More Egnorance about Darwin and language in the Washington Post

Well, given the number of comments on my review in the Washington Post of Tom Wolfe’s abysmal new book on Darwin, Chomsky, and the evolutionary basis of language (Wolfe says there is no such basis), I shouldn’t have been surprised that there would be pushback from readers. But what I didn’t expect was that one of the […]

Yahoo news claims evolution “just got harder to defend”. Nope.

This headline, with a link to the full article by Eric Metaxas (who, after C.S. Lewis, describes himself as a “mere Christian”), was on the front page of Yahoo News yesterday (click screenshot to go there): To see the full “argument,” such as it is, you have to go to the conservative news service CNSnews.com, which took […]

NPR’s Barbara King dismisses Tom Wolfe’s knowledge of evolution, but still recommends reading his new book

Barbara King, a retired anthropology professor at William and Mary (my alma mater), has a regular column at National Public Radio’s (NPR’s), Cosmos & Culture site.  The column this week, “Evolution uproar: What to do when a famous author dismisses Darwin, ” is devoted to Tom Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom Of Speech, which I reviewed […]

The masses comment on the Wolfe review

Nick Cohen’s advice to authors includes this gem: “Never read the comments.” And I nearly always follow that dictum, except for the comments on this site.  I also made an exception for my review of Tom Wolfe’s book in the Washington Post. I wanted to see how people reacted to my defense of evolution, realizing that […]

I’m #3

This is gratifying, despite the numerous creationists infesting the comments—people who don’t know squat about biology and nevertheless feel compelled to pronounce on it. Several people said, “We know nothing about speciation,” apparently unaware that I wrote a 450-page book telling biologists what we know (and want to know) about that very field! Even worse […]

Skimpy attendance at the Ark Park?

I’ve heard various rumors that Ken Ham’s Ark Encounter, better known as the “Ark Park”, isn’t drawing the huge crowds of goddies—or young goddies-to-be—that it predicted. According to The Friendly Atheist, Ken Ham said the park would lure 2 million visitors a year, or 5,500 visitors a day, but it didn’t even get those numbers the […]

Tom Wolfe discusses his new book on NPR, claiming that humans “didn’t evolve from animals”; NPR doesn’t challenge that

This weekend, National Public Radio (NPR) host Scott Simon interviewed renowned author Tom Wolfe about Wolfe’s new book The Kingdom of Speech. You can hear the five-minute interview here. I just now listened to it, but several exercised readers emailed me yesterday complaining about Wolfe’s criticisms of evolution—criticisms that weren’t called out by Simon. Let me begin by […]

University of South Carolina dumps its football chaplain

At the end of August, 2015, I wrote a longish post (see also here) about the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF’s) “Pray to Play” report, detailing the incursion of religion into 18 public universities via the establishment of “football chaplains.” These chaplains, 100% of whom are Christian, are hired to pray with the players and get them to […]

God vs. physics: Krauss debates Meyer and Lamoureaux

I haven’t yet watched yesterday’s Religion and Society debate at Wycliffe College in Toronto: “What’s behind it all? God, science, and the universe,” whose description is this: Has a scientific explanation of the universe replaced the need for God as cause of its origins? Could life on our planet exist apart from divine intervention? Is […]

The New Adventures of Angry Cat Man

Learning that I had been called “Angry Cat Man” by faculty at the Lab School because of what I write on my website, reader Pliny the in Between produced an appropriate cartoon, whose title is given in the header. Recognize my Evil Minion? Did you notice that the CatSuit has the coloration of a feline familiar to […]