design
evolvingthoughts | May 29, 2007
A while back, I wrote a series of posts (listed at the end) on whether or not creationists were in fact being rational in their choices of who to believe about science, based on what information they had available to them as they were growing up.
Now, a paper has been published in The Edge by psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg, which is a revised version of a paper in Science, May 18, 2007, which argues pretty much the same thing. I only wish the paper I have forthcoming in Synthese had got published earlier, but they have data, something philosophers must avoid according…
evolvingthoughts | May 22, 2007An oldie but a goodie:
With respect to the theological view of the question; this is always painful to me.-- I am bewildered.-- I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see, as plainly as others do, & as I shd wish to do, evidence of design & beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent & omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae symbol with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice.…
evolvingthoughts | May 16, 2007
Its is here. It's a largish PDF, about 81Mb, and this is only a temporary site until I get the proper files to Archive.Org for assembly and OCR.
Philip Henry Gosse was a well-known naturalist in the early 19th century. Huxley referred to him as "that honest hodman of science", and he was responsible (I am told) more than anyone else, for the new fashion of keeping aquariums.
Gosse's son, Edmund, wrote a rather unhappy memoir about growing up with a devout and strict father, called Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments, in which he mentions this book:
My Father had never admired…
evolvingthoughts | May 14, 2007
John Locke, in his Letter Concerning Toleration (1689) argued that the rule of law and the imposition of religion ought to be two different things, and only the former ought to be a civil matter. All religions were to be tolerated. Having done a good thing in the context of the religious wars of Europe, Locke then did a bad thing which continues to echo today. He wrote:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of a God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The taking away of God, though but even in…
cevans | May 14, 2007
I've been thinking a lot about über-couple Charles and Ray Eames recently; those of you who attended last week's Urho Talks will know the territory I'm about to shlep into.
If you don't know, Charles and Ray were designers, architects and filmmakers who are responsible for many classic, iconic designs of the 20th century (Thanks, Wikipiedia!). Notably, a great deal of wonderful furniture, the IBM Pavilion of the 1964 World's Fair, ground-breaking exhibition designs, and over 100 short films.
Their place in the world of "Design" (whatever that means) is both unclear and totally manifest,…
evolvingthoughts | May 12, 2007
In what is for this furriner a somewhat perplexing column, Kathleen Parker, who is supposedly one of the Washington Post stable of writers, argues that the question asked of Republican nominees for presidency - Do you believe in evolution? - was unfair.
I fail to see why. Sure, nobody expects the president to select the next generation of successful breeders for any generation, but this is a good surrogate test of whether or not the candidate thinks science is to be trusted, or whether they think, as this administration odes, that they can choose the reality in which they operate with…
evolvingthoughts | May 1, 2007
OK, Americans, a couple of years after the British saw it, you are being treated to Jonathon Miller's A Brief History of Unbelief, a three-part series on how atheism came to be possible in western society, such that it is now one of the larger "religious" divisions in our culture. I'm not mocking, as Australia hasn't seen it yet. But I got sent a review copy, so here are my thoughts, below the fold. It starts on 54 May on PBS, I'm told, so check your local schedules, as they say.
I really really really wanted to like this series. Miller is one of my TV heroes, and was famously a member of…
evolvingthoughts | April 15, 2007
A bunch of topics that I can't be stuffed blogging in detail, but are important:
Larry Arnhart and Roger Scruton, both Darwinians (see previous post) and conservatives, justify the existence of religion as a social cohesive force. I wonder, though, as a Darwinian (see previous post) and a not-conservative, why we can't use the values and rituals of social justice and morality as a cohesive force, especially given that religion can only cohere a society by excluding and marginalising those who disagree with it. That said, we can invert the issue and say that a function of religion is to…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Sometimes life hands you nice ironies and wry humour. The same week that the Pope, Ratzinger-Benedict XVI (don't you hate hyphenated names?) announces that he almost accepts evolution as science, Michael Ghiselin, a rather famous evolutionary biologist and author of the 1969 book The Triumph of the Darwinian Method publishes (in the same journal as my latest, preen, preen) a paper entitled - I kid you not - "Is the Pope a Catholic?"
Ghiselin is making a point about set inclusion in the context of the nature of species, so I won't belabour the pun any further, but Ratzinger's new book…
evolvingthoughts | April 12, 2007
Suppose for a minute that everything the creationists say about evolution were true. Now suppose you had lost your mind... but I repeat myself. What would the history of that ersatz and terrible "science" be?
Wonder no more. Richard Forrest, who claims to be a paleontologist but is clearly a minion of satanic powers, has written the truth history of evilution, in The Truth: Being a TRUE and IMPARTIAL account of the history of that damnable religion, the great EVIL of DARWINISM, also called EVOLUTIONISM and it's attempts to bring the downfall of all moral and TRUE CHRISTIAN ™ virtue. Based…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2007
In the course of tracking down the usual suspects in the history of the species concept, I often come across some unusual ones. So I thought I'd start blogging them as I find them. Today's suspects are Jean-Baptiste René Robinet (1735-1820) and Pierre Trémaux (1818-1895).
Robinet was one of the last and most comprehensive exponents of the Great Chain of Being. A philosophe, rather than a naturalist, he had the somewhat extreme idea that there was a vital force that was causing all things - not only the living things - to express themselves in the most perfect manner. That most perfect…
evolvingthoughts | April 7, 2007
I cannot believe I didn't pick this up myself. Coulter's book Godless isn't what it seems to be - an ill-informed rehash of tired old creationist bafflegab. Instead, it's a Sokalesque hoax designed to make conservatives reassess their own rationality and to expose the idiocy of intelligent design! Read about it at Livescience.com in a piece of clever analysis by Peter Olofsson.
evolvingthoughts | March 30, 2007
There will no doubt be many April Fool's gags and hoaxes tomorrow. None will have the cachet of the Spaghetti Harvest, or the discovery of Homo micturans, because you can't get the wood, you know, but they will all be worthwhile relief from the inanity and insanity of our present society.
But there is a hoax doing the rounds that, while not an April Fool's gag, is a gag about April the 1st.
The story is this:
Hooray For That Judge In Florida, an atheist became incensed over the preparation for Easter and Passover holidays and decided to contact the local ACLU about the discrimination…
evolvingthoughts | March 26, 2007
As you all may know, I wrote a series of blog entries on microbial species concepts back when I first moved over to Seed, which had previously been on my older blog [links at end]. This then became a talk and later a paper, now in review. My argument was that there was a principle by which we could tell if microbes were a single species or not, depending on how regularly it exchanged its genetic material.
Now the American Academy of Microbiology has caught up with me <insert smiley here>...
A report by the AAM entitled Reconciling Microbial Systematics and Genomics raises the…
evolvingthoughts | March 25, 2007
At Res Ipsa Loquitur comes a tale of a law professor trying to use Cicero to argue that all morality comes from intelligent design. Yes, that intelligent design. Read the smackdown by the student, who gives me much hope for the legal profession...
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2007The IDiot Dembski has written this:
It’s a happy Darwinian world after all …William Dembski
Every now and again when I want to feel good about our shared humanity, I curl up with Darwin’s DESCENT OF MAN and read passages like the following:
The reckless, degraded, and often vicious members of society, tend to increase at a quicker rate than the provident and generally virtuous members. Or as Mr. Greg puts the case: “The careless, squalid, unaspiring Irishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith,…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2007
I can't believe I didn't think of this first:
Customer: Hello. I wish to complain about this so-called 'scientific theory' what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very establishment.
Salesman: Oh yes, 'Intelligent Design'. What, uh... what's wrong with it?
Customer: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. Its vacuous, that's what's wrong with it!
Salesman: No, no, uh... what we need now is to 'teach the controversy'...
Customer: Look matey, I know an empty 'argument from incredulity' when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Salesman: No, no, it's not empty: it's just…
evolvingthoughts | March 12, 2007
I am idly wondering what the best creationist book ever was. Not what best puts the usual creationist canards forward, but which creationist (including ID) book tried to make an intellectually satisfying and honest case.
So far I have Wendell Bird's Origin of Species Revisited published about 1983 or so, which was the defendant's brief in McLean v Arkansas. Of course, it's by a lawyer, which doesn't bode all that well. And pretty much anything by Phillip Johnson is suspect for the same reason. But I'm curious. Anyone?
evolvingthoughts | March 10, 2007
A common attack upon evolutionary biology, from ranking clerics in the Catholic church to the meanest creationist blogger, is that it implies that life arose and came to result in us by accident. We are asked to believe, they say, that three billion years led to us as a series of accidents. No matter how often evolutionary biologists and informed respondents try to point out that the sense of "accident" in biology is based on the lack of correlation between the future needs of organisms, the trope is repeated ad nauseum.
Why?
The reason is deep in the history of western thought. In…