Jeffrey Shallit scorches poor Pamela Winnick, an anti-science, pro-creationism writer who came out with a book titled A Jealous God: Science’s Crusade Against Religion. Would you be surprised to learn she’s guilty of sloppy scholarship, misleading quote-mining, and outright lies? Just like the rest of ’em.
Eh. It’s a mannered debate about the plural of “octopus”. Honestly, I think fretting about whether the root is Latin or Greek and the ending of the plural form matches is a waste of time—we’re speaking English. What matters is that it is understood, and what the convention is. So let’s ask the scientists who study octo-whatsises!
Searching PubMed for the various forms of “octopus” gives the following numbers of references:
| Octopus: | 1,608 |
| Octopuses: | 592 |
| Octopods: | 16 |
| Octopi: | 6 |
| Octopodes: | 0 |
| Octopedes: | 0 |
I’m sticking with octopuses, the form hallowed by informed usage. I won’t spit in your eye if you call them octopi. I suspect the only people who would call them octopedes are skulking about on the humanities side of campus.
George W Bush hasn’t vetoed a single bill in all these long, long years of his presidency. Guess what issue might finally convince him to move?
He’s willing to veto any expansion of stem cell research.
That’s our George. Science isn’t part of his base, so he’ll willingly throw that away to make the church-based ignoramuses happy. Zygotes must be spared! It’s the ones that have been born that can be used as cannon fodder.
Hard to believe, but check out the source this anti-choicer uses to back up his essay on the callous horror of abortion.
Satire and irony are now officially dead.
The author has a new post up—he still doesn’t get it. He’s still babbling about the fictional author of the Onion piece getting all those abortions.
It’s a marvel. There really are people that stupid out there.
(via Curly Tales of War Pigs)
Mark Isaak has opened a discussion on The Panda’s Thumb about The Larger Issue of Bad Religion. It’s good to discuss the problem of religion, but my main complaint is the attempt to separate ‘good religion’ from ‘bad religion’, and suggesting that we should be lauding those ‘good religionists’ to win them over to our side. Unfortunately, we don’t have a criterion to distinguish the two, and I fear that if we did define them, those practitioners of ‘good religion’ would be vanishingly small, and not particularly strongly associated with any particular sect.
I’d suggest that ‘good religion’ is merely something called a religion, which has stripped away everything relating to superstition and any concrete concept of a deity, but then everyone would call them godless atheists anyway and we’d be right back where we started.
Revere and Tara make fun of a silly guest commentary from a very silly man who thinks them evilutionists are cheating by using the term “mutation”—that changes in the virulence of a disease are examples of a “population shift,” which has nothing to do with evolution.
Just a note to any journalists or newspaper editors who might read this: the Panda’s Thumb has a useful list of scientists and other defenders of evolution who are willing—no, overjoyed—to vet these kinds of strange anti-scientific tirades. We’re also willing to help with any pro-science articles you might be moved to write. It’s kind of sad that this list is sitting there, and we rarely hear from any responsible journalists; I think I’ve had 3 calls in a year and a half. What’s the problem, is it just easier to take the press releases the Discovery Institute pushes at you, without bothering with that difficult job of actually questioning any of it?
It’s his birthday, and Coturnix has gathered about eleventy billion links to Tesliana (Teslaniana? Is there a word for this, or am I just making things up?)
Carel Brest van Kempen has extracted a few fascinating quotes from an old book he has. It’s titled Creative and Sexual Science, by a phrenologist and physiologist from 1870, and it contains some wonderful old examples of folk genetics.
President Bush would be pleased:
“Human and animal hybrids are denounced most terribly in the Bible; obviously because the mixing up of man with beast, or one beast species with another, deteriorates. Universal amalgamation would be disastrous.”
Although, unfortunately, he then goes on to use this as an argument against miscegenation.
Another lesson is that you shouldn’t deny pregnant women anything, or their longing will mark their child.
“A woman, some months before the birth of her child, longed for strawberries, which she could not obtain. Fearing that this might mark her child, and having heard that it would be marked where she then touched herself, she touched her hip. Before the child was born she predicted that it would have a mark resembling a strawberry, and be found on its hip, all of which proved to be true.”
Don’t let them see horrible things, either.
“Mrs. Lee, of London, Ont., saw Burly executed from her window; who, in swinging off, broke the rope, and fell with his face all black and blue from being choked. This horrid sight caused her to feel awfully; and her son, born three months afterwards, whenever anything occurs to excite his fears, becomes black and blue in the face, an instance of which the Author witnessed.”
And…uh-oh. Maybe George W. Bush won’t be so thrilled with this part.
“A child in Boston bears so striking a resemblance to a monkey, as to be observed by all. Its mother visited a menagerie while pregnant with it, when a monkey jumped on her shoulders.”
I think Carel needs to get busy and transcribe the whole thing onto the web. I know I’ll find these examples useful when I teach genetics this spring.
Billmon reviews An Inconvenient Truth, and its more of a lament for the fact that science and reason seem to have little compelling power to a nation raised on ranting idiots and authoritarian dogma.
In my darker moments, it sometimes seems as if the entire world is in the middle of a fierce backlash against the Age of Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the ideological challenges they posed to the old belief systems. The forces of fundamentalism and obscurantism appear to be on the march everywhere—even as the moral and technological challenges posed by a global industrial civilization grow steadily more complex.
I think a lot of us have that feeling nowadays.
I was going to just restore one old post, but it linked to another, and that one linked to others, and finally I just went ahead and dragged in the whole interlinked conglomeration.
