If Odd Arrangements and Funny Solutions are the Proof of Evolution, Then What About These Optimized Designs?
You’ve heard all those evolutionary arguments about how nature’s sloppy, repetitive, inefficient and downright evil designs prove evolution. Then what about the many optimized designs in biology, such as those in this New York Times article, suggested by a friend, such as our eye’s ability to detect even a single photon: Read more
From The Best Schools: All Dawkins’s Straw Men
Jerry Coyne as a “tailless catarrhine primate” (self-description); John Hawks as the adult
Here’s the Real Message Behind This Week’s Sunday Book Review
Tired of the New Atheists, and the old atheists as well? Delighted to see the likes of Philip Kitcher taking them down in this week’s Sunday Book Review? Philosophers Kitcher and David Albert reviewed books by atheists Alex Rosenberg and Lawrence Krauss in an exercise that was more like shooting fish in a barrel than any kind of literary review. But wait a minute, what is Philip Kitcher—who once wrote that evolution illuminates “a wealth of biological details” and whose book was endorsed by arch evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould—doing tossing Molotov cocktails into the atheist camp? Isn’t evolution just atheism in disguise? Kitcher’s and Albert’s reviews are another example of what is the fundamental name-of-the-game, and most people will continue not Read More ›
In the days when Mars had life, the 1970s …
Yet Another Embarrassing Finding for the Global Warming Crowd
It turns out the earth heats up and cools naturally with no human intervention. Who ever thought that it didn’t? Oh, the consensus.
But one person would have known everything …
Why math matters. Also, can we get a word in for common sense?
A new WAC: On those ever so revealing chalkboards (of the quantum physicists) and the law of non-contradiction, LNC
Below, is a picture of Einstein’s chalkboard at Princeton as he left it — and you should see his bookshelves and desk, too! What does this have to do with the now so commonly dismissed laws of thought, especially the law of non-contradiction? A lot. AKA, one cannot wisely saw off the branch on which s/he is sitting. What does that mean? We can start from the proverbial main tools of the great theoretical physicists of 100 years ago when quantum physics was emerging: chalk-boards, chalk, and — of course — what they had between their ears. So, they used distinct scratch marks with definite meanings, to clarify, analyse and communicate what they were thinking. (Some, proverbially, had “chalkboards in Read More ›