The New Yorker features Robert Lang and the incineration of his origami
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You heard it here first, folks, so the New Yorker was slow on the uptake (and they don’t have the photos and videos that I featured). At any rate, the new issue features the recent story of R…
8h ago
The FFRF removed my piece on the biological definition of “woman”
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When I wrote yesterday about my critique of Kat Grant’s “What is a woman?” piece, a critique published on the Freedom from Religion Foundation’s (FFRF) website, I had no ide…
on Jan 2
I resign from the Freedom from Religion Foundation
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This is the result of a dispute I’ve explained before (see here). Because the FFRF has caved into to gender extremism, an area having nothing to do with its mission, and because, when they le…
on Dec 29
A third one leaves the fold: Richard Dawkins resigns from the Freedom from Religion Foundation
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Well, that makes three of us. Steve Pinker, I, and now Richard Dawkins, have all decided independently to resign from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The organiz…
on Dec 29
Another one leaves the fold: Steve Pinker resigns from the Freedom from Religion Foundation
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Like me, Steve Pinker has resigned from the Honorary Board of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). His resignation was sent yesterday. Steve is a bigger macher than I. both intellectually …
on Dec 29
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As I noted yesterday, Biden has commuted the sentences of all but three federal prisoners on death row; they’ll now be serving life behind bars without parole instead. I insisted that this wa…
on Dec 28
The John Templeton Foundation is at it again
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It’s been called to my attention that the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) is up to mischief again. I haven’t written about it for a long time, largely because I thought it had reformed.…
on Dec 23
Belief in moralistic gods makes people generous—towards coreligionists
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I’ve been meaning to write about this paper for some time, but it’s fallen into my backlog of 1000-odd draft posts that I almost never look at. However, I found a printout in my daypack…
on Dec 16
“Scientism” conference on our campus
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UPDATE: For another splenetic take on scientism, read David Brin's post, "The dangerous chimera called 'scientism." An excerpt:The crusade to discredit all fact-using professions is an existential t
on Oct 7
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: nuclear policy needs to be “queered”
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The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) is most famous for its "Doomsday Clock," which assesses how close we are to a worldwide anthropomorphic catastrophe, including global warming and nuclear war. R
on Aug 24
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I'm tired of Bret Weinstein pushing conspiracy theories, and just as tired of him making proclamations about evolutionary biology that are misleading or flat wrong. I'm especially peeved today becau
on Aug 14
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A brand-new paper from Nature Ecology & Evolution used a clever technique to estimate the age of "LUCA",. the "last universal common ancestor" of all living things. What that means is LUCA is the
on Jul 18
Still more about the frequency of women hunting
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A while back, the paper by Anderson et al. appeared in PLOS One, and caused a bit of a stir in the press because of its claims that women contributed far more to hunting in various societies than anth
on Jun 24
MIT abandons use of DEI statements
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DEI statements are affirmations made when you're applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of "diversity, equity, a
on May 5
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Well, this is unexpected, and details will be forthcoming. He was 82.https://twitter.com/ferrisjabr/status/1781348138881802563I have lots of stories about Dan, and found him amiable and charit
on Apr 19
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There's more DNA-dissing is going on, this time in a piece in Aeon arguing that it is bad for society and for biology to think of the cell as an assembly line of molecules controlled by a "boss" in th
on Mar 28
New paper doubts estimates of how often women hunted in hunter-gatherer societies
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Twitter is good for some stuff, and the best are 1.) cat and duck pictures and 2.) finding out about new science papers, often before they're published. Remember the conflict last year about the fre
on Mar 6
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Of all places, Vanity Fair has a short but interesting discussion of the New York Times headline fracas! You may remember that when there was an explosion in a Gaza hospital on October 17, the NYT rep
on Oct 28, 2023
How Palestinian kids are taught to hate Jews
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It doesn't take much studying or Googling to learn that Palestinian kids, like many kids throughout the Middle East, are taught from a young age to hate Jews, to embrace the goal of killing them, to b
on Oct 28, 2023
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Scientific American just can't help itself; it has to keep pounding away at the biological definition of sex, which is based on differential gamete size. Just the other day they published a full artic
on Oct 26, 2023