Culture Wars
omnibrain | July 4, 2007There is a great article today on Slate about why the pretty ridiculous idea that vaccinations containing trace amounts of mercury cause autism will never go away. Here's the first little part of the article:
At the recent 12-day hearing into theories that vaccines cause autism, the link between the disorder and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine came across as shaky at best. As for the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which was used in other vaccines, witnesses showed that in all known cases of actual mercury poisoning (none of which caused autism), the dose was hundreds or…
omnibrain | June 29, 2007Are you a politician or currently considering a run for office?
Do you agree with Richard Nixon that drugs are "public enemy number one in the United States"?
Are you worried that smoking marijuana makes you insane, turns you into a violent criminal or causes death?
Do you worry daily about why prohibition failed?
Do you think the War on Drugs is a great idea?
Are you stressed out about these things and need an easy way out? Incarcerex may be for you!
Take a look at this great spoof from drugpolicy.org!
Does your politician suffer from Chronic Re-Election Paranoia (CREEP)? Do you think our…
tfk | June 27, 2007Roy Torcaso, 96, fought for the right to serve in public office without declaring his religious beliefs:
Mr. Torcaso, who said he was an atheist, was a bookkeeper by profession. He worked for a Bethesda construction company when his legal challenge started in 1959. He had been urged by his boss to become a notary public.
At the Montgomery County Circuit Court, he refused to swear to a state oath given to notaries public that made them profess the existence of God.
"The point at issue," he said at the time, "is not whether I believe in a Supreme Being, but whether the state has a right to…
tfk | June 27, 2007Do you know, I think that Dr. Swift was silly to laugh about Laputa. I believe it is a mistake to make a mock of people, just because they think. There are ninety thousand people in this world who do not think, for every one who does, and these people hate the thinkers like poison. Even if some thinkers are fanciful, it is wrong to make fun of them for it. Better to think about cucumbers even, than not to think at all.
Discuss. Laputa was a flying sky-island of natural philosophers where no one's clothes fit because they preferred astronomical instruments to mundane tape measures. It is…
tfk | June 26, 2007Pete Seeger tells us "Moderation in all things, even moderation." A useful motto in many situations. For instance, my friend Mike the Mad Biologist rightly criticizes hackish pundits, and hackish politicians, for Compulsive Centrist Disorder, the belief that the true answer to any question must lie halfway between the positions being advocated, regardless of what those positions are, and where that midpoint happens to lie.
We might call this an extremist form of moderation.
Moderation is a sticky issue in the culture wars these days. Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins expend a good deal of…
tfk | June 26, 2007Denyse "Buy my book" O'Leary thinks that evolutionary biologists are just like religious folk. Among the deep parallels she finds: Scientists and the religious both give booklets to children, celebrate birthdays of important figures, claim that certain things are facts, and seek official recognition. Finally:
- sacred bones. Christian churches have the bones of the saints; Buddhist stupas the toe-nail-clippings of Buddha; evolution is built on sacred bones, that the evolutionists read meanings into in the way that the pagan priests of Caesar's time read meaning into scattered bones.
What is…
tfk | June 17, 2007It's fairly common to hear the claim that religious belief in America has been very stable over the years. That's true to some extent, but a look at Gallup's long-term trend data suggests that the long-term stability may be changing, and that change corresponds nicely with the Bush era or perhaps the "war on terror."
The plot below shows data from a question Gallup has asked regularly for decades: "How important would you say religion is in your own life: very important, fairly important, or not very important?"
The place of religion was indeed very stable for decades, at least at the…
tfk | June 14, 2007A paper by Notre Dame's David Campbell (PDF link) finds that evangelicals are more likely to vote for a Republican when they live in a community with more people who do not identify with any religion. Building on a tradition of research in race relations which tests whether integrated communities foster greater social acceptance or stronger separation between groups. Studies in Southern communities in the 1960s had found that white voters were more likely to vote for racially conservative candidates as the fraction of African Americans in the community increased. Whether that trend…
tfk | June 12, 2007Last March, the Washington Post's Shankar Vedantam reported on research which showed that, in one interviewee's words, "We are really bad about putting ourselves in other people's places and looking at the world the way they look at it." We tend to quickly assign base motives to our opponents and lofty ones to ourselves and our allies. Vedantam concluded:
It is important to note that the[se] experiment[s] do[] not establish which ... is true. It is possible ... that everything you believe about [your opponents'] motives is true and everything that your opponents believe is false. But a…
tfk | June 11, 2007PZ Myers looks at the poll we've been discussing lately, sees that all 72% of evolution-deniers do so for religious reasons, and wonders:
So tell me, everyone: why are scientists supposed to respect religion, this corrupter of minds, this promulgator of lies, this damnable institution dedicated to delusion, in our culture?
Maybe we need to start picketing fundamentalist churches. Maybe it's about time that we recognize religious miseducation as child abuse.
Given that a decent chunk of Americans clearly regard evolution as immoral, perhaps even as child abuse, I don't think that's a road…
tfk | June 11, 2007A poll released last week found that a substantial chunk of Americans think that humans were created 10,000 years ago, and evolved over millions of years. Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll explains that and other insights by pulling together their data on public views of evolution.
The most interesting data to me was a crosstabulation of the views on evolution and creationism.
View of Evolution and View of CreationismNumbers Represent % of Total Sample
View of Creationism
Definitely true
Probably true
Probably false
Definitely false
%
%
%
%
View of Evolution…
tfk | June 8, 2007A majority of Americans would not change their views of a candidate who did not believe in evolution, 28% would be less likely to vote for an anti-evolutionist, and 15% would be more likely to back that candidate.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that the poll shows Americans deeply confused over what they think about the issue. While over 80% of Americans claim to be "very" or "somewhat familiar" with evolution and creationism:
Two-thirds in the poll said creationism, the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years, is definitely or probably true.…
omnibrain | June 7, 2007An oldie but goodie starring I Dream of Jeannie as god ... Enjoy!
Here's Ned Flanders dealing with an evolution exhibit.
And here's the evolution vs. creationism debate starring Lisa.
tfk | June 6, 2007A few days ago, Billy Dembski responded negatively to a review of Michael Behe's new book by my fellow ScienceBlogger Mark Chu-Carroll. In particular, Dembski questioned whether it was really a review, telling his readers to "Judge for yourself whether this deserves to be called a review." (It is, and a damning indictment of Behe's vacuity).
Demsbki proceeded to question whether a computer scientist has a right to criticize Behe's mathematical arguments. Dembski's actual response to the substance of Chu-Carroll's review was, sadly, lacking. I pressed the issue in the comments, and…
tfk | June 6, 2007DaveScot quotes Martin Niemöller's famous "First they came… poem" arguing that:
Those who believe Guillermo Gonzalez’ involvement with ID outside the Iowa State campus can be justly used in consideration of whether or not to grant him tenure would be well served to think about this.
No. Guillermo Gonzalez was not put in a concentration camp. He was not shot, starved, gassed or otherwise abused. His employer evaluated his future prospects as an astronomical researcher, and found him lacking. Equating a personnel decision with the Holocaust is, and I say this cautiously, a form of Holocaust…
tfk | June 4, 2007PZ Myers explains his objection to religion:
the bible is inferior. No pirates. No cephalopods. No swashbuckling. No undead monkeys. No men with tentacles.
Those are fair points, but for Cosma Shalizi's explanation of The Reason for the Season, with it's link to a working paper from the Vampire Research group on Jesus Chthulu. In that scholarly work, it is observed that:
Jesus came from an area where the worship of the Magna Mater has been endemic for millennia…. Her connection with the mythos is well-known (see HPL, ``The Rats in the Walls''); a consensus of learned opinion holds her to be…
omnibrain | May 31, 2007Heaven forbid animals drink some soda! and then enjoy it! This is probably the least bothersome form of animal testing out there. Trust me... animals looooove sugar!
Here's the snippet from the NYT article:
Under pressure from animal rights advocates, two soft drink giants, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo, have agreed to stop directly financing research that uses animals to test or develop their products, except where such testing is required by law.
Researchers at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sought the assurances after discovering studies financed by the companies that used animals…
tfk | May 28, 2007Mousie Cat writes:
our Ken-doll of the Religious Right is headed for big things
So many options on who that could be. Sam Brownback? Fred Phelps? Jerry Johnston?
None of them seems likely to reach higher office, thankfully.
No, just little old Ken Willard, hero of the creationist board of education members. He's unlikely to lose to a write-in candidate for the presidency of the National Association of State Boards of Education.
If tradition holds, he'll drive out the qualified staff, insulting them and denigrating them until they get the hint. Then he'll install some unqualified hack…
tfk | May 23, 2007One of the lines you hear a lot in the immigration debate goes something like "we need to strengthen the idea of assimilation to immigrants. Keep your heritage, but you are now Americans. If you want to live in America, you are Americans first."
I don't know exactly what that is supposed to mean. I certainly have a sense of what being American means to me, but it has relatively little with what our correspondent above (Ned Ryun, former congressman Jim Ryun's baby boy) would think. In fact, without getting overly "meta," I'd have to say that being American means being able to define yourself…
tfk | May 22, 2007A while back, the Reverend Jerry Johnston, intolerant blowhard extraordinaire, was revealed to have been skimming the till from his First Family Church. It's the all-too-familiar tale of a conservative megachurch with a TV audience. Family on the payroll, bogus accounting, a lavish lifestyle for the Rev. and his family, and dubious uses of religious tax exemptions for non-church operations (this will sound oddly familiar to those who've been reading the obituaries for Jerry Falwell, who got into comparably hot water early in his career). These various lines of evidence were pulled together…