Denyse O'Leary

An Austrian atheist has won the right to be shown on his driving-licence photo wearing a pasta strainer as “religious headgear”.

In “Austrian driver’s religious headgear strains credulity” (July 14, 2011), BBC News tells us so

Readers may recall that pastafarianism first surfaced as the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a sort of street drama against the idea of design in nature, at Kansas school board hearings. It blossomed into a Web site. Austrian Niko Alm, learning that religious headgear is allowed in official photos claimed that “the sieve was a requirement of his religion, pastafarianism.”

Given that “the only dogma allowed in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is the rejection of dogma,” some think his three-year crusade a protest against the permissible religious headgear policy. Read More ›

Warmup act: The sky is falling.

In “From The Kentucky ‘Ark Park’ To Back-Door Creationist Legislation, Religious Right Forces Are Demanding State Support Of Fundamentalist Dogma, Rob Boston (Americans United for the Separation of Church and State Newsletter, July/August 2011) dispenses with nuances,

Attacking evolution means big money for the Religious Right. In Kentucky, a creationist ministry called Answers in Genesis opened the Creation Museum in 2007 at a cost of $25 million. Three years later, it had logged its one millionth visitor.

So is it any wonder that Kentucky, smelling more jobs and tax revenues, is eager to do business with the forthcoming Ark Park? Would Kentucky be better or more fairly governed if – absent of crime, sedition, or ethics issues – the government made the principals’ religious beliefs an issue? Read More ›

I commend Thomas Cudworth’s post today to all, for raising a very good question: Do Darwin’s best known hacks and flacks do much science research. Given their other activies, like interfering with academic employment decisions and journal publications, writing hit pieces on scholars, and demanding wacky decisions from school authorities, one wonders where they would find the time.

One curious fact is that these activists are, generally speaking, Americans talking to Americans – and their fellow Americans have displayed a low level of confidence in Darwinism for decades.

So one of three possibilities, surely: Read More ›

Reviewer Charlie Jane Anders tells us “Zookeeper is a horror movie about evolutionary biology” (IO9, July 8, 2011), but she means “evolutionary psychology.” Briefly, the zookeeper wants this girl, and the animals (who can talk, of course) advise him to use their mating strategies:

Griffin is encouraged to become an Alpha Male, to pee in public to mark his territory. (There is a lot of urination.) The Adam Sandler-voiced monkey tells him to fling poop. At various times, his mating seminar starts to seem like an episode of the Pick-Up Artist, as a lion tells him to throw some negs. He’s encouraged to pick fights with competing males, to separate his desired mate from the pack, and to make his nerdy-but-gorgeous best friend pretend to be his girlfriend to make Stephanie jealous. There is much slapstick involving Griffin attempting to do a frog confrontation stance and making his pants split open.Eventually, though, it starts to work — Griffin, implausibly, becomes an Alpha Male and everybody admires him. He becomes a kind of super-yuppie and God among ordinary shlubs.

The usual keenness of evolutionary psychology’s insight into human nature is on display here; the screenwriter captures the quintessential truth that humans have evolved to consider this kind of behaviour sexy – just as animals evolved to have equivalent-to-human minds. From Anders:

Read More ›

The day had to come. The day that the political correctness mob, feminist division, turned on Dawkins and his atheists. Apparently, in a response to a complaint about sexual harassment, Dawkins had said,

The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that….Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behavior, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Bet Dawkins doesn’t know what hit him. He failed to buy into the “I feel like a victim, therefore my accusations are just” line that governs modern, materialist culture. And that’s just unforgivable.  😳

In “Atheists, your moral and intellectual superiors” (July 7, 2011), Canada’s Five Feet of Fury opines Read More ›

And the situation is far too important to justify stopping to find out what is going on.

Here, “Granite geek” David Brooks warns, “Creationism trying to sneak into New Hampshire laws” (July 4, 2011):

… two possible bills may come up in the fall to get creatonism into the classroom. One would mandate teaching “intelligent design”, the other would mandate teaching evolution “as a theory”.

Both lawmakers agree there are theological/philosophical elements to their proposals – one wants to examine how much atheism is being the push for evolution in classes; the other is concerned by the lack of a deeper meaning in evolution. I argue in the column that evolution, linking us to the understandable reality of the universe, has more meaning that an arbitrary creation by some other-worldly being or beings, but I also note that the argument is irelevant: Science classes should teach science.

The Granite one seems unaware that just saying that “evolution, linking us to the understandable reality of the universe, has more meaning that an arbitrary creation by some other-worldly being or beings” means that he has a definite theological position, and saying that “Science classes should teach science” only raises the question of what he means by “science.”

Happily, he answers that. Read More ›

At Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea profiles Patricia Churchland, author of Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton University Press), who explains “I would read contemporary ethicists and just feel very unsatisfied. It was like I couldn’t see how to tether any of it to the hard and fast. I couldn’t see how it had anything to do with evolutionary biology, which it has to do, and I couldn’t see how to attach it to the brain.” As an eliminative materialist (there really is no “you”), she is confident that evolutionary biology will help us understand morality. With what result?

The element of cultural relativism also remains somewhat mysterious in Churchland’s writings on morality. In some ways, her project dovetails with that of Sam Harris, the “New Atheist” (and neuroscience Ph.D.) who believes reason and neuroscience can replace woolly armchair philosophy and religion as guides to morality. But her defense of some practices of primitive tribes, including infanticide (in the context of scarcity) —as well the seizing of enemy women, in raids, to keep up the stock of mates— as “moral” within their own context, seems the opposite of his approach.I reminded Churchland, who has served on panels with Harris, that he likes to put academics on the spot by asking if they think such practices as the early 19th-century Hindu tradition of burning widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres was objectively wrong.

So did she think so? Read More ›

In “’Belief’ in evolution? It may be the wrong word” (06/27/2011), Faye Flam, Philadelphia Inquirer staff writer, allows us to know that we really shouldn’t say we “believe in” evolution because, as Larry Krauss puts it,

“I have attempted, largely through spurring on from several colleagues . . . to never use the word belief in talks,” said Arizona State University physicist and writer Lawrence Krauss.

“One is asked: Does one believe in global warming, or evolution, and the temptation is to answer yes,” he said, “but it’s like saying you believe in gravity or general relativity.”

“Science is not like religion, in that it doesn’t merely tell a story . . . one that one can choose to believe or not.”

Ms. Flam typefies the legacy media in decline because she cannot Read More ›

Welcome news from ScienceDaily (June 24, 2011), for people who are fed up with Genes Rule contending with Environment Rules:

Effects of Stress Can Be Inherited, and Here’s How

“There has been a big discussion about whether the stress effect can be transmitted to the next generation without DNA sequence change,” said Shunsuke Ishii of RIKEN Tsukuba Institute. “Many people were doubtful about such phenomena because the mechanism was unknown. Our finding has now demonstrated that such phenomena really can occur.” Read More ›

Yesterday, one of our top stories was “William Lane Craig is disingenuous, and he ‘shocked’ Larry Krauss” [his materialist atheist opponent].

The oddest thing about the story is that Krauss is, as it happens, a multi-awarded physicist, hailed by Scientific American as “one of the few top physicists who is also known as a “public intellectual.” Yet his post-debate comments sound like the circular rants of a sore loser.

The really interesting question is why such behaviour is so widely admired. Why do Krauss’s friends not discreetly suggest he quit talking like this? Read More ›

Francisco Ayala, the 2010 Templeton winner known for the view that intelligent design is blasphemy and an “atrocity”*, has a new book out, Am I a Monkey? Six Big Questions about Evolution (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Here’s an excerpt.

Defending the view that you are something along the same lines as a monkey but not to worry, he writes, curiously,

Those things that count most remain shrouded in mystery: How physical phenomena become mental experiences (the feelings and sensations called “qualia” by philosophers, that contribute the elements of consciousness) and how out of the diversity of these experiences emerges the mind, a reality with unitary properties such as free will and the awareness of the self that persist throughout an individual’s life. (P. 11)Ayala sounds here as if he believes the mind exists, but he goes on to say Read More ›

Recently, there have been a number of attempts to use science to make evil intelligible. Canadian columnist David Warren reflects here, regarding a recent riot in Vancouver:

I am trying to draw attention to the very “zero” at the heart of that mob, and ultimately, any violent mob. The participants behave in ways that are finally unintelligible. To say they behave as animals would be unfair to animals, which are purposeful, and even merciful by comparison. (What they have no business with, they leave alone.)

It’s not that the books don’t explain anything. They tend to explain – either well or badly- Read More ›

[Contest closed for judging.] Contest judged here.

Recently, a list was posted to Listverse identifying Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box as “#1 in a list of 10 books that screwed up the world” because “Despite much refutation from the Scientific community, many fundamentalists still use this as a “source” for proof that evolution is not true.”

At the time, we noted,

Also rans include Mein Kampf (7) and the The Manifesto of the Communist Party (3)

[ … ]

And this beats der Fuehrer? So World War II was for nothing? Wow.

The list’s author tried to cover his base by asserting that his 10 through to 1 list order isn’t supposed to mean anything. Just an accident with numbers, like the universe itself?

Lists can be fun. So here’s the contest: Read More ›

In “Answering the Dreaded ‘Evolution’ Question” (The American Spectator 6.24.11), Jay Richards and David Klinghoffer explain how politicians can avoid the “speed trap” of the “evolution” question:

Though a president doesn’t have much influence over state and local science education policy, reporters lie in wait for the unwary candidate, ready to pounce with a question he’s poorly prepared to answer yet that is important to millions of voters. Fortunately, there’s a reply that not only avoids the trap but helps advance public understanding.

Oh yes? They suggest:  Read More ›

Few or no documentaries. Okay, that doesn’t matter. But this does: In unbylined “An Environmentalist’s Lament” (Breakthrough Journal, June 2011), we learn, once again, about the high costs of hype when it does matter:

Take last summer’s BP oil spill in Louisiana. Covering the spill was the Super Bowl of environmental journalism. You couldn’t have asked for a better disaster: the never-ending gusher, the oiled birds and tar balls, the callous foreign corporation and corrupt government agency. [ … ] I was in no position to go off chasing oil slicks — but also with a certain discomfort I couldn’t put my finger on until recently, when New Yorker staff writer Raffi Khatchadourian published an exhaustive investigation into the spill.

Read More ›