A final note on Expelled 24 Mar 2008 This is a nice review in New Scientist, obviously “framed” more in sorrow and confusion than in anger, which ends with Throughout the entire experience, Maggie and I couldn’t help feeling that the polarised audience in the theater was a sort of microcosm of America, and let me tell you – it’s a scary place. I also couldn’t help thinking that the intelligent design folks aren’t being silenced, so much as they’re being silent. Because when it comes to actually explaining anything, they’ve got nothing to say. Evolution Politics Religion
Biology The Demon Spencer 16 Jun 200922 Jun 2018 When I first started to read philosophy and history I heard about this demon. His name was Herbert Spencer, and he was famous for three things: Incomprehensible prose Coining “Survival of the Fittest”, and Coming up with a “devil take the hindmost” laissez faire political philosophy that was called “social… Read More
Evolution The first phylogeny 30 Sep 202030 Sep 2020 The only diagram in the Origin is famously the hypothetical series of species forming a tree structure, but it isn’t an actual classification based on his principles. I have previously noted the rise of cladograms towards the end of the 19th century, but in a talk by Ian Hesketh, I was… Read More
Epistemology Do atheists “relapse”? 31 May 2010 Carol Everhart Roper at OpEdNews has an interesting essay “Is there such a thing as an ex-atheist?” and asnwers, anecdotally, no. I tend to agree. While it is a common trope by Christians in particular that they were atheists and converted, in every case with which I am familiar, and… Read More