June 21, 2012
Last Sunday I was on a panel at the American Society for Microbiology meetings. I'll post a slidecast of the talk in a few days, and get into the topic of the panel in more detail then.
Since I was presenting, I got a free pass to the rest of the conference, which was fascinating. I'm a…
June 7, 2012
In case you've been wondering, "Where've you been for the last month, Josh?," the photo above gives a pretty good hint.
Miles Nikola was born on May 4th, a healthy and beautiful 8 pounds 12 ounces. For the last month, he and his mama and I have been at home getting used to each other. It's truly…
April 29, 2012
I didn't write about the attacks in Oslo last year because…what is there to say. The bombing and shootings are tragic, the Norwegian people have shown an admirable resilience in the face of terrorism, and wingnuts who initially tried to pin the attack on Muslims have egg on their faces.
I was…
April 28, 2012
Not to dredge up old fights, but a topic we discussed on the blog back in 2009 has cropped up in a couple of recent essays. The issue is whether there is a form of truth that literature can convey, perhaps even a level of literary truth which cannot be conveyed through other means. The topic came…
April 25, 2012
A couple weeks ago, the second creationist bill of the "academic freedom" generation became law. You'd think Casey Luskin, who seems to be the ringleader of the clowns pushing these bills, would be thrilled. But all he can seem to do is find reasons to be upset.
First he was angry that…
April 22, 2012
[Attention Conservation Notice: About 3,500 words on the factual, scientific, and philosophical problems of a paper which was surely not intended to be taken seriously as science or philosophy. Nick Matzke comes at it from a different angle at The Panda's Thumb, and more briefly.]
Evolutionary…
April 12, 2012
Todd Wood is a professor at Bryan College, in Dayton, TN. Dayton, you'll recall, was the home of the Scopes trial, and Bryan College was named after Scopes's prosecutor, William Jennings Bryan, and was founded in part to carry on Bryan's anti-evolution crusade. Wood himself is a prominent young…
April 12, 2012
On Tuesday, Governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee allowed HB 368 to become law; it is the second of this new generation of creationist laws, along with a similar bill in Louisiana. Haslam refused to sign the bill, stating that it brought confusion, not clarity. He also noted that the bill had…
March 21, 2012
The Florida Atlantic University newspaper reports:
Associate Professor Stephen M. Kajiura was reviewing with his evolution class in GS 120 for a midterm when FAU student Jonatha Carr interrupted him: âHow does evolution kill black people?â she asked. Kajiura attempted to explain that evolution…
March 21, 2012
If you wonder why I haven't been blogging lately, it's because I've been trying to keep science safe in the Volunteer State; for instance, here's a great piece Huffington Post science editor Cara Santa Maria put together, including an interview with yours truly.
If you watch the NCSE front page (…
March 7, 2012
The Denver Post reports on a talk by hyperconservative Justice Antonin Scalia at a religious conference:
The 75-year-old Scalia said that today one can believe in a creator and the teachings of Jesus without being the brunt of too much ridicule, but that to hold traditional Christian beliefs that…
March 2, 2012
For reasons not worth getting into, I was struck by the urge to find the history of the most common example of a loaded question: "Have you stopped beating your wife?"
It's a question that demands a yes or no answer, but either response requires the respondent to affirm a) having a wife and b)…
March 1, 2012
From The Confusion, by Neal Stephenson, Book Three of The Baroque Cycle. The Duchess of Oyonnax, in the court of Louis XIV, explains why good people do bad things:
In this world there are few who would kill for money. To believe that the Court of France is crowded with such rare specimens is folly…
March 1, 2012
This is a press release they just sent out about the effort to undo the absurd idea that "corporations are people, my friend":
TOPEKA â Senate Democratic Leader Anthony Hensley, of Topeka, House Democratic Leader Paul Davis, of Lawrence, and Ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee Tom…
February 29, 2012
David Klinghoffer is surprised that his Disco. 'tute colleagues managed to get an article published at the Huffington Post. Klinghoffer's colleague must've known this was coming, and HuffPo isn't notorious for refusing essays, so I can't fathom why it was any sort of surprise. Nor is "pleasant"…
February 21, 2012
Shorter David Klinghoffer: National Center for Science Education, Darwin/Climate Enforcers, Humiliated by Forged Document Scandal:
Ethical questions about someone with no formal ties to NCSE clearly demonstrates the scientific, pedagogical, and moral failings of NCSE.
So Peter Gleick outed himself…
February 19, 2012
A secret fundraising document from a shadowy anti-science institute was accidentally made public. The document candidly lays out the anti-science agenda of group, including efforts to undermine science education in public schools, but also plans to broadly redefine society.
The year was 1998, and…
February 16, 2012
As the SPLC and ThinkProgress report:
Yesterday, police arrested an unidentified man at the Kansas Capitol after discovering several homemade bombs in his truck close to the Kansas Capitol. The truck had stickers on its back window saying, âWelcome to America. Now speak Englishââ and âDoes my…
February 14, 2012
Disco. 'tute ex-president Bruce Chapman doesn't know his history. He asserts:
The Spanish Inquisition was about testing the sincerity of people's Christianity.
This is true in the sense that the Crusades were about the joys of travel and cultural exchange.
I mean, how did torturing Jews until they…
February 13, 2012
Shorter Jerry Coyne: Chris Mooney, evolution, and politics:
We haven't got free will, except when it comes to politics.
Like Coyne, I've yet to read Chris Mooney's book, and like Coyne, I'm not up on the latest research on the determinants of political and ideological orientation. Unlike Coyne, I'…
February 12, 2012
Long ago (1656), Blaise Pascal wrote an apologetic note that editors have been quoting at prolix writers ever since:
The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter.
Brevity is a key to effective writing, if nothing else because it's hard to hold a reader's…
February 10, 2012
Last week's all-consuming outrage was spurred by a new rule issued by the Obama administration requiring that all employers' health insurance plans cover birth control without a copay. Religious employers â especially Catholic groups â had asked for an exemption, and thought there was a wink-and-…
February 1, 2012
Shorter David Klinghoffer, Minister of Propaganda for the Disco. 'tute: "Then They Came for Me -- and There Was No One Left to Speak for Me.":
I'm Jewish so it's OK for me to claim NCSE's decision to oppose pseudoscience in earth science classrooms as well as biology classes is just like Nazis…
January 16, 2012
The National Center for Science Education, where I work, has focused on fighting political attacks on evolution education for all of its 30 year history. When the group was founded in the early '80s, they didn't choose a name narrowly focused on evolution, hoping that they'd make quick work of…
January 10, 2012
It's odd, people are wrong on the internet, but somehow, I can't work myself up over it. Maybe it's because they're just talking in circles and making things up. Or perhaps my very identity has changed.
January 9, 2012
Ophelia Benson has an odd idea about how identity is constructed:
beliefs arenât actually a matter of identity and shouldnât be treated as if they were.
This claim seems so obviously false that I can't really imagine how she could have written it.
We can see how this plays out in religion: there…
January 9, 2012
ThinkProgress reports, Kansas House Speaker Won't Apologize For Praying For Obama's Death:
Kansas House Speaker Mike O'Neal (R) has apologized for forwarding emails from his personal account referring to First Lady Michelle Obama as "Mrs. YoMama," but he has not apologized for another email using a…
December 19, 2011
If he does, he might remember that he already wrote this blog post. That was less than a year ago. I responded then, so have little to add.
One thing is worth noting. Coyne's complaint is that the government is funding "accommodationism" because one page on the award-winning and widely loved…
December 13, 2011
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Richard Dawkins has a new book out â for kids no less â and Casey Luskin is on the case. Luskin, you'll recall is the Disco. 'tute's chief pettifogger (in the classical sense), and his tendency to work himself into uncanny heights of…
December 12, 2011
Shorter Jerry Coyne: Whence moderate Islam?:
You'd think MEMRI's archives would be a great place to find the “moderate” form of Islam in the Middle East, but all I get from the right-wing propaganda shop dedicated to putting "emphasis on the continuing relevance of Zionism to the Jewish people and…
