jrosenhouse | September 14, 2006Have to blog and run today. I get to spend three hours this afternoon trying to persuade skeptical calculus students that “related rate” problems aren't so bad. A forlorn quest, I know. Anyway, how about I just point you towards some interesting reading:
Over at CSICOP's site, Penny Higgins offers this excellent article on the topic of transitional forms generally, and Tiktaalik in particular. Worth it for the diagrams alone!
Joshua Roebke, writing for Seed, gives us a concise summary of Grigory Perelman's refusal of the Fields Medal for proving the Poincare conjecture.
The New York…
jrosenhouse | September 13, 2006One of the nice things about being a big shot science blogger is that publishers frequently send you free books to review. In fact, lately they've been arriving a lot faster than I can read them.
One book that turned up recently in my mailbox was Coming to Life: How Genes Drive Development, by Nobel Laureate Christianne Nusslein-Volhard. My friends, this is one fantastic book.
The book's main purpose is to explain what is currently known about the processes by which a fertilized egg develops, under the direction of the genes, into an organism. Nusslein-Volhard's writing is reminiscent of…
jrosenhouse | September 12, 2006It all started when Pat Hayes, of Red State Rabble, posted this blog entry describing a recent talk given by Ken Miller at the University of Kansas. Miller, you will recall, is the author of Finding Darwin's God. The first half of this book is brilliant in explaining some of the evidence for evolution, and explaining why the major arguments made by creationists and ID folks are wrong. Sadly, in the second half of the book Miller makes an argument defending the compatibility of Christian faith and science. Personally, I found his argument so weak and easily refuted that I found myself…
jrosenhouse | September 11, 2006From the Connelsville Daily Courier, a Pennsylvania newspaper, comes this blunt assessment of the merits of evolution. The essay is by guest columnist Rosemary Fike:
The United States of America no longer can be called a Christian nation. In fact, we could be called a nation of fools. We are quietly allowing our schoolchildren to be taught Charles Darwin's theory of evolution although it is not supported by the evidence.
To the contrary, it has been proven that evolution is a scientific impossibility. It appears as if a fanatical cult has overtaken the scientific community, bringing…
jrosenhouse | September 8, 2006Another point made in the Newsweek article mentioned in the previous post is that Harris et al are as hard on religious moderates as they are on the fundamentalists:
It is not just extremists who earn the wrath of Dawkins and Harris. Their books are attacks on religious “moderates” as well--indeed, the very idea of moderation.
The idea is that on the one hand we have the dogmatic fundamentalists, the ones who reject science wholesale and place their hands over their ears when they sense a bit of contrary data coming their way. On the other are more moderate people. They're the ones who…
jrosenhouse | September 8, 2006Via Afarensis, I came across this Newsweek article about atheism. It focuses mainly on Sam Harris, RIchard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. Overall I think it's a pretty good article. Here are a few highlights:
This was not a message most Americans wanted to hear, before or after 9/11. Atheists “are seen as a threat to the American way of life by a large portion of the American public,” according to a study by Penny Edgell, a sociologist at the University of Minnesota. In a recent NEWSWEEK Poll, Americans said they believed in God by a margin of 92 to 6--only 2 percent answered “don't know”--…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2006It seems the big evolution confab in Rome has ended. The verdict? No change:
A participant at the Pope's closed door symposium on creation and evolution, Jesuit Fr Joseph Fessio, has denied speculation about a change in the Church's teaching on evolution, saying nothing presented at the meeting broke new ground and that American debates on Intelligent Design did not feature in discussions.
Catholic News Service reports that the annual gathering of former doctoral students of Pope Benedict, which was hosted in part by the Pontiff at his summer villa in Castel Gandolfo, outside Rome,…
jrosenhouse | September 7, 2006Jerry Coyne has a review of the new book The Evolving World: Evolution in Everyday Life, by David Mindell, in the current issue of Nature. The ID folks are crowing over this remark:
To some extent these excesses are not Mindell's fault, for, if truth be told, evolution hasn't yielded many practical or commercial benefits. Yes, bacteria evolve drug resistance, and yes, we must take countermeasures, but beyond that there is not much to say. Evolution cannot help us predict what new vaccines to manufacture because microbes evolve unpredictably. But hasn't evolution helped guide animal and…
jrosenhouse | September 6, 2006The August 28 issue of The New Yorker features this magisterial article about the Poincare conjecture. The focus of the article is on the priority dispute between Grigory Perelman on the one hand, and a team of Chinese mathematicians led by Harvard's Shing-Tung Yau on the other. According to the article, Yau believes that the proof posted to the internet by Perelman was deficient in several key respects, and that the first complete proof should be credited to two of his students. Thus far, most of the mathematical community seems to disagree:
This, essentially, is what Yau's friends are…
jrosenhouse | September 6, 2006Mathematician John Allen Paulos offers these worthy thoughts on the subject of creationist arguments based on probability theory:
But there's another contributing factor to this opposition to evolution that I'd like to discuss here. It is the concerted attempt by creationists to dress up in the garb of mathematics fundamentalist claims about human origins and to focus criticism on what they take to be the minuscule probability of evolutionary development. (Even the conservative television pundit and ace biologist Ann Coulter has lent her perspicacity to this mathematical endeavor in her…
jrosenhouse | September 5, 2006In this entry from last week I mentioned Joan Roughgarden's recent book Evolution and Christian Faith, and praised her firm dismissal of ID. Sadly, there are many other parts of her brief book where I believe she has missed the boat.
One such part concerns her criticism of Richard Dawkins' idea of the selfish gene. It comes near the end of the book, where she presumes to criticize extremism on both sides of the evolution debate. She writes:
I suggest we first identify positions that needlessly provoke polarization and learn to avoid them. Then, each of us, one by one, and in groups and…
jrosenhouse | September 4, 2006The New York Times reports on the big evolution meeting in Rome:
They meet every year, the eminent German professor and his old doctoral students, for a weekend of high-minded talk on a chosen topic. For years it was nothing more than that.
But now the professor, once called Joseph Ratzinger, has become Pope Benedict XVI. And this year, for three days beginning Friday, the topic on the table is evolution, an issue perched on the ever more contentious front between science and belief.
And so the questions rise as the meeting unfolds at a papal palace just outside Rome. Is this merely…
jrosenhouse | September 4, 2006I was watching Steve Irwin before it was cool.
I discovered him by accident, channel surfing. Commercial, commercial, Law & Order, infomercial, holy crap is that guy picking up snakes by the tail?! As I recall, it was a show called, “The Ten Deadliest Snakes in Australia.” He was not a big star at this time, and did not yet have his regular television series. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.
After that I made a point of watching him regularly. As his fame grew his mannerisms became exaggerated to the point of being annoying, and his show was clearly being aimed at a…
jrosenhouse | August 31, 2006Have a look at this interesting article, by Samantha Shapiro at Slate, about the decline of conservative Judaism. She writes:
Since 1886, the Jewish Theological Seminary has sought to negotiate a middle ground between Orthodox Judaism, which (to vastly oversimplify) teaches that the Torah and Rabbinic law were authored by God, and Reform Judaism, which sees obedience of Jewish law, or Halakha, as a choice, not a divine mandate. Conservative Judaism, which began as a congregational movement in 1913, attempts to bridge the gap--to affirm the divinity of ancient Jewish law but also to allow…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2006Slate offers up this depressing article, by Amy Sullivan about how religious people view the Democratic Party:
Which is why it is startling that in the two years since this Democratic revival began, the party's faith-friendly image has dimmed rather than improved. The Pew Research Center's annual poll on religion and politics, released last week, shows that while 85 percent of voters say religion is important to them, only 26 percent of Americans think the Democratic Party is "friendly" to religion. That's down from 40 percent in the summer of 2004 and 42 percent the year before that--in…
jrosenhouse | August 29, 2006Chris Mooney's excellent book The Republican War on Science is now available in paperback. So if you didn't buy it in hardcover, shame on you! But now you have a chanc eto redeem yourself.
Kidding aside, Mooney does a first-rate job of confirming what anyone who has been paying attention has long suspected: That the power brokers in the Republican Party are almost uniformly hostile to science and its findings. Buy it and read it immediately!
jrosenhouse | August 27, 2006David Heddle provides a typical example of the mental gymnastics required to believe that God is all -knowing and all-powerful. He writes:
Many of you know I live in a small town in New Hampshire. In a month or so, the scenery will knock your socks off. Believers will marvel at God's creation, while unbelievers will be left without excuse.
Presumably that means without excuse for rejecting the idea of a loving God.
But then the post takes a grim turn:
I was just be-bopping down the road in my orange Honda Element, listening to demonic classic rock, when I heard a strange ka-thunk.…
jrosenhouse | August 26, 2006How bad have things gotten for the ID folks? They're pathetically excited about the publication of Jonathan Wells' new book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Drwainism and Intelligent Design.
It used to be that the ID folks were keen to persuade us that they were going to revolutionize science. They published books like Darwin's Black Box and No Free Lunch, which at least put forward some actual scientific ideas.
But then the scientific community laughed en masse at those ideas, and the ID folks found themselves with nothing left to say. So now they have to take satisfaction when sleazy…
jrosenhouse | August 26, 2006It's been a good week for entertainment. I saw Snakes on a Plane, of course. Very enjoyable, though inevitably a bit disappointing given the hype. Needed more snakes. And Prison Break returned this week. I had to tape the premiere and only just got around to watching it. Looks like another fine season ahead.
Classes start Monday. Ominous music, please.
jrosenhouse | August 25, 2006I am currently holding in my hands a little book called Evolution and Christian Faith, by Stanford University biologist Joan Roughgarden. I don't agree with Roughgarden's religious views, but she sure does a good job of nailing ID:
Furthermore, neo-Darwinism can account for complex structures. When you get together eye experts, lung experts, feather experts, blood clotting experts, and so on, it always turns out that they can suggest plausible neo-Darwinian sceanrios for how these structures originated. (p. 89).
And:
So, when the intelligent design folks announce with great fanfare that…