jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Commenter Sastra, replying to my previous post on this subject, offers what I thnk is a perfect characterization of much of the response to Dawkins' book:
From what I can tell, most of the sophisticated critics of Dawkins feel that he failed to address what I like to call the Argument from Generalized Vagueness. God is something so great, so other, so important and significant and unlike anything in our experience, that the only way we can bring it down to our level and understand it is by referring to it in veiled metaphors. It's all very vague, and encompasses all sorts of general things…
jrosenhouse | December 27, 2006Yesterday I linked to P.Z. Myers discussion of a common anti-Dawkins meme. Specifically, that Dawkins' arguments in The God Delusion are hopelessly superficial, and that his failure to ponder seriously various works of academic theology render his book incomplete at best, and vapid at worst.
Richard Dawkins himself has weighed in on Myers' comments:
Congratulations to P Z Myers on this brilliant piece of satire. It applies not just to Allen Orr's review in NYRB, but to all those many reviews of TGD that complain of my lack of reading in theology. My own stock reply (“How many learned books…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006Speaking of the Monty Hall problem, I recently came across this terrific essay (PDF format), by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Toronto. Rosenthal discusses several variants of the Monty Hall problem, and shows how a clever application of Bayes' Theorem helps to distinguish between them. Here are the variants he considers:
Monty Hall Problem: A car is equally likely to be behind any one of three doors. You select one of the three doors (say, Door #1). The host then reveals one nonselected door (say, Door #3) which does not contain the car…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006Actually, many of the questions Marilyn vos Savant got asked in her column are positively ingenious. They also provide a lot of food for thought. Here are a few that caught my eye. As always, feel free to hash them out in the comments:
I need glasses to see things at a distance. When I look in the mirror, I can see my face clearly. When I look at the things reflected in the room behind me, they appear fuzzy, yet the distance is an illusion, and all objects reflected are an equal distance from my eyes. Can you tell me why this is so?
If you had a completely enclosed truck with birds…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006Many of you are familiar with the old Monty Hall problem. You might also be aware that it rose to prominence as a result of a column in Parade magazine by Marilyn vos Savant. After Savant's initial discussion of the problem, she received a flood of angry letters, some from actual mathematicians, saying that she was wrong and that her answer was foolish. Actually, Savant got it right, and the problem is now a staple of courses in elementary probability theory.
I recently got it into my head to track down the actual correspondence she received on the issue. Courtesy of the local public…
jrosenhouse | December 26, 2006In my post about H. Allen Orr's review of Dawkins' The God Delusion, I commented that Orr begins with a standard anti-Dawkins argument: that he doesn't give adequate consideration to all of the internecine philosophical and theological disputes that surround religious questions. P. Z. Myers has the perfect reply to this argument:
I have considered the impudent accusations of Mr Dawkins with exasperation at his lack of serious scholarship. He has apparently not read the detailed discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots, nor does he…
jrosenhouse | December 22, 2006Evolutionary biologist H. Allen Orr has this lengthy essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Officially it's a review of Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion, Joan Roughgarden's Evolution and Christian Faith: Reflections of an Evolutionary Biologist, and Lewis Wolpert's Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast: The Evolutionary Origin of Belief. Actually, though, Orr says almost nothing about those latter two books.
Orr begins by describing his admiration for much of Dawkins' previous work. (He describes The Selfish Gene as the best work of popular science ever written).…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006Winter break is the time to complete all of those annoying chores you've been putting off during the term. For example, yesterday my car passed its inspection. Woo hoo!
And today, Isaac and Emily passed their inspection. By which I mean the vet found that they're in good health (though Isaac, like his owner, really needs to lose some weight.)
Vet day is always very exciting. First comes the ritual of wrestling the cats into the carrier. I have a large carrier, really intended for small dogs, that comfortably fits both of them. I figure they take some comort from knowing they are not…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006John Lynch has an excellent summary of what a rotten year it's been for ID:
January
Dembski:
Just as a tree that has been “rimmed” (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the movement initiated by Phillip Johnson. Expect Darwinism's death throes, like Judge Jones's decision, to continue for some time. But don't mistake death throes for true vitality. Ironically, Judge Jones's decision is likely to prove a blessing for the intelligent design movement, spurring its…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006In other news, the Cobb County sticker kerfuffle has now been settled.
You might recall that this was the case where a small Georgia school district decided to paste warning labels inside their high school biology textbooks. The labels asserted the following:
This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered.
Some parents in the district sued, claiming a First Amendment violation. The Judge agreed, and found that the…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006In the course of his lengthy discussion of the report on the Sternberg affair, mentioned in the previous post, Ed Brayton links to this discussion of the ID paper that started all the controversy in the first place. The discussion is by Ronald Jenner, of the Section on Evolution and Ecology at the University of Califronia at Davis. Jenner has many enlightening things to say about the merits, or lack thereof, of the paper in question. But there is one place where he gets it sadly wrong. First, we have this:
Let's take a deep breath, sit back in our chair, and calmly take the measure of…
jrosenhouse | December 19, 2006Ed Brayton has the must-read post of the day.
Remember Richard Sternberg? He's the former editor of the journal Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. A while back he published a pro-ID paper in the journal. Sternberg was a research associate at the Smithsonain Institution at the time. It quickly became clear both that the paper itself was total garbage, and that the normal editing procedures of the journal had not been followed in its publication.
The result was a big black eye for the Smithsonian and for the journal. But things got worse when Sternberg began alledging…
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2006A while back we Science Bloggers were asked to provide personal photographs to Seed CentCom. This is what they did with them. I'm the strikingly handsome fellow directly behind Shelley's owl. Go have a look!
jrosenhouse | December 18, 2006The New York Times has has this remarkable article about the high school teacher in New Jersey who was using his class as a mission field:
Before David Paszkiewicz got to teach his accelerated 11th-grade history class about the United States Constitution this fall, he was accused of violating it.
Shortly after school began in September, the teacher told his sixth-period students at Kearny High School that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah's ark, and that only Christians had a place in heaven, according to audio recordings made by a student whose…
jrosenhouse | December 15, 2006Writing for The Boston Globe, Jeff Jacoby offers a typically muddled argument against atheism. The column's title: “Atheism's Bleak Alternative”. Most of the column describes various atrocities perpetrated by secularists against religious people, particularly in England. But it's the last three paragraphs that really merit a response:
What is at stake in all this isn't just angels on Christmas cards. What society loses when it discards Judeo-Christian faith and belief in God is something far more difficult to replace: the value system most likely to promote ethical behavior and sustain a…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006From the BBC:
The blogging phenomenon is set to peak in 2007, according to technology predictions by analysts Gartner.
The analysts said that during the middle of next year the number of blogs will level out at about 100 million.
The firm has said that 200 million people have already stopped writing their blogs.
Gartner has made 10 predictions, including stating that Vista will be the last major release of Windows and PCs will halve in cost by 2010.
Gartner analyst Daryl Plummer said the reason for the levelling off in blogging was due to the fact that most people who would ever start a web…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006Everyone knows the first rule of holes: When you're in a hole, stop digging.
Apparently no one told Discovery Institute lackey Casey Luskin. He's still trying to pretend that their inane charges against the Judge in the Kitzmiller decision have any merit. Recall that their latest brainstorm is that Judge Jones, in following standard procedure by using verbatim portions of the plaintiff's proposed findings of fact in his opinion, somehow rendered himself a pawn of the ACLU.
Luskin persists in trying to make an issue out of this. Over at The Panda's Thumb, Tim Sandefur offers a reply.
So…
jrosenhouse | December 14, 2006There was a remarkable exchange on the MSNBC show Hardball yesterday, between host Chris Matthews, and commentators Roger Simon and Chris Cillizza:
MATTHEWS: Yes, well, isn't it funny, Roger--and I love the way you cover politics. You get the richness of it. You have fish fry dinners with Jesse Jackson in the middle of the night and write about it. Here we are with a president--who most people who are honest about it would say came to the office pretty much unprepared to deal with the third world.
He listened to a bunch of jughead neoconservatives who talked him into a war that doesn't…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2006Time for another installment of, “How bad have things gotten for the ID folks?”
It is now almost a year since the big ruling in the Dover case. As I'm sure you recall, that's the one where the ID folks put their most formidable legal and scientific talent in front of a Court, and the Court promptly laughed in their faces. Still smarting from this, they have decided that attacking Judge Jones is the way to go. But since there is no legitimate point on which Judge Jones can be criticized, they have decided to go to the old standbys of trumped up charges followed by phony outrage.
Here's the…
jrosenhouse | December 13, 2006New Scientist has this article about the latest attempt by ID proponents to pretend they care about science:
This is my second attempt to engage in person with scientists at Biologic. At the institute's other facility in nearby Fremont, researchers work at benches lined with fume hoods, incubators and microscopes - a typical scene in this up-and-coming biotech hub. Most of them there proved just as reluctant to speak with a New Scientist reporter.
The reticence cloaks an unorthodox agenda. “We are the first ones doing what we might call lab science in intelligent design,” says George Weber,…