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Uncommon Descent Contest: What do we call people who refuse to read books they are attacking? – second award judged

The second award offer in the recent contest, a copy of Don Johnson’s Probability’s Nature and Nature’s Probability, asks “What do you call a guy who reviews/trashes a book without reading it?”

It goes to homerj1 at 3 for

The review is a noview and the reviewer is a noviewer.

This won because it can be used effortlessly in a sentence, as in:

Prof. Retro Darwin’s noview of biochemist Michael Behe’s latest  …

Rev. Darwin Santa, noviewer of Steve Meyer’s …

Recently, Dimbo Darwin, science writer, noviewed Bill Dembski’s latest …

Ease of use is important. And dropping the pretense of reading makes for more honest communication: Read More ›

Prominent evolutionary psychologist tries to fix a has-been town, and its religion

In Nature News (8 June 2011), Emma Marris recounts how evolutionary biologist D. S. Wilson is trying to apply  his theories to once-prosperous Binghamton, New York (pop 47,000). In “Evolution: Darwin’s city,” she explains that he has focused much of his research on “the long-standing puzzle of altruism,” (“why organisms sometimes do things for others at a cost to themselves”).

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The challenge Wilson has undertaken is to turn bad neighbours into good ones, and unwilling students into willing ones, using evolutionary psychology (though puzzled colleagues doubt that he is really doing EP). The problem is that he simply doesn’t have the needed grasp of human nature. Evolutionary psychology makes that impossible, as we shall see.

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Some wonder why that’s even a puzzle, where humans are concerned. Darwinian social theory dictates that the default switch must be set to selfishness, because then the awesome power of natural selection can be shown. From an ID perspective,  the human default switch is not in fact set to selfishness exclusively and natural selection plays a limited role in human history. So Wilson’s “puzzle” disappears in favour of innumerable conflicting motivations, many of which do not happen to be especially selfish.   Read More ›

Why were the Soviets trying to create a human-chimp hybrid?

Here’s an intellectually respectable “Blast from the past” to understand the motives, a (August 23, 2008), “The Soviet ape-man scandal” by New Scientist’s Stephanie Pain:

When Ivanov put his proposal to the Academy of Sciences he painted it as the experiment that would prove men had evolved from apes. “If he crossed an ape and a human and produced viable offspring then that would mean Darwin was right about how closely related we are,” says Etkind. Read More ›

Sometimes smart people just don’t notice the world around them as closely …

This from Martin Eiermann’s (The European, 30.05.2011) interview with Stewart Brand, author, biologist, and environmental activist from the 1960s onward:

Brand: Steven Pinker [materialist cognitive scientist (Harvard)] is currently working on a book about the decline of violence through human history. We like to think that we are living in a very violent time, that the future looks dark. But the data says that violence has declined every millennium, every century, every decade. The reduction in cruelty is just astounding. So we should not focus too much on the violence that has marked the twentieth century. The interesting question is how we can continue that trend of decreasing violence into the future. What options are open to us to make the world more peaceful? Those are data-based questions.  Read More ›

Dumped BioLogians could make own Expelled film?

From my notes on Christianity Today’s June 2011 “Darwin ‘n Jesus ‘n me” article. The article offers a look at Christian Darwinist think tank BioLogos: Biblical exegete Daniel C. Harlow, along with theologian John R. Schneider, are being investigated for violating doctrinal standards at Calvin College, for their work in ASA’s Perspectives. BioLogos (Christian Darwinist think tank) has as its biblical expert Peter Enns, whose Old Testament theorizing led to his suspension from Westminster Theological Seminary (p. 26). Similarly, Tremper Longman III found that he was no longer an adjunct faculty member at Reformed Theological Seminary, due to an article he published at BioLogos, saying that nothing insists on a literal understanding of Adam. So, if this is the new Read More ›

Why don’t Christians speak up? – a few reasons as if reality mattered

Wintery Knight asks why intelligent, educated Christians won’t speak up for their views.

Why is this not being addressed by churches?

Do you have an experience where a Christian group stifled apologetics? Tell me about that, and why do you think they would do that, in view of the situation I outlined above? My experience is that atheists (as much as I tease them) are FAR more interested in apologetics than church Christians – they are the ones who borrow books and debates, and try to get their atheist wives to go to church after they becomes interested in going to church. Why is that?

A couple of thoughts: Read More ›

Are the wheels coming off Harvard’s multi-million endowment to find the origin of life?

This one, where Harvard pledged $1 million annually in 2005. One gets that impression from Sophie Wharton’s “Searching for life’s origins, on Earth and beyond”, Undergraduate Research Journal ( Spring 2009): After the $8 billion hit that Harvard’s endowment took a few months ago, there is fear that funding to the Origins of Life Initiative may suffer too. The progress of the Initiative is hindered by the lack of a dedicated space for labs, which are currently scattered throughout the University. Nevertheless, the development of a new science campus in Allston – on the other side of the Charles River – offers a promising solution. But it’s not hard to see what the problem is: Another group in the Initiative Read More ›

Maybe you wouldn’t have been better off if you’d gone to Harvard … ?

Where people who are prepared to blow $1 million a year on discovering the origin of life … when we hardly have a clue what to look for: Confidence in progress has now been replaced by postulation of change. Progress is achieved and can be welcomed, but change just happens and must be adjusted to. “Adjusting to change” is now the unofficial motto of Harvard, mutabilitas instead of veritas. To adjust, the new Harvard must avoid adherence to any principle that does not change, even liberal principle. Yet in fact it has three principles: diversity, choice, and equality. To respect change, diversity must serve to overcome stereotypes, though stereotypes are necessary to diversity. How else is a Midwesterner diverse if Read More ›

“Can’t we all just get along?” Look, need we read more than the abstract?

… of this paper by Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at University of British Columbia, Canada “Explaining Human Behavioral Diversity,” in Science (27 May 2011) People have been captivated and puzzled by human diversity since ancient times. In today’s globalized world, many of the key challenges facing humanity, such as reversing climate change, coordinating economic policies, and averting war, entail unprecedented cooperation between cultural groups on a global scale. Success depends on bridging cultural divides over social norms, habits of thinking, deeply held beliefs, and values deemed sacred. If we ignore, underestimate, or misunderstand behavioral differences, we do so at everyone’s peril. What is this paper doing in a science journal? How does one “co-operate” with people who honestly do not Read More ›

Why lots of smart people don’t agree with Stephen Hawking that

… death ends all – my current MercatorNet article (26 May 2011):

… most people have not assumed that we survive death because they are “afraid of the dark,” as Hawking supposes. On the contrary, the oldest beliefs usually include ancestor worship, which includes propitiating the continuing spirits of unpleasant ancestors for fear they will otherwise harm us. Or, as Beauregard and I put it [in The The Spiritual Brain] , in such a society the problem isn’t that everyone dies, but that no one does. (p. 48)  Read More ›

Academic push poll linking ID with fear of death: Possible backfire?

Richard Weikart, Cal State U prof and author of Hitler’s Ethic, wrote UD a note on the recent study in which fear of death supposedly increased support for ID (yes, that one where they stitched together a bunch of stuff to represent  ID theorist Michael Behe, including stuff he hadn’t written1).

Weikart says,

This article is intending to suggest that people believe in Intelligent Design because of their “death anxiety” (rather than empirical evidence). However, the solution suggested by these researchers—to explicitly explain to people that evolution can provide meaning and purpose to their lives—is astonishing, if you really think about it. Read More ›

Eugenics and the Firewall: An interview with Jane Harris Zsovan, Part III

Denyse: First, step with us a moment into Scientific American’s past (a past it repudiates) where, in 1911, it enthusiastically editorialized about “The Science of Breeding Better Men.” How about this for an opening line: “ADA JUKE is known to anthropologists as the ‘mother of criminals.'” Well, how’s that for coming straight to the point? The solution?

The proper attitude to be taken toward the perpetuation of poor types is that which has been attributed to [Thomas] Huxley. “We are sorry for you,” he is reported to have said; “we will do our best for you (and in so doing we elevate ourselves, since mercy blesses him that gives and him that takes), but we deny you the right to parentage. You may live, but you must not propagate.”

Actually, her real name was “Margaret,” and the history was rather more complex than eugenics hysteria allowed for. In Canada, the worry surfaced as a fear that “the British race was ‘becoming small, dark, and emotional'” (p. 26). Maybe that’s code for “like the separatist-minded French-speaking Catholics of Quebec” …
(This is the third and final part of Uncommon Descent’s interview with Jane Harris Zsovan, author of Eugenics and the Firewall about her book on the controversial topic of social Darwinist eugenics in Western Canada in the mid-twentieth century. Here’s Part I and here’s Part II.) Read More ›

Prager: Secular apocalypses undermine public’s view of science

Dennis PragerLots of people, including us folk at Uncommon Descent are accused of  “undermining science.”

Dennis Prager, reflecting on last weekend’s “Prepare to Meet Thy Doom“-fest observes that secular apocalypses (that never really happen) have done our work for us:

There is one major difference between leftist and religious doomsday scenarios. The religious readily acknowledge that their doomsday scenario is built entirely on faith. The left, on the other hand, claims that its doomsday scenarios are entirely built on science. Read More ›

Fashion is usually “as if biology wasn’t real” …

… and, despite best intentions, this doesn’t feel like an exception. The effort to meld developmental biology and fashion statements may be doomed in the chrysalis: Helen and Kate collaborated in 1997 to create a series of fashion/textile designs, spanning the first 1,000 hours of human life. Producing these at London College of Fashion, Helen and Kate worked interactively using design at multiple levels to evoke the key embryonic processes that underlie our development. Seen and acclaimed by millions internationally and called a ‘cultural hybrid’, it changed the course of Helen’s career – her time is now devoted to ideas and work rooted in science. Kate is dedicated to the public understanding of science.  Mixing fashion and biology doesn’t work Read More ›