Entries in "politics"
February 22, 2007
Why I found Collapse
so depressing
On Monday, Mano Singham wrote about The odd response to global warming warnings, and this reminded me that I never finished my response to Jared Diamond's Collapse
. I finished reading the book some time ago, and unfortunately continued to be more convinced by the doom-and-gloom side of the argument...than the hopeful side
.
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so depressing"
February 13, 2007
Unmentionables
I read a rather depressing article this morning: Evolution by Any Other Name: Antibiotic Resistance and Avoidance of the E-Word. The paper presented a [not exhaustive, but reasonably convincing] survey of articles about the phenomenon of antibiotic resistant pathogens, in which the authors found a striking difference between the use of language in the 'evolutionary' literature versus papers in the 'biomedical' literature.
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October 11, 2005
Life is a cup of tea
I've been avoiding the evolution vs 'intelligent design' debate for the most part, because it seems like something that would need a significant input of time to approach in a way that's not pointlessly shallow. I think there are interesting questions to be asked about why 'intelligent design' has such traction with parts of the population, but others do this better than I can. Mano Singham in particular keeps coming back to the topic, and always has something worthwhile to say.
However, I read something this morning that I had to share. Last week's Economist had a report from the Dover PA court case in which the school board is being challenged over its decision to include ID in the curriculum. I was particularly taken with one quote, because I thought it an unusually succint way of explaining how a devout religious person need not have any difficulty accepting the idea of evolution. It was John Haught's analogy between different levels of explanation for life and different levels of explanation for his boiling kettle:
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May 12, 2005
Protesting a protest
Update on the 26th of May: the boycott I describe below has been overturned
I don't know how big an issue this has been in the news outside the UK, but the AUT (a big university teachers' union) recently passed a motion approving a boycott of two Israeli Universities. The most comprehensive, even-handed article I've seen about this appeared recently in the Christian Science Monitor, and it's worth a read.
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April 11, 2005
What we are up against
No time to discuss this deeply now, but read and weep: creationist misinformation in a Tennessee diner.
What I will say is this: it wasn't until I moved to the US that I understood how much of a battleground the theory of evolution really is, or how much it ties in with the deep social & political divides across this country. It is frightening to me, as a member of the reality-based community to contemplate how we can fight back against an enemy that shows no concern for those little nuisances called 'facts', without becoming as bad as they are.
[reference spotted by Stanek]
March 21, 2005
What Summers did wrong
Having written all that I did in defence of Summers' argument, I still don't have a great deal of sympathy for him. He did make several very important mistakes, which are things he should know better than to do, and go some way towards explaining the depth of hot water he's ended up in.
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What Summers actually said
I've been following the Larry Summers controversy with some interest, but I didn't want to say anything about it myself until I had read his actual words. I finally got around to reading the transcript of the speech on the weekend, and to my less than complete surprise the whole thing seems rather overblown.