Category Archives: Uncategorized

Greta Christina on atheism

Yes, I swiped this from Richard Dawkins’s website (thanks, RD!), but I had to pass it along to those readers who missed it.  This is a collection of ten articles about atheism by Greta Christina, who has previously been below my radar.  Christina is a free-lance writer, an atheist, and a lesbian who writes a [...]

Dick Lewontin interview

The Lewontin interview (very short) is now up at the Chicago Evolution website.   I’ll get to interview him at greater length on Dec. 31 for Current Biology.  If you have questions you’d like posed to the Great Man, post them here (no guarantees they’ll be asked!).

More evidence for evolution: dead genes in sea snakes

Well, we don’t really need any more evidence for evolution, do we?  But it keeps pouring in, the latest in a paper from the Journal of Evolutionary Biology (link is to the abstract, and if you have journal access you’ll find the paper in the online “early edition”).
In WEIT I talk about olfactory receptor (“OR”) [...]

Bloggingheads: Wright vs. Hitchens, part II

Bloggingheads.tv has put up the second part of the 77-minute dialogue between Christopher Hitchens and Robert Wright; the link is here.
The whole dialogue turns on Wright’s objection to Hitchens’s book subtitle: “Religion poisions everything.”  There’s no discussion, or virtually none, about whether or not the claims of religion are true; rather, H&W argue about whether [...]

Darwin conference photos

Bob Richards has put up a few dozen photos from our Darwin conference in October. If you enjoy seeing evolutionary biologists and philosophers in flagrante delicto, go here.  We’ll have an interview up shortly with Richard Lewontin (my Ph.D. advisor), and the videos of the talks themselves are on the way.

Fig. 1.  The Boss (aka [...]

Italian science organization funds creationist book

This week’s Science reports that the main science funding agency in Italy — their equivalent of the NIH or NSF — has not only funded but promoted a creationist book.  (There’s more on this debacle at the Dec. 9 Science Insider.)
Evolutionism: the decline of an hypothesis was assembled by Roberto de Mattei, a historian of [...]

Roger Ebert: New Agers and creationists should not be President

God bless Roger Ebert (that’s a metaphor), one of Chicago’s greatest assets.  And although he can no longer speak, his voice is getting ever louder on his website.  In his December 2 entry he takes on the supernaturalists:
If you were attending a dinner party of community leaders in Dallas, Atlanta, Omaha or Colorado Springs and [...]

Evolution Rap

Today’s turning out to be Video Saturday.
Most academic rap videos are pretty geeky and dire, but this one is really good: “3.5 ’til infinity”, by Bill Durham and his Galápagos gangstas.

Think about it. If there were hella elephants
Growing exponentially with none remaining celibate,
We’d all be swimming in elephantal juices;
So who decides [...]

Dear God, please stop the healthcare reform bill

o.k., this is really scary.  Here are the reliably insane congresswoman Michele Bachmann and conservative activist Lou Engle, accompanied by a zany cast of chanting Republicans, praying at a Family Research Council “prayercast” aimed at stopping Obama’s healthcare bill.  And if, God help you, you want to watch a whole hour of people importuning God [...]

Reason Project video contest

The Reason Project has announced its annual video contest: make a video.  Your video that promotes rationality and/or scientific thinking could win up to ten thousand dollars. (There are three prizes.)  Make big bucks and save the world at the same time — how do you beat that?