Miscellany 26 Jun 200818 Sep 2017 Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason. There’s a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist’s post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution – Problems with Science for more. Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn’t make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at Psychology Today. Michael Ruse has an interesting and entertaining review of, among other things, Bill Wimsatt’s book, at American Scientist. It turns out we can know what it is like to be a bat… Science After Sunclipse has a discussion on what education can be achieved by science blogs. Laelaps‘ Brian Switek responds. Sciguy reports that Spain is about to give basic human rights to apes, something I have previously supported elsewhere. Stephen Hale had already argued one can prove a negative, before I did. Hat tip: Abnormal Interests. Ecology and Biodiversity Evolution General Science Politics Sermon Social evolution Species and systematics wimsatt
Censorship Some more on ISP filtering, and a rant on censorship in Australia 27 Nov 20084 Oct 2017 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… Read More
Evolution On the “Darwin Year” 1 Jul 2008 Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn’t made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven’t needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer’s piece, over at his new digs with Discover… Read More
Freedom The problem with logic 19 Jan 201420 Jan 2014 When teaching students critical reasoning it is an article of faith that we should teach them logic. Of course, we ameliorate any benefit this might have by teaching it incomprehensibly and in artificial cases. But still, we believe logic is what is most important in philosophy and in culture generally…. Read More
Thanks for the link! Sciguy reports that Spain is about to give basic human rights to apes, something I have previously supported elsewhere. That is excellent news; I certainly hope the legislation goes through. If you haven’t seen it already you should definitely check out the Nature special “Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History,” too.
The comments on that SciGuy link are mostly so deeply stupid I’m left wondering how they mustered the basic literacy to post them. How does an intelligent poster attract a rabble like that?
I learned about Wimsatt’s book through your blog and the title made me take a look at it in Amazon. The description there made me think it might be interesting to read it, but if it’s being reviewed in American Scientist (and by Ruse), I’ll have the best reference possible.