Pigliucci on accomodationism

Massimo Pigliucci has decided to weigh in on the debate over accommodationism that has been happening in the atheist blogosphere for forever now, coming down on the side of the accomodationists. Unlike Mooney and Nisbet, Pigliucci is clear that he’s interested in matters of philosophical principle, not tactics. (Mooney and Nisbet, in contrast, may well [...]

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Anti-adaptation bias

Here’s Jerry Coyne on the evolutionary roots of religion:
I like the “byproduct” hypothesis, if for no other reason than it’s almost self-evidently true. Surely every human behavior is in some sense a byproduct of genes that evolved for other reasons. And if religion, like music-making, jokes, and pornography, is an outgrowth of genes that [...]

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Medieval fallacies and modern theists

Vic Reppert links to a foolish and arrogant interview with Granville Sewell, the guy who sold Dembski on thermodynamics arguments against evolution (an achievement for which all critics of the ID movement are indebted to him). Here’s the core of the interview:
In fact, although this may come as a surprise to our students, mathematicians are [...]

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Awful Guardian piece on the climate non-scandal

Via The Volokh Conspiracy, the Guardian has a new piece which appears to show that, finally, journalists have discovered something scandalous in the hacked climate research e-mails. Except that once again, if you look closely, the situation hasn’t changed from what I described in December. A scientist was accused of fraud, but there’s no evidence [...]

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A reason for liberals to hate teachers unions?

My old professor John Hawks has a post up highlighting an incident where it took half a million dollars to fire a single creationist science teacher. The original article isn’t clear on why that happened, only saying that “he asked for a pre-termination hearing.” But why does a lowly middle school teacher have the power [...]

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