I found something at Wikipedia. It’s quite amusing.

The entry is: Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?

“Who breaks a butterfly on a wheel?” is a quotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot of 1735, which has entered common use and has become associated with more recent figures.

Ah – has it? Who’s that then?

The philosopher Mary Midgley used a variation on the phrase in an article in the journal Philosophy written to counter a review praising The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, where she cuttingly said that she had “not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to break a butterfly upon a wheel.” Dawkins replied that this statement would be “hard to match, in reputable

A reader sent me an article from Nature Immunology a couple of weeks ago – it’s about the part that immunology played in the Dover trial, and very interesting it is. Immunology and the stacks of evidence for how it evolved blew Behe and his black box out of the water. There’s a nice illustration of a tall pile of books with another thick pile of papers on top of it; the caption reads “We can look high or we can look low, in books or in journals, but the result
is the same. The scientific literature has no answers to the question of the origin of the immune system.” The footnote of course is to Darwin’s Black Box.… Read the rest

Nnnnnnokay, time for another spot of mockery and ridicule. I’ve done plenty of real work today – plenty, I tell you. Finishing an article, subbing, official correspondence, all sorts. (Of course, I also took an hour or so to go for a walk in the fat leafy yellow-green lush spring streets, but hey, I’m not a vegetable, here, I can’t sit at the desk for twelve hours straight.) So it’s time for dessert. (Yes, besides the orange, and besides the chocolate cookie. Be quiet.)

Well, after all, what do you expect, when you get real estate agents and vicars together? Rational dialogue? I don’t think so. On the one hand you got people who talk about fabulous homes with … Read the rest

George Felis wrote such an elegant and apposite comment in reply to another commenter that I wanted to put it on the main page.

You apparently missed the word “voluntary.” You typed out the word, but then you talked about doctors and relatives instead of focusing on the choices available (or denied) to suffering people – and not necessarily just the elderly. (I will simply ignore your instant degeneration into Nazi comparisons, which in reasoned argument is always the first resort of a scoundrel.) Have you actually read anything about the specific proposed law? Or are you opposing it on general principle and your vague suspicions about doctors’ and relatives’ nefarious “utilitarian” motives? Because the actual bill being proposed by … Read the rest

So, those of you in or around London have a joyous opportunity to go to a talk on the question ‘Does Truth Matter?’. It sounds like fun to me. I’d go if I were in or near London – if I could scrape together the 8 quid.

Truth has become a nebulous, even unfashionable notion in our contemporary society. Relativism and postmodernism have undermined our belief in the importance and certainty of truth.

On what basis can we now investigate the validity of claims by our politicians – the existence of weapons of mass destruction, for example? Is there still a moral imperative to tell the truth?

Speakers: Simon Blackburn, professor of Philosophy at Cambridge; Stephen Law, lecturer in Philosophy

Here’s one reason we don’t want to pretend that morality and the meaning of life are the work of religion and only religion – the bishops.

The Archbishop of Canterbury will lead the opposition in the House of Lords this week to a bill that aims to allow voluntary euthanasia…The bishops of Oxford, Portsmouth and St Albans are among senior figures who will back the archbishop in the debate.

Senior. Meaning what. They’re old? Or they have some kind of elevated standing? But elevated standing in and on what? The Anglican church – which has no special expertise in the subject, and is in some ways handicapped for discussing it or thinking about it sensibly, by the fact that … Read the rest

Earlier this morning while working on something unrelated to B&W (which I do occasionally) I was reading this review by Judith Shulevitz of books on the conflict between evolution and creationism by Eugenie Scott and Michael Ruse respectively, and I was brought up short by this gloss on Ruse’s argument:

Nonetheless, he says here, we must be careful about how we use the word “evolution,” because it actually conveys two meanings, the science of evolution and something he calls “evolutionism.” Evolutionism is the part of evolutionary thought that reaches beyond testable science. Evolutionism addresses questions of origins, the meaning of life, morality, the future and our role in it. In other words, it does all the work of a religion,