History
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2007The IDiot Dembski has written this:
It’s a happy Darwinian world after all …
William Dembski
Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following:
The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith,…
oracknows | March 24, 2007Here's wishing a belated blogiversary to Holocaust Controversies! On its first blogiversary, Nick has posted a cautiously optimistic analysis on the reason why Holocaust denial is losing its potency and increasingly being abandoned, even by the far right, as the completely ludicrous lie that it is.
I have no illusions that Holocaust denial is going away any time soon, but it does seem to have lost some of its influence, and here's hoping that, as long as deniers spew their lies, Sergey, Nick, and Andrew over at Holocaust Controversies and organizations like The Holocaust History Project will…
pharyngula | March 22, 2007Since Ed Darrell made such a comprehensive comment on the question of whether Darwin was as wicked a racist as the illiterate ideologues of Uncommon Descent would like you to believe, I'm just copying his list here.
Remember the famous quarrel between Capt. FitzRoy and Darwin aboard the Beagle? After leaving Brazil, in their mess discussions (remember: Darwin was along to talk to FitzRoy at meals, to keep FitzRoy from going insane as his predecessor had), Darwin noted the inherent injustice of slavery. Darwin argued it was racist and unjust, and therefore unholy. FitzRoy loudly argued…
pharyngula | March 21, 2007Sometimes we're a little bit mean to engineers here — there's the Salem hypothesis, for instance, that notes that creationist apologists who claim to be scientists often turn out to be engineers. In compensation, though, watch this video of a Michigan man with simple, clever strategies for moving massive objects. I was impressed. I guess the ancients didn't need the assistance of high-tech alien astronauts to build impressive stone structures, all they needed was a Wally Wallington.
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
It is, as JBS Haldane noted, a fact the whole world knows, which he called "Aunt Jobiska's Theorem" after Edward Lear's poem:
The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up,
To his Aunt Jobiska's Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish;--
And she said,-- 'It's a fact the whole world knows,
'That Pobbles are happier without their toes.'
What fact? Well, it doesn't matter. Any fact, that everyone knows, will do. Try this:
On the morning of November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin’s On the…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
Courtesy of the inimitable Jason Grossman, who passes such things along to me, comes this announcement from the even more inimitable John van Whye who is responsible for the Darwin online project:
Friends of Mr Darwin may be interested to learn that images of his diary or 'Journal' (DAR158) now join the online transcription (provided by the Correspondence Project). The transcription and new images can be seen here.
I am of course aghast that Dr van Whye failed to note that Darwin died with a doctorate honoris causa, and hence should be called Dr Darwin, even at the risk of confusing him…
evolvingthoughts | March 19, 2007
Most historians of evolutionary biology have contended that Darwin did not believe that species were real. Instead, they claim, he believed species were arbitrarily delimited from each other, and the species was nothing more than a more distinct variety. Thus, according to Mayr, Darwin did not attempt to solve the problem of speciation because he did not and--because of his species concept, could not--appreciate that there was a problem to be solved. Since he did not consider the species a distinct natural unit, it was only natural that he did not see the need to explain how species multiply…
clock | March 16, 2007Osvaldo_Cavandoli aka Cava, the author of the amazing and hillarious cartoon La Linea, one of my childhood favourites, has died about two weeks ago. Here is the very first episode:
There are several more available on YouTube (I just watched about a dozen and laughed out loud).
Unlike most of the episodes seen on TV this one below is definitely NSFW (i.e., if your work does not find this safe, you should find a saner employer):
The subtitles, in Croatian, are hillarious if you do not understand Italian.
[Hat-tip: cicciosax]
clock | March 16, 2007
On this day in 1934 the US adopted the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act, commonly known as the Duck Stamp Act. Hunters are required to buy a stamp before bagging migratory birds like ducks and geese, with the proceeds earmarked for habitat preservation. The stamps themselves are so beautifully done that many non-hunters buy and display them as art. We won't be hunting them, but here are a few quotes on Birds.
I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance than I…
oracknows | March 15, 2007You may recall Dr. Lorraine Day, the former Chief of Orthopedic Surgery at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980's who, after developing breast cancer, became a consummate altie, selling various dubious "natural, alternative therapies for all diseases, including cancer and AIDS." Somewhere along the line, sadly, she also became a rabid anti-Semite and Holocaust denier. I've had an interest in her conspiracy-mongering for a while now, because she's the perfect storm of two of my biggest interests: "alternative medicine" and Holocaust denial. I used to refer to her as purveying both…
evolvingthoughts | March 14, 2007
Carl Linné, or as we know him from his Latinised name, Carolus Linnaeus, turns 300 this year, on May 23rd. And Nature has a series of articles on the famous Swede in this week's edition, as well as a slew of other interesting papers. I don't know, nothing blogworthy comes along for months, and then they hit you with too much to do properly...
OK, there is a piece on his legacy to taxonomy in the age of molecular systematics; one on the role and problems of amateurs in systematics and how they may resolve some of the problems of insufficient professionals; Linnaeus' raccoon named Sjupp (not…
evolvingthoughts | March 11, 2007
I have put a file on my home site that lists as many species definitions, from Aristotle to today, as I can find. It's a work in progress, so if you find any that are significant in the history of biology or the present debate that I have missed, please let me know. In time, this may become a reader published somewhere. [It's a 1.3Mb PDF]
aardvarchaeology | March 10, 2007
The spring issue of Antiquity, a journal for which I am proud to act as a correspondent, has come on-line and is being distributed on paper as well. It has a lot to offer those interested in Northern European archaeology: papers on the construction date of Silbury Hill in Wiltshire, England; on the late-1st Millennium temple at Uppåkra, Scania, Sweden; on mid-to-late 1st Millennium research as historical archaeology; on the Viking Period towns and trade network around the Baltic; and (as illustrated above) on voluptuous Late Magdalenian female silhouettes knapped in flint and found at…
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of "accident" in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.
Why?
The reason is deep in the history of western thought. In…
oracknows | March 8, 2007As longtimers around here know, I have a great interest in all things World War II, including the Holocaust. I've written numerous times, either in the context of discussing the Holocaust or while discussing bioethics and the evolution of about the horrific medical experiments carried out by the Nazis. Much less frequently mentioned are the equally horrific excuses for "medical experiments" carried out by the Japanese on various prisoners that fell into their hands. Although not as systematic or widespread an atrocity as the Nazi medical experiments, they should not be forgotten, and,…
pharyngula | March 7, 2007The archives of Natural History magazine contain some strange old stories—like this tale from 1933, when whales were casually slaughtered, and you could write about their death throes in a popular magazine. There's a memorable image in it, at least.
Unimaginable numbers of squids, which occur in practically all parts of the oceans, are devoured by sperm whales. The certainty of this is, of course, obvious from the bulk of the mighty foragers and the size and number of the schools engaged in an unceasing quest for food throughout all the warmer sea waters of the globe. It was indelibly…
evolvingthoughts | March 5, 2007
I received the following from someone who refers to herself only as Fran K, which, given my recent experiences with university adminstration, has the right Kafakesque overtones. I publish it in the hope that others may learn from our joint experiences... someday.
Dear John Wilkins,
I quite appreciated your commentary on the Procrastination Principle, not to mention your Lazy Manager Theory and ballistic defense system of staff.
The procrastination principle, however, has been in practice since long before 1995, when codified for the academic community by John Perry.
Many years ago (maybe…
pharyngula | March 4, 2007Last week, I promised I'd watch this documentary about the "lost tomb of Jesus" because it was being advertised here on Pharyngula. Promise fulfilled, but the ghastly program was two hours long—two hours of nothing but fluff. I've put a bit of a summary of the whole show below the fold, but I'm afraid there's nothing very persuasive about any of it, and it was stretched out to a hopelessly tedious length.
8:00-8:30
We learn that there were some ossuaries pulled out of a tomb in 1980. The names scrawled on them: Jesus bar Joseph, Jose, Mary, Matthew. They really didn't have to drag that out…
pharyngula | March 4, 2007Guess what period the History Channel characterizes as 600 years of degenerate, godless, inhuman behavior? Come on, guess!
The Dark Ages. Bunch o' brutal atheists running around covered in dirt and boppin' each other on the head with clubs is what it was, I guess. If you take a look at their timeline, they define the Dark Ages as the period from 410 AD, when Alaric of the Visigoths (Christian) sacked Rome (Christian), to 1095 when Pope Urban II (Christian, probably) sent an armed mob of knights and hangers-on (Christian) to savage the people of the Middle East (Muslim, mainly). In between, we…
oracknows | March 3, 2007It's history time, both good and bad!
First, there's the latest History Carnival.
Next, there's the Carnival of Bad History.
Enjoy!