This is a post I recently wrote for the miniblog, but the reaction it received (not necessarily just through blog comments) has lead me to think that I should put it up on the main blog, where it’s most visible. It deals with something that might be considered a bit controversial in the skeptical movement, but I feel it needs to be said by at least someone. I’m not trying to pick fights – I’m just thinking about this concept and what it could mean for the movement in general.
Captain Disillusion, the popular YouTube skeptic who debunks viral videos that contain paranormal themes or clever trickery, is finally back with a new series recounting his adventures at TAM (The Amazing Meeting) 7. He’s known for his humour, and these new videos really bring it home, I think.
Here’s the first in the series of five (including a debunking of the infamous “lotto number prediction” by Derren Brown) – you can find the rest on his YouTube channel:
Yes, I mentioned it in an earlier post, but now I’m making it absolutely clear – on the 14th of February (Valentine’s Day, eh?) Homologous Legs will be hosting the Carnival of the Godless blog carnival!
If you want submission guidelines, here’s the place to go, but really, anything pertaining to or about religion from a godless perspective is fine (which is what the guidelines say, but… some people never click links).
You go here to submit blog posts – none of that “emailing” that we’ve all grown so used to with other carnivals.
Spread the word – via email, Twitter, your own blogs, etc.! I’d like a huge number of posts for this edition, which may have something to do with the theme that I’m planning…
In a shocking turn of events, Meryl Dorey, President of the Australian Vaccination Network for almost 17 years, has stepped down from her position leading the prominent vaccine-awareness group.
Citing reasons such as a lack of funds behind the AVN and the fact that her children have likely suffered due to her activism, Dorey broke the news via blog post earlier today. She also stated that the AVN will most likely be closing its doors to the public by the end of February.
Immediately, members of the AVN expressed outrage at the decision:
“I know Meryl personally,” said one anonymous web commenter, “and she would never abandon her post so readily. Something’s not right.”
Another, under the pseudonym NoVaxMax, posted “I fear that our hero in the fight for the truth has fallen prey to what she hated most – a vaccination. Only exposure to an unnatural cocktail of antifreeze, squalene and reptoid-designed microchips could bring about such a radical shift in thinking.”
Research by supporters of the vaccine-awareness organisation concluded this afternoon that Ms. Dorey must have succumbed to the intoxicating effects of specifically-targeted chemtrails carrying unusually high levels of the H1N1 vaccine, a known neurotoxic substance, within their deadly vapors.
“Of course, we’ve known about the dangers of being exposed to vaccines in the environment before this point, and the effects, such as caring about your children and refusing to believe in giant global conspiracies, are clear in this case,” said lead researcher HerbsCureAll, “but such acute symptoms really lead us to believe that this was a targeted attack.”
Another researcher commented, “It would take more than a GP randomly stabbing her with a needle in the street, as they often do, to affect Meryl’s judgment so severely. She was a strong, strong woman, who used homeopathy frequently.”
Various skeptical organisations and individual skeptics immediately applauded the move. Former President of the James Randi Educational Foundation, Dr. Phil Plait wrote that “Dorey claims she wants to save people’s lives. This move on her part may finally do it.”
Dr. Rachael Dunlop, Vice President of the Australian Skeptics, tweeted “What happened? I left the intertubz [sic] for few hrs [sic] and Dorey is resigning?!! WOW. Congrats to all involved in a HUGE victory.”
But AVN supporters are warning that such comments are to be expected and should be ignored. “Don’t listen to the skeptics, they’re in league with Big Pharma and the New World Order,” cautioned an anonymous web commenter, “I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that Richard Saunders himself ordered this cruel and vicious attack. It’s very much his style.”
I recently mentioned Dr. Granville Sewell, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas, El Paso, in relation to a new book of his, filled with essays about intelligent design and evolution, that was recently published by the Discovery Institute. Sewell is an intelligent design proponent/advocate, and due to his status as a professor at a legitimate university, he gets put up on a pedestal by pro-ID organisations (such as the Discovery Institute) as one of the supposedly “many” scientists who reject evolutionary theory in favour of intelligent design.
This treatment also extends to any publications Sewell happens to write on the subject of evolution, and two of these appear in the Discovery Institute’s Peer-Reviewed & Peer-Edited Scientific Publications Supporting the Theory of Intelligent Design (Annotated). Of course, they aren’t true academic papers but articles published in journals – hence they don’t really have any scientific weight – but intelligent design proponents will use anything they can get their hands on and hold it up as legitimate science, so long as it can be professionally cited and looks all fancy to the layperson.
One of these articles written by Sewell is called “A Mathematician’s View of Evolution” [The Mathematical Intelligencer 22, no. 4 (2000), pp5-7], and it will be the focus of this blog post to analyse and look at the arguments he puts forward in it. Hopefully it will demonstrate to you that scientists and academics outside their fields of expertise cannot be believed as quickly as creationists and ID proponents would have you think.
Is it Carnival of the Godless time again? Why yes, it is! And over at Right To Think, no less! Head on over there and check it out.
A favourite post of mine from this edition was from Bay of Fundie, analysing a talk given by young-earth creationist Marcus Ross at the Darwin Was Wrong conference put on by Logos Research Associates. Good stuff. Good, crazy stuff.
And what do you know? The next edition of the Carnival of the Godless will be hosted right here at Homologous Legs! You can start submitting posts if you’d like, but feel free to wait for a few more days until I put up a more… “noticeable” blog post.
So many books! So little damn time! That basically describes my reading habits at the moment – I’ve got The Greatest Show on Earth by Richard Dawkins and Why Evolution is True by Jerry Coyne to read, but I’m still pulling my way through The Blind Watchmaker, also by Dawkins. I tried to finish it off during my New Zealand holiday, but less biology-related activities got in the way of that – fortunately or unfortunately, you decide…
What do you get when you add together the big bang, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics and the evolution of life? Definitely not a materialistic theory of origins, answers Sewell, a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas El Paso.
In this wide-ranging collection of essays, Sewell concludes that while there is much in the history of life that seems to suggest natural causes, there is little evidence to support Charles Darwin’s idea that natural selection of random variations can explain major evolutionary advances.
…because a mathematician is somebody that we can trust as an expert in the field of biology! Everyone do a happy dance, especially you, Casey Luskin.
Naturally, the grandiose claims (supposedly) being made by Dr. Sewell in this book have attracted my attention, and when a book is called “delightful” by Cornelius Hunter, I just know I have to read it:
“In The Beginning provides delightful and wide-ranging commentary on the origins debate and intelligent design,” says biophysicist Dr. Cornelius Hunter. “Sewell provides much needed clarity on topics that are too often misunderstood, like his discussion of the commonly confused problem of entropy, which is a must read.”
Seriously, he talks about entropy? In the context of evolutionary biology and intelligent design, that can’t be something that isn’t hilarious. Come on, I’ve got to read this, even just to see the context in which he writes the line:
“Darwin’s attempt to explain the origins of all the magnificent species in the living world in terms of the struggle for survival is easily the dumbest idea ever taken seriously by science.”
So… I’ve put it on my Amazon wishlist, in the hope that someone with a bit of spare money lying around might “accidentally” buy it for me. But don’t get me wrong, if I could buy this myself I would – but I’m not yet old enough to apply for a PayPal account! Ah, the curse of youth…
This is a post in a series designed to keep my readers happy while I swan around New Zealand for two weeks. The theme is extinct New Zealand animals, of which there are a lot of. Note – I take full responsibility for the terrible puns that make up each post title.
This post will be mysterious… as it will reveal that New Zealand make not have been as mammal-less as previously thought. Of course, mammals exist in the present day on New Zealand in the form of domestic animals (cats, cattle, dogs, sheep etc.) and invasive pests (Australian possums and rats etc.), but there exist no modern mammals that are natives. It had been thought for years that New Zealand had never had any native mammals at any time – fossils has never been found, and there were certainly no living relatives.
However, a discovery in St. Bathans, a New Zealand town, in 2006 of mammalian fossils turned this thinking on its head.
Mammalia, as a taxonomic class, is divided into three subclasses – Theria, Prototheria and Allotheria. Placental and marsupial mammals are therian, monotremes are prototherian, and various mesozoic mammals that have no extant relatives were allotherian. These new fossils appeared to be in none of these subclasses, and looked to be a distinct lineage from any of them.
This was, and is, exciting news, as it opens up a new outlook on New Zealand’s past ecosystems. However, these nontherian mammals were only the size of a modern mouse, so it was unlikely that they posed any large predation threat to any of the flightless bird species that were evolving throughout New Zealand’s diversification period.
Do you have a skill at speaking to crowds about specific topics? Would any of those topics, perchance, be related to skepticism? If so, have you considered adding your details to the Skeptical Speakers Bureau? Of course not – most likely you’ve never heard of it before! Oh ho ho, got you there.
…
Sorry.
Anyway – yes, you should definitely sign up for this new service being hosted on the Grassroots Skeptics website, which will increase your speaking profile considerably in the skeptical movement once it’s released proper. Probably. I did, which really doesn’t reflect much on the quality of the current list of people (except that I know that Kylie Sturgess from Podblack Cat has signed up as well – a quality submission), but whatever, you have to do crazy things sometimes.
Homologous Legs is the blog of Naon Tiotami (aka. Jack Scanlan), an Australian (soon-to-be) undergraduate biology student who has a serious problem with creationists and intelligent-design proponents.
Here you can find rebuttals to articles found on various high-profile creationist and intelligent-design websites, news about the creation/evolution war, and random thoughts from a 17 year-old student.
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