Well, there was a surprise. I opened the mailbox this afternoon and what was sitting on top but the Continuum catalogue. Continuum Philosophy 2006, it says. Ooooh, thought I, all excited. Jeremy mentioned a few weeks ago that he’d got one in the post, but I thought I wasn’t going to get one. But now here it was. I was excited because JS told me our book was featured. I liked that idea.

So, after a suitable interval, after doing various things and going up and down various flights of stairs and getting everything just so, I found a pair of scissors under a pile of books and papers (piles of books and papers are a permanent feature around here, … Read the rest

And another thing. That idea that Dennett mentioned in the Spiegel interview.

…the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making a potter. It is always the other way around and this is so obvious that it just seems to stand to reason.

That’s the idea that ‘Intelligent Design’ is all about, of course. The argument from incredulity – we just can’t believe that something as complex as a cell could have turned up without being designed. The argument from nonexplanation … Read the rest

Well great. Just great. Wonderful. Brilliant. Meera’s in India right now, and she was going to be presenting a paper at a science conference. Well, I hope to hell it wasn’t this one!

A gunman has burst into a science conference in the southern Indian city of Bangalore, opening fire and injuring at least five people, police said. The gunman escaped after firing his automatic rifle at the Indian Institute of Science…The victims were said to be scientists and laboratory technicians attending the conference.

Good move. Well done, gunman – that’s the ticket. Don’t want any pesky scientists cluttering up the place in India, do we. No – what possible use could scientists and lab technicians be in India?!… Read the rest

Well isn’t B&W up to date. Yes, it is. No sooner do I find Daniel Dennett’s comment on the Kitzmiller decision in my email and rush to post it, than I find a Spiegel interview with Daniel Dennett on evolution and ID.

Spiegel asks why evolution is so particularly troubling to religious people, compared with other scientific theories.

It counters one of the oldest ideas we have, maybe older even than our species…It’s the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation. You’ll never see a spear making a spear maker. You’ll never see a horse shoe making a blacksmith. You’ll never see a pot making

This again. I seem to have this argument every ten days or so. The issues are just never framed properly – instead they’re framed evasively and euphemistically, and how can anything be discussed properly when the air is clouded by evasion and euphemism? I ask you.

What argument? The free speech one. The one that swirls around the thought that free speech is not about the easy cases but about the hard ones. One version of that is the discussion of hypocrisy and double standards, as in Mark Steyn’s inaccurate whinge about Hampstead big guns who ‘lined up’ to defend Rushdie but wouldn’t (according to Steyn) line up to defend Lynette Burrows, and as in this one about Orhan Pamuk … Read the rest