jlynch | January 11, 2009
From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted that it no longer holds anything anymore. To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride which circles down to the tiniest hub is like a dance of energy around a point in which a great will stands stunned and numb.
Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise without a sound . . . then a shape enters, slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders, reaches the heart, and dies.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)
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jlynch | January 11, 2009Glenn Branch brought my attention to a book by John Henry Egan. Since it is titled 6 Million and Counting: Darwinism, Atheism and Genocide, I think you can see where it is going. The following appears to encapsulate the gist of this fine work of historical investigation:
Charles Darwin invented the term "sub-human" a phrase used by the Nazis to demonize and murder Jews, gypsies, and many others ...
Darwinism is an Atheistic philosophy, anathema to both Jews and Christians. Leading Darwinists advocate the violent destruction of all religions. Charles Darwin was himself an atheist and advocate…
jlynch | January 11, 2009
I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes in a number of natural history museums. While a grad student, I had an office in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, spent a good deal of time every year in the collections of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and a month at the Natural History Museum in London. As anyone who has spent time behind the scenes will tell you, not only are all the really cool specimens kept away from public view, but museums are populated with some very strange people! Richard Fortey's latest book, Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural…
jlynch | January 11, 2009Chris Elliot (Philosophy, Hofstra) has made me aware that Project Gutenberg has doubled its coverage of works by Thomas Henry Huxley. Some light reading on this weekend for those not watching the NFL. The additions are:
Conditions of Existence as Affecting the Perpetuation of Living Beings
Coral and Coral Reefs
Criticism on "The origin of species"
Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature
Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life
Method By Which the Causes of the Present and Past Conditions of Organic Nature Are to Be Discovered -- the Origination of Living Beings
On Some Fossil…
jlynch | January 10, 2009It looks like the lights are back on here after the upgrade though comments are not yet switched back. I expect they will be soon.
jlynch | January 9, 2009Our masters over at Mission Control will be upgrading our blogging platform (finally!) starting 1:00PM today. The site will still be available for you to read although no new comments or posts will be allowed. We expect to be back live sometime Saturday evening. Enjoy the silence.
jlynch | January 8, 2009PZ is reporting that Mississippi is considering one of those inane textbook disclaimer bills (HB 25), the sort of thing that occurred in Alabama and Georgia.
AN ACT TO REQUIRE THE STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION TO INCLUDE CERTAIN LANGUAGE EXPLAINING THAT EVOLUTION IS A THEORY IN THE INSIDE FRONT COVER OF CERTAIN PUBLIC SCHOOL TEXTBOOKS; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.
The disclaimer would read:
The word 'theory' has many meanings, including: systematically organized knowledge; abstract reasoning; a speculative idea or plan; or a systematic statement of principles. Scientific theories are based on both…
jlynch | January 8, 2009John hasn't read Origin. Not *this* John. And certainly not this one. It's this one - and what he proposes to do is blog while he reads the first edition of that work. I have to say I approve of the use of the first edition - subsequent editions are a little murkier and lack the freshness of expression that makes the first such a wonderful read.
John expresses some slight shame at having not read Origin before. I don't think that's really a problem (or surprising). Biology students rarely read Origin and similarly physics students rarely crack open Principia; scientific education rarely…
jlynch | January 7, 2009Jim Lippard is organizing SkeptiCamp Phoenix 2009. A SkeptiCamp is "a conference whose content is provided by attendees. Where BarCamp is focused on technology, SkeptiCamp instead focuses on topics of interest to skeptics, including science, critical thinking and skeptical inquiry." The event is planned for February 21st and I've already agreed to talk on "Academic Freedom" and the Intelligent Design movement. If you are an Arizona skeptic, or even from further afield, wander on over to the Camp Wiki and sign-up either to attend or present.
There's a FaceBook group as well, by the way.
jlynch | January 7, 2009Just a quick update on the book I mentioned last night. It appears that it will be published by Dembski's vanity press (for which Flannery is in charge of publicity and marketing). The work is not an edited series of papers, but a re-issue of Wallace's World of Life (available for free here) with an introduction by Flannery and foreword by Dembski.
So nothing interesting here, I'm afraid, beyond perhaps some breathless claims that "OMG! Wallace would have been one of us!!!!" or "Teach the controversy over Wallaceism!!!!" This one will die a natural death. Move on.
From Charles Smith's…
jlynch | January 6, 2009Dembski just announced a forthcoming book for which he is apparently writing a foreword: Michael A. Flannery (ed.) Alfred Russel Wallace's Theory of Intelligent Evolution: How Wallace's World of Life Challenged Darwinism. Flannery (MA, MLS) is associate director for historical collections at Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham and claims to have "published extensively on the history of medicine, pharmacy, and bioethics" [pdf] and is a recipient of the Edward Kremers Award for outstanding scholarship in pharmaceutical (rather than biological or…
jlynch | January 6, 2009John Wilkins has a nice post up regarding the deification and demonization of Darwin. With regards the latter, he particularly discusses something I have intended to blog since I heard about it through a Wall Street Journal article - Roy Davies' book, The Darwin Conspiracy, which repeats the historically inaccurate (and unfortunately perennial) claim that Darwin plagiarized Wallace. Davies is a retired TV producer. Wilkins is an historical philosopher. Jim Lennox - who has replied to Davies' claim - is a Professor of History and Philosophy of Science. I'm not saying that Davies has to be…
jlynch | January 6, 2009NCSE is reporting that the first anti-evolution bill of 2009 will be from Oklahoma.
Senate Bill 320 (document), prefiled in the Oklahoma Senate and scheduled for a first reading on February 2, 2009, is apparently the first antievolution bill of 2009. Entitled the "Scientific Education and Academic Freedom Act," SB 320 would, if enacted, require state and local educational authorities to "assist teachers to find more effective ways to present the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies" and permit teachers to "help students understand, analyze, critique, and review in an…
jlynch | January 5, 2009
Ed reports on a putative new species of iguana that has been found on the Galapagos archipelago. Darwin saw two species (one marine and one land). We now have two additional land species, the Barrington land iguana Conolophus pallidus and this new one which is found only Volcan Wolf, the northernmost volcano of Isabela Island.
Paper is in press with PNAS (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0806339106).
jlynch | January 5, 2009From here:
Casey also chides Miller for not doing any knock-out experiments on blood clotting systems. This is heavily ironic as no ID proponent, not even Behe, has done any experiments on the blood clotting system. As I point out in my post Behe vs Lampreys, it's the evolutionary biologists that have been doing all the heavy lifting in regard to understanding the clotting system. In fact I issued a challenge to the ID proponents, the Amphioxus genome had just been published at http://genome.jgi-psf.org/Brafl1/Brafl1.home.html. Amphioxus is a primitive chordate, more primitive than lampreys,…
jlynch | January 4, 2009Over at PT, Nick piles on Luskin:
One aside: the fact that Behe wrote a chunk of Pandas is important in several ways apart from pure history. First, this makes Pandas, rather than Darwin's Black Box (or really, a few of his web articles), the first published expression of Behe's IC argument. Second, it means that Behe, like all of the other major players in the ID movement, pretty clearly endorsed the ID movement's get-into-the-public-schools-first, do-the-scientific-research-later philosophy and practice. Third, it nukes Luskin's indignancy about Miller failing to distinguish the blood-…
jlynch | January 4, 2009John Wilkins has reminded me of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.
Wander over to John's place to read the rest of the poem which strangely works well with my first post today.
jlynch | January 4, 2009Ken Miller has offered the final portion of his discussion of Luskin, Behe and clotting. He ends with the following:
The only relevant question at this point is why the Discovery Institute keeps highlighting its own failings in this way. Why are Casey and his employers now -- three years after the Dover trial -- trying to rehabilitate the tattered credibility of both Michael Behe and Pandas? What mischief are they planning now? The only conclusion I can draw is that they must be maneuvering for the next round of state board hearings or legislative sessions -- and I'm concerned. These folks…