Yes, he does. I’ve had to put it below the fold just in case it might blister my readers’ eyeballs.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Yes, he does. I’ve had to put it below the fold just in case it might blister my readers’ eyeballs.
Many of us are familiar with The Brick Bible, retellings of Bible stories using Lego bricks. The author made a stunning announcement on facebook today.
I had no idea that he was skilled at more than writing novels, but apparently his drawings and paintings were quite good. This one is magnificent!
Posting it here is not an endorsement of Ben’s position, but he has reasonable arguments that I’m willing to give an airing.
PZ Myers
I imagine most readers of this blog are familiar with Jerry Coyne. If not, he’s a prominent biologist and atheist who maintains the blog Why Evolution is True. And apparently, he has taken to blocking commenters who disagree with him, even over substantive scientific issues.
First, some background: A conflict has been brewing over how to model the evolution of social behavior. At issue is a method called inclusive fitness theory, which emphasizes the role of genetic relatedness between interacting organisms. In 2011, Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita, and EO Wilson (hereafter, NTW) published an article arguing that inclusive fitness is a mathematically limited method, and that the role of relatedness has been overemphasized in the evolution of worker castes in social insects.
NTW’s article generated a strong response—most famously, a letter signed by 137 prominent researchers (also some talking bears). I happen to agree with Nowak, and have collaborated with him and Wilson on follow-up work. However, intelligent people can disagree on this issue, and I trust that science will sort it out.
It’s full of fierce independent women. Adda Þóreyjardóttir Smáradóttir (also, full of great names) demonstrated for equality by posting a picture of herself bare-breasted on twitter — if men can do it, women ought to have that privilege, too — and as you might expect, immediately got a rash of misogynistic comments. So what did other Icelandic women do? They posted pictures of their breasts in solidarity.
For your perusal, a new Gender Workshop post by Crip Dyke. Herein we discuss how feminists, in particular Katha Pollitt, can fail to recognize feminism when it comes in the form of transfeminism. The readers themselves will have to judge the applicability of the title. For more active exercises in the workshop series, this here is a link back.
CaitieCat, a regular commenter here, recently brought to my attention this article, which discusses trans* persons’ reproductive rights in the context of feminist reproductive rights activism.
Along the way, it mentions a recent Katha Pollitt piece in the Nation. Together, these pieces have created a good opportunity to explore transfeminism’s role in current feminisms.
Transfeminism, as I have defined it in my teaching, is the integration of feminism into trans* advocacy simultaneously and in coordination with the integration of trans* advocacy into feminism. It is of necessity something that is often labeled “intersectional feminism” (though we’ll critique that in another post). Here I won’t go much further into what transfeminism is. Rather, we’ll take a look at how current feminism demonstrates the need for a strong transfeminist response. [Read more…]
I’m going to be speaking in Köln, Germany on the 22nd of May, at the International Atheist conference. They just posted some videos from previous events — I was last there in 2012. I listened to the first bit of this talk (really, I can’t bear to watch videos of myself) just to remind myself of what I talked about then, and to make sure my planned talk doesn’t overlap (it doesn’t). But I did learn something important from my brief glimpse.
Eric Hovind gave a talk at a public high school in Georgia. He titled it “Critical Thinking”, and tried to claim that it wasn’t an out-and-out creationist talk.
He lied.
Jonny Scaramanga makes some excellent points about debates. He’s talking about his appearance on the BBC’s The Big Question, but it’s the same thing: what makes for drama is to have two sides battle it out, and you get even more dramatic drama if one side is a collection of extremists who are committed to a set of demented views.
