Sermon
evolvingthoughts | March 24, 2009One of my favourite 70s songs, below the fold: "Life's a Long Song", by Jethro Tull, from the 1971 EP of the same name. For some reason the final episode of Battlestar Galacticaput this in my head.
When you're falling awake and you take stock of the new day,
And you hear your voice croak as you choke on what you need to say,
Well, don't you fret, don't you fear,
I will give you good cheer.
Life's a long song.
Life's a long song.
Life's a long song.
If you wait then your plate I will fill.
As the verses unfold and your soul suffers the long day,
And the…
evolvingthoughts | March 21, 2009There are a lot of folk who think they have a handle on how to communicate science to the general public, and a lot of folk, mostly scientists, who think nobody else does. But I was reading Carl Zimmer's twittering today, about Rebecca Skoot getting a column gig for a new magazine devoted to issues of interest to women, Double X. It hit me that science journalism is not dying, it is having to adapt to a new business model.
Traditional media made its money from advertising and sales. It used a broadcast model of publishing - a single source (the printing presses or the transmitters) to many…
evolvingthoughts | January 24, 2009It came as an email. Then it was on the Seed Bloggers Forum. Now it's on my frigging Facebook - they really want me to answer this:
In his first speech as President-elect last November, Barack Obama reminded us of the promise of "a world connected by our own science and imagination." And on Tuesday, in his inaugural address, President Obama cemented his commitment to a new ethos and culture by vowing to "restore science to its rightful place."
At Seed, we are firmly committed to President Obama's vision and want to help make it a reality. We begin today by asking you, our friends and…
evolvingthoughts | January 22, 2009It has started, downplaying the unpleasant aspects of Nobel laureate Carleton Gadjusek's life. An obituary (paywall) in Nature has what is a rather positive overview of the man who discovered that kuru, which we now know as a prion disease like Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, was transmissible. It fails to mention that he thought it was a virus (it is a protein based disease). It also just barely mentioned his pedophilia.
Eccentricity was the source of Gajdusek's genius as a scientist, and of his notoriety late in life. In 1997, he was imprisoned on a child molestation charge involving one of the…
evolvingthoughts | January 18, 2009People get readyThere's a bus a'comin'
Don't need no deity
Just get on board
Won't hurt believers
If you can't hear God's mummery
You'll still need a ticket
From the Transport Board
People get ready
For the bus to show you
All people are passengers
From coast to coast
Citizenship's the key
For the doors of freedom
There's room for all
Among the secular host
There's plenty of room
For those you call sinners
They're still part of humanity
To each his own
Have pity on those
Whose minds are narrow
Cause there's no real place
Where theocracy's at home
So people get ready
There's a bus a'comin'
Don…
evolvingthoughts | December 31, 2008Congratulations to Sir Terence Pratchett, or SurPterry as we shall undoubtedly come to call him (although I'm tempted to doubt it as he is the last bloke I think would ever be lost for words). But overlooked in the reports is this guy, who gets an OBE:
He's John Martyn, BTW.
evolvingthoughts | December 24, 2008So what is it with Christians who are so able to debunk and demythologise the myths of everyone else, and fail to see that exactly the same logic applies to their own mythology?
A priest in northern Italy told kids there was no Father Christmas at a children's mass. Great. We shouldn't believe in magical beings that can break all physical laws just to get across a moral story. I concur.
What about Jesus? A magical being who can break the laws of physics, whose sole justification (and a not very good one at that) is that there is some moral foundation for treating folks nicely. Without a trace…
evolvingthoughts | December 11, 2008... shh, not so loud or everyone will want one.
Here's a piece by Darksyde at Daily Kos in which he reports the outgoing EPA chair (who has overseen all manner of bad science and decisions, although that may not be his own fault) as saying
"It's not a clean-cut division [between evolution and creation]. If you have studied at all creationism vs. evolution, there's theistic or God-controlled evolution and there's variations on all those themes."
It seems to me that theistic evolution is not exactly about God controlling evolution, although there may be plenty of biblical warrant for God…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
Note the careful ambiguity there: this is not a blog of another antipodean philosopher, but another blog of this antipodean philosopher. The ins and outs of Australian politics and policies are not of interest to much more than 0.3% of the world, so my asseverations are even less interesting to you all. Hence I have started an intermittent blog, The Drought Resistant Philosopher, wherein I will whine (or as we say here, whinge) about the latest stupidity from our representatives and public service, and so on. All ISP filtering posts will go there from now on.
No more mister nice silverback…
evolvingthoughts | December 3, 2008
When my kids were in school, I noticed an interesting phenomenon that went something like this:
Headmaster: No, your kids can't be being bullied. We have a policy against bullying.
I came to call this the "Policy policy": so long as there's a Policy in place for some longstanding problem, action is unnecessary and complainants can be silenced by reference to the Policy.
The Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that the present government (AKA the Clean Feed Censorship Party) wants to establish a Bill of Rights in Australia to protect citizens against laws that are unconstitutional and…
evolvingthoughts | November 27, 2008
The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of conservatives think censorship is a legitimate form of governance), it's dead. This is a Very Good Thing.
But it raises some more general issues: why is Australia so damned intent upon censoring anything? Why do we have among the most draconian censorship laws in the democratic world? Isn't it about…
evolvingthoughts | October 23, 2008
In my recent talk on secularism, I declared that there will always be religion, and a secularist ought to get used to that fact. Secularists have assumed that a secular society will cause religion to wither away and die, but this seems to me a foolish thing to believe. Every society known has had a religion or six, and although, as PZ recently noted, some religion is on the decline and more people are declaring themselves to be non-religious (which is not the same has having no religious beliefs, by the way), this doesn't license the easy induction that religion is on the way out. These…
evolvingthoughts | October 20, 2008
So, as many of my readers and all of my friends know, I am a moral vacuum. I routinely brush those earnest young folk aside who seek my signature on their morally worthy petitions with that statement - they usually stand there blinking. I mean, what do you do? Run after the psychopath and try to reason with him? Just try it, young fellow...
Anyway, in a self-conscious attempt to make up for this, see below the fold.
Janet has done all Seed stablemates proud by attempting to get us to donate to DonorsChoose. Since it's an American thing, and I am not American, I have chosen to not get…
evolvingthoughts | October 5, 2008
The two space shuttle disasters were due to political and military interference in the design of the shuttle. On the one hand, the various senators wanted parts of the shuttle manufactured in places like, of all states, Utah, necessitating the solid fuel segment design that failed catastrophically with Challenger, and put the fuel tank for the shuttle engines above the shuttle itself, causing the Columbia disaster. On the other the USAF wanted the Shuttle to be big enough to deploy spy satellites. The end result was a hybrid design that was unsafe and inefficient. So of course NASA and the…
evolvingthoughts | October 3, 2008
... by GumbyTheCat, with just the right amount of snark.
Late note: See the critical commentary by Galley Proofs.
evolvingthoughts | September 16, 2008
In response to the unwarranted flap over the education director of the Royal Society making comments that of course the media and the creationists spun to suit themselves, Richard Dawkins had this to say:
Although I disagree with Michael Reiss, what he actually said at the British Association is not obviously silly like creationism itself, nor is it a self-evidently inappropriate stance for the Royal Society to take. Scientists divide into two camps over this issue: the accommodationists, who 'respect' creationists while disagreeing with them; and the rest of us, who see no reason to…
evolvingthoughts | September 11, 2008
I'm supposed to be marking essays, but the reaction to Thony's recent guest articles has triggered in me a conditioned reflex: the uses and abuses of history by scientists.
Historians have a certain way to pursue their profession - it involves massive use of documentary evidence, a care taken to avoid naming heroes and villains, and in general a strong devotion to the minutae and detail of history, instead of the now-old-fashioned grand sweeps of a Toynbee or Marx. Sure, they disagree how to interpret things, including mindsets of agents in another time, but overall when a historian gives…
evolvingthoughts | September 5, 2008
One of the enduring objections to evolution of the Darwinian variety is that it is based on chance, and so for theists who believe God is interventionist, it suggests that God is subjected to chance, and hence not onmi-something (present, potent or scient). Darwin and his friend Asa Gray debated this issue in correspondence, and it ended up as the final pages of his 1868 Variation (below the fold). Effectively, Darwin argued that we cannot "reasonably maintain" that God intended for chance events that are useful to humans or to the species concerned. It is this that I want to discuss,…
evolvingthoughts | August 22, 2008
A little while back I linked to Sahotra Sarkar's review of Steve Fuller's Science versus Religion. Now Fuller has put up a defence at the Intelligent Design website, Uncommon Descent, under the gerrymandered image of a bacterial flagellum (if you want to know what a real flagellum would look like at that scale, see this).
While I haven't yet read the book (I'll be reviewing it for Metascience), a couple of points that Fuller's post make clear:
1. He has a really casual dismissal of factual accuracy so long as the "spirit" is right
2. This explains why he's allied himself with ID.…