Fans de Waal is a crucial figure in the research into morality, fairness, reciprocal altruism and suchlike within the realm…
So you might well have caught this on various science websites, but the thoughts of a fish, a zebrafish, have been caught on camera. As Gizmodo report:
A team of Japanese researchers has achieved something incredible: they’ve captured, for the first time ever, a movie which shows how thoughts form in the brain.
There’s this damned of all sayings—‘a jack of all trades, the master of none’—which haunts me. It presents itself to me in moments of existential crisis. When I consider how so many fields feed into one another, I want to own them all; be the expert in philosophy, science, mathematics, history, theology, biblical exegesis, etc. But is it possible or even reasonable to assume that one can become at the least, say, ‘a master of most trades, a jack of few?’
You would have to be a cultural hermit not to realise that the film production of the famous Victor Hugo book and resulting musical has recently hit our cinema screens to largely rapturous welcome.
Largely. Not exclusively.
So, a review:
Having seen theist after theist squirm and perform mental gymnastics in order to make sense of the countenancing of slavery within the Bible, it’s about time Nonstampcollector produced a knockdown video on this subject.
Feb. 1, 2013 — We’ve all heard examples of animal altruism: Dogs caring for orphaned kittens, chimps sharing food or dolphins nudging injured mates to the surface. Now, a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests some plants are altruistic too.
The researchers looked at corn, in which each fertilized seed contained two “siblings” — an embryo and a corresponding bit of tissue known as endosperm that feeds the embryo as the seed grows, said CU-Boulder Professor Pamela Diggle. They compared the growth and behavior of the embryos and endosperm in seeds sharing the same mother and father with the growth and behavior of embryos and endosperm that had genetically different parents.
Beth, over at SIN’s Incongruous Elements, recently posted on the Vatican approach to sex abuse (that being cover it up or sweep it under the carpet):
Fifteen years before the clergy sex abuse scandal came to light, Archbishop Roger M. Mahony and a top advisor plotted to conceal child molestation by priests from law enforcement, including keeping them out of California to avoid prosecution, according to internal Catholic church records released Monday.
The archdiocese’s failure to purge pedophile clergy and reluctance to cooperate with law enforcement has previously been known.
Feline friend or feline fiend?
Cats are one of the top threats to US wildlife, killing billions of animals each year, a study suggests.
The authors estimate they are responsible for the deaths of between 1.4 and 3.7 billion birds and 6.9-20.7 billion mammals annually.
Oh dear. The Guardian reports:
Four US states are considering new legislation about teaching science in schools, allowing pupils to to be taught religious versions of how life on earth developed in what critics say would establish a backdoor way of questioning the theory of evolution.
Fresh legislati
My deconversion was radical. The ultimate antithesis to my previous life and to people’s preconceptions of how I would live and impact the world in the future. I was raised in a charismatic Pentecostal Holiness church. Prophets would come and work the congregation into a frenzy of tears and jerking; of laughing and a mixture of hushed and explosive verbal babbling. At this point we had all been herded to the altar and, while I could never conjure tears and I hadn’t yet “accepted” the gift of tongues, every prophet managed to find their way to me. The heavy breathing and sweaty brow with the open palm landing right on my forehead. I was to be a pastor, leader, discerner, even a prophet myself.
Recently for my local Secular Student Alliance (SSA) group I gave a talk about what we can know about the historical Jesus, and perhaps he was originally a non-historical figure made flesh. This proposition is not the least bit popular among academics, let alone Evangelicals, but it isn’t necessarily crazy either. You will find some comparing it to Holocaust denial or creationism, but the evidence that Jesus existed is nowhere near as strong as it is for evolution or the Nazi-led Holocaust. There is significant evidence for Jesus, prima facie, but things get hairy when you look again.
Here is a really useful little paper by Theodore M. Drange on the contradictory aspects of God. Drange is Professor of Philosophy at West Virginia University. This article can be found here, at Philo online. This gives a neat little summary of many of the arguments against God based on his characteristics being incompatible with each other. The classic one, as touted by Dan Barker (and myself, often) is that God cannot be perfectly merciful and perfectly just at the same time. See what you think.
WASHINGTON (AP) — Thousands of people, many holding signs with names of gun violence victims and messages such as “Ban Assault Weapons Now,” joined a rally for gun control on Saturday, marching from the Capitol to the Washington Monument.
As I have reported with regards to the Scouts and the Girlguides, the British Humanist Association are doing wonders in getting (children’s) organisations to consider changing religiously orientated oaths. Now the air cadets have taken bold action themselves, as the Guardian reports:
Prometheus Books, set up by the late Paul Kurtz, is a flag-bearer for atheist and secular publishing. Check out their many cracking titles, some of which you are sure to have read. SIN’s John Loftus has had several books published by them, and I think Stephen Law, also of SIN, had his Believing Bullshit published by Prometheus, too.
As The Friendly Atheist points out, Republican politicians are pressing for a bill which would force high school students to make a pledge in order to graduate; a pledge which includes pleading to God:
One of the occasional commenters here, and a kindly man from across the pond, Russ, wrote this which I thought would…
Jerry Coyne, on his excellent blog, has detailed his opinions, whilst recounting critiques of other thinkers, on atheist philosopher Thomas Nagel’s controversial anti-evolution book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False. Well, the title is enough to make one sigh. I am including here a review / critique by one of Jerry Coyne’s first students, Allen Orr, for your delectation. This appeared in The New York Review of Books. I suggest heading over to Coyne’s piece for more detail.
Good news. Well, for me at any rate. I have been very kindly offered a short counter-apologist segment on a…
This is an intriguing report from the Telegraph, of all places. It may promote messages such as “love thy neighbour”…
I was reading a post by Don Severs over on Enough’s Enough entitled (deliberately confusingly, methinks) “Is it wrong to be resistant to opposing Anti-supernaturalism? Or not?”. The post talks about “anti-supernatural bias”, as if atheists reject the claims of the Bible out of presupposition (which can happen) rather than the fact that they are just ridiculous and completely improbable. We can even use objective methodology to arrive at such conclusions (Bayes’s Theorem).