October 25, 2010
I'm in DC doing meetings and stuff, so regular blogging will return later in the week. Meanwhile, via Ed Yong, a paper On Angry Leaders and Agreeable Followers, which finds:
[T]he two studies we conducted showed that agreeableness moderates the effects of a leaderâs emotional displays. In a…
October 18, 2010
At least he'll admit where he's coming from:
October 18, 2010
Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, considers the confrontationalist/accommodationalist disagreement:
Hereâs the difference between the two sides: You know that courtroom phrase, âtell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truthâ?
Both Mooney and PZ want to tell the truth about science…
October 17, 2010
Wilkins reports Leigh Van Valen, paleontologist and evolution polymath (theorist, philosopher, mathematician, proponent of the Ecological Species Concept, and coiner of the Red Queen Hypothesis) has died.
He was 75, and will live on through his many students and his astonishingly broad body of…
October 15, 2010
Laughing Squid reports, via John Brockman's twitter feed and Nassim Nicholas Taleb's website, that the father of fractal geometry has moved to a different fractional dimension.
October 14, 2010
Attention conservation notice: 3200 words attempting to correct what may be a fatally flawed analogy between New Atheism and Martin Luther King, Jr.'s approach to the civil rights movement.
In replying to Jason's post the other day, I skipped over some important issues that were peripheral to my…
October 14, 2010
Shorter former Census Bureau director and current Discovery Institute president Bruce Chapman (author of a book with this blog post's title) â The Futility of Polling:
Numbers are stupid.
Slightly longer:
It's better to predict the outcome of elections based on conversations with some guy on the…
October 13, 2010
Jason Rosenhouse has a long post up claiming I missed the point in my post a few days ago about the lessons communication science can teach us about the accommodationism spat. The two things I came away from his post thinking were: 1) wow, did he miss my point! and 2) we're talking about very…
October 12, 2010
Disco. Inst head honcho Bruce Chapman is confused. "What is more powerful," he wonders, "altruism or the survival instinct?" The question, he explains, is raised because of Watergate felon Chuck Colson's ramblings about the trapped Chilean miners. Colson, in turn is confused and amazed by…
October 11, 2010
Last weekend, Chris Mooney and Genie Scott squared off against PZ Myers and Vic Stenger at the Council for Secular Humanism's 30th anniversary bash. The question was something to do with whether accommodationism is teh awsum or teh lamez0rs. You know my opinion, and from what I saw of the…
October 7, 2010
Thanks to Razib, I've managed to separate out Hispanic graduation rates in our new favorite graph (cf. and also):
I didn't put this on the graph, but immigration history does make a difference here. Hispanics born in the US have essentially the same high school graduation rate as everyone else, go…
October 6, 2010
In answer to requests from the previous post on graduation rates, here's the same data broken down by race. African Americans still lag whites in graduation rates, but have made impressive gains in high school graduation rates, though graduation appears more likely to be delayed. African Americans…
October 6, 2010
Via This Is Not Helpful, a review of creationist movie Dragons or Dinosaurs: Creation or Evolution. The reviewer is concerned that teachers presenting the view that dragons are really dinosaurs might get fired from public schools, "loosing 4-8 years of collage."
My greatest fear is that this…
October 5, 2010
The opening of Sam Harris's End of Faith, like several essays he wrote at HuffPo, focus on suicide bombing. He argues that suicide bombing is absurd, and only exists because of religion. A footnote to EoF acknowledges that suicide bombing was first deployed on a large scale by the Tamil Tigers,…
October 5, 2010
When Sam Harris first broached the topic of his latest book in a YouTube video, Sean Carroll made a thoughtful criticism of the talk, and Harris replied via Twitter: "Please know that I will be responding to this stupidity." He did reply, though never successfully addressing the arguments offered…
October 5, 2010
While answering a question for Science and Religion Today ("Is it of greater importance for America to have more scientific experts or less scientific illiteracy" – short answer: both, but if I must, I'd choose scientific literacy), I started toying around with these data on graduation rates in…
October 4, 2010
Senator Jim DeMint clearly hates America for its freedoms. As a local paper reports:
DeMint said if someone is openly homosexual, they shouldn't be teaching in the classroom and he holds the same position on an unmarried woman who's sleeping with her boyfriend â she shouldn't be in the classroom…
September 29, 2010
My post yesterday about Pew's religion poll has generated a certain amount of discussion, though mostly about a point that I phrased poorly and ought to rework to clarify. I'm getting general pushback on my suggestion that atheists did better on this survey because they are book smart about…
September 28, 2010
Martin Cothran (cf.) demonstrates that he's a religious illiterate, writing:
It's Banned Books Week again: You know, the week where we talk about all of the books religious parents have objected to in schools, but where we ignore the fact that religious books were prevented from making it into…
September 27, 2010
Disco. club owner Bruce Chapman is upset. He saw a report from Saturday which claimed that the UN had someone in charge of meeting aliens if they landed. Two days later, he therefore launched a breathless critique of the obviously Darwinian influence on this decision, a blog post he titled Evidence…
September 27, 2010
The more I watch Christine O'Donnell's riff on evolution, the more sure I am that Christine McDonnell would, had she not been interrupted, have told Bill Maher, "even Darwin himself renounced evolution on his deathbed." Alas, she only got through "even Darwin himself…," but I think we'd all have…
September 24, 2010
There are no words. Delaware, you disappoint me.
September 24, 2010
Rolling out big federal bucks to fund merit pay for teachers the day after a major report found no benefit from merit pay was probably poor timing.
September 24, 2010
Ed Yong has a great blog post up asking Should science journalists take sides? He rightly answers: yes, "a commitment to the view from nowhere has many problems." Among those problems, this opinions-on-shape-of-earth-differ style is "a disservice to journalism," reflective of "laziness" and "a…
September 23, 2010
Not to reopen raw wounds, but reposting my talk from Netroots Nation reminded me of two other sessions I attended, both on the theme of snark and satire. Unfortunately, video from the one I want to talk about today is not yet online.
As you'll recall, sciencebloggers and skeptics were really bored…
September 20, 2010
That's the full video from my panel at Netroots Nation this summer. Mark Sumner (DailyKos's DevilsTower, and the author most recently of The Evolution of Everything), Greg Dworkin (DailyKos's DemfromCT), and Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (co-authors of the excellent and important Merchants of…
September 17, 2010
David Klinghoffer is looking for reasons to apologize. That's all I can conclude from his latest post at the Disco. 'tute blog: On Yom Kippur, Considering the Moral Meaning of Theistic Evolution. He writes about the Yom Kippur liturgy, probably the holiest moment in the Jewish year, when we…
September 17, 2010
As far as I can tell, the new Disco. blogger I discussed yesterday made a mistake in her post's title. "Nature: I used to love her, now I'll have to kill her," sure seems like a reference to the classic Guns 'n' Roses song: "I used to love her." But the lyrics go:
I used to love her, but I had to…
September 16, 2010
Rhadagast is blogging again! He was one of the big sciencebloggers when I started (that was August of 2004, so happy 6th blogiversary, TfKers), but took a 2 year hiatus. The proliferation of new sciencebloggers and new scienceblogging networks got me looking for people who I was reading back when…
September 16, 2010
Every now and again, the Disco. 'tute's blog rolls out some breathless announcement. Sometimes they've been invited to join other creationist groups at a public forum, or maybe they're angry at a newspaper article claiming they have ties to religion, or they might just have come up with another…
