February, 2013, and beyond - Post of the Month

When considering this history, it would be, well, odd to consider an outbreak of typhus in a particular city in France as somehow presenting a challenge to our image of history because it was not recorded in a different city in Italy. To further claim that this occurrence ("intrusion") of typhus ("lava") into the records of the French town was not part of history ("the geological column") would also be odd, to say the least.

Even in this thread, people talk about science as if it's synonymous with reality, or that it's self-evident that it's the only source of knowledge worth considering. If scientists like Dawkins and Krauss tell us we're nothing but gene machines or cosmic pollution, then dammit, that's all we are. If there were anything unique or meaningful about human existence, the story goes, science would have detected it by now! The audience for this sort of cheerleading has been groomed by a culture where gadgetry is more important than the arts or humanities, and where our view of what constitutes empirical inquiry is de-historicized and philosophically shallow.

And to Faith's idea that "blacks find it offensive," I find it offensive that anybody would dare to deny the equivalency of the fight for civil rights based upon race with the fight for civil rights based upon sexual orientation. If we're going to go down that road, gays have it worse:

I feel like I’ve made a good-faith effort to understand and explain, but I’m still having trouble identifying what keeps you from agreeing with my perspective on what is and what isn’t rational.Maybe it’s because I’ve only ever presented one paper on beneficial mutations? Maybe you think we only have one experiment that supports our idea that mutations create new alleles? Is that the problem?Just in case it is, here are a few more examples:... (see link)When we say that alleles come from mutations, we aren’t making wild, unfounded assumptions. There really is very good evidence that alleles come from mutations, and a lot of scientists have put in a lot of hard work to acquire that evidence. And, there is no evidence that alleles come from anywhere else. Until that evidence comes out, mutation seems like the best --- indeed, the only --- hypothesis we’ve got.