and religion
- Why do scientific theories work? The inherent problem
- The evolution of morality
- You can prove a negative
- Basics: NOT
- "Class" war
- The ontology of biology 1 - What an ontology really is
- The ontology of biology 2 - How to derive an ontology in biology
- The ontology of biology 3 - phenomena
- To be, and not to be - that is the quantifier
- Evolution and economics
- Fallacies on fallacies
History of science
- The value of the history of science
- Nature makes no leaps...
- Bastardising history in the service of dogma
- Stein is right: Darwinism causes antisemitism
- What's so cool about Darwin?
- Taxonomists and bad history
- What is a disease?
- A meme. A medieval meme.
- Another claim for priority from New Zealand
- The birthday of John Ray
- Aristotle on the mayfly
- Scientists as historians
- Rodney Stark's idiotic history (Guest post by Thony Christie).
- Browsing through the Philosophical Transactions on species and generation
Politics
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Back in 2006 I briefly discussed sociologist Rodney Stark's book, The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (Random, 2005). Now over at Evolving Thoughts, John provides a guest post by Thony Christie that discusses Stark's claims about the history of…
We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem…
We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem…
We are busy preparing for The Open Laboratory 2008. The submissions have been trickling in all year, and a little bit more frequently recently, but it is time now to dig through your Archives for your best posts since December 20th 2007 and submit them. Submit one, or two, or several - no problem…
About "Agriculture and the rise of religion"..
I've observed(too) some correlations. OC1: Southern-US,Iran and even Finland are quite agriculture countryside and most fundamental religions (in relation to antievolution/fundamentalism) compared to neighbour countries. OC2. Reader's Digest mentioned Brazilian hunter-gatherer's tribe that seem have no religion (!)
Lately I've been reading Boyer and Diamond and they gives some confirmation to my hypothesis: Agricultures are more dependent on weather and so also on "gods" of weather than hunter-gatherers.
Agricultures are more risky to get famine at the same time than hunter-gatherer tribes(Diamond). Superstition comes to explanations when accidents happens more often at the same time or in series (Boyer).
These support "my" OC1,OC2-observations. But those seem contradict somebit to Your hypothesesis that religion is trustfull social marker.(Biggest towns like NY are more atheistic and liberal than countrysides or small towns).
On the other hand my point is on modern antievolution times..