History
evolvingthoughts | October 18, 2006
Well, Stranger Fruit beat me to it (after I told him about it!) but there's a new version of Darwin's works online that has many juicy goodnesses, such as the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th editions of the Origin. Now we can check if these creationists are quoting properly. It has images as well as OCR'd text, and some of these editions were scanned from the Darwin family's own library. Also, there are field notebooks and lots of other stuff.
An OBE for John Van Wyhe, I say...
clock | October 14, 2006John bemoans the state of science journalism, with some added history of the Atlantis hypothesis.
clock | October 14, 2006Amazing history lesson from Archy: Nazis in Antarctica.
* title totally stolen from Mustang Bobby, as there is no possible improvement on it.
evolvingthoughts | October 13, 2006Those of you who live near San Francisco might be interested in this talk I'm giving at the Pizza Munch gathering at UC Berkeley in November.
For November we've made arrangements to meet jointly with the Bay Area Biosystematists in Berkeley on Thursday, November 9. John Wilkins (Queensland) will give a talk entitled "The Unseasonable Lateness of Being, Or, Essentialism Comes After Darwin, Not Before."
Abstract: The received view of the history of the species concept is that before Darwin, naturalists held to a view of essentialism, according to which species were constituted by necessary and…
oracknows | October 12, 2006Last week, when I speculated about reasons why there hasn't been a National Slavery Museum in this nation until the one slated to open in 2007, I mentioned the power of Confederate sympathies that still persists even to today in much of the South. Basically, in the eyes of many, the Confederacy has been romanticized, downplayng the brutality of slavery upon which the economy of the South was based for so long. Another example has cropped up in the Senate campaign of Senator George Allen (R) in Virginia:
The Confederate battle flag still stirs passions - reverence in some, fear and loathing in…
oracknows | October 8, 2006Pretty much everyone knows about the existence of the fabulous cave paintings dating back 30,000 years in places such as Lascaux and Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in France. In these caves, our forebearers used the walls as their canvases to paint amazingly vibrant and detailed paintings of animals and various other things. The paintings are beautiful, some of them even having been drawn using surprisingly sophisticated techniques of shading and perspective, and millions visit the caves to view .
Long we have assumed that we knew quite a bit about these drawing in these caves. But now evidence has been…
oracknows | October 4, 2006The other day, in the midst of a discussion about one of my posts about Holocaust denial, an anti-Semite posting as "bernarda" demanded:
Then I read books like Norman Finkelstein's Holocaust Industry and understood that it [the Holocaust] has just become a propaganda tool to create a permanent guilt complex, even on Americans who had nothing to do with it. Why are there several holocaust museums in the U.S. but no slavery museum?
The answer is pretty simple: Because the U.S. did not perpetrate the Holocaust. It helped to end the Holocaust. In contrast, the U.S. did perpetrate slavery. That's…
oracknows | October 2, 2006The latest History Carnival has been posted at Old is the New New. Enjoy!
oracknows | October 2, 2006While I happen to be on the topic of free speech and neo-Nazis today, here's something that came to me via Holocaust Controversies, a Holocaust denier comments about Sergey's post about the 65th anniversary of the Babi Yar massacre:
So is this the so-called "massacre" where kikes were supposedly massacred? God, but were it only so. Thus the volk who seek freedom fm Judaic oppression need merely review the proper historical dialectic.
He then goes off on a standard anti-Jew rant, citing arch anti-Semite and Holocaust denier Michael Hoffman III.
As you can see, this "Apollonian" is the variety…
oracknows | October 2, 2006As much as I oppose Holocaust denial, fascism, and neo-Nazis, you might recall that I am very much in favor of free speech. Indeed, I tend to take as broad an interpretation of the First Amendment as possible, and remain very grateful to our Founding Fathers for enshrining this freedom in the Constitution, where it's much more difficult to tamper with. But what happens when a distinctly anti-freedom of speech ban is enshrined in a nation's Constitution?
This is what:
A Stuttgart court fined a German company that specializes in anti-fascist paraphernalia adorned with swastikas for using the…
pharyngula | October 1, 2006Analysis of a 1969 recording reveals that Neil Armstrong actually did say "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.".
purepedantry | September 29, 2006As the Nobel Prize announcements are due to come out soon, it would be good if you knew your Nobel history. Lawrence Altman for the NYTimes has an excellent article on it. Money quote:
Yet in a little known story, the Nobel Prizes, the first of which will be announced on Monday, almost never came to be, largely because of the unsophisticated way Nobel drew up his will. It was flawed and legally deficient because he lived in many places and never established a legal residence. Nobel resided for many years in France, made intermittent visits to a home in Sweden and amassed assets in many…
stcynic | September 29, 2006Jon Rowe has an excellent post once again blasting David Barton for his utterly irrational historical revisionism in regard to religion and the constitution. He points to a document I've never seen before, an affidavit that Barton filed in the McCreary ten commandments case. You have to read this document. The illogic is absolutely breathtaking. He points again and again to early colonial laws that were completely opposed to freedom of thought and religion as being the key to understand the nation's founding. For instance:
In an effort to substantiate this position historically, critics often…
oracknows | September 26, 2006Via History News Network:
(Translation below the fold.)
Apparently, the above cartoon, Der Bonker, in which a disconsolate (and rappin'!) Hitler is portrayed sitting on the toilet complaining about Churchill, is causing an uproar in Germany:
A satirical cartoon about Hitler, where he sits on the toilet complaining about Churchill, is causing controversy in Germany.
Illustrator Walter Moers is famous for his comic books depicting the dictator as a frustrated little man who throws fits every time the Jews are mentioned. But with the release of the short film "Der Bonker", Germans seem to feel…
oracknows | September 24, 2006Here's a belated notice that the Carnival of Bad History #9 has been posted at World History Blog.
Enjoy!
evolvingthoughts | September 24, 2006
Razib has a little post on cultural cladism, but I think he gets it quite wrong.
He repeats the usual trope canard that culture isn't like biology in terms of its evolution. I think it is exactly like it, and that the "analogy" between cultural traditions and species is quite exact. All that differs is the frequency of the various kinds of evolution.
For instance, take Razib's example. He says that because Judaism is very unlike Christianity in some respects, and much more strictly like Islam in its monotheism, it should be seen as a sister taxon to Islam and not Christianity, and the…
evolvingthoughts | September 23, 2006Via Shakespeare's Sister, this video shows who the real nerd is...
evolvingthoughts | September 22, 2006
We may believe in some doctrine of evolution or some idea of progress and we may use this in our interpretation of the history of centuries; but what our history contributes is not evolution but rather the realization of how crooked and perverse the ways of progress are, with what wilfulness and waste it twists and turns, and takes anything but the straight track to its goal, and how often it seems to go astray, and to be deflected by any conjecture, to return to us - if it does returns - by a back door. [Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, Penguin, 1973 (1931), 24…
oracknows | September 19, 2006Heh.
I love it when the guys over at Holocaust Controversies get involved in a tussle with someone who clearly doesn't know what he is talking about, and I figure that perhaps my readers will too. So, enjoy this amusing little rebuttal to a guy who calls himself the "Birdman" and seems to think it's so cool to be "politically incorrect," even going so far as to bill himself the "world's most controversial author." (Get a load of his blatant anti-Semitism, for example.) Apparently he's also a UFO maven, as well.
In any case, enjoy as Sergey takes the Birdman apart.
While you're at it, enjoy…