Well that was a coincidence. Maybe there is an Intelligent Designer after all, plotting all our every moves.

I had just read, coded, and posted Julian’s latest Bad Moves, which is about getting your facts wrong, and not noticing or considering that you may be getting your facts wrong, and not pausing to consider that other people may be getting their facts wrong. So the next thing I did was go to Normblog to see what was new there. And what’s the first item on the page? A post about the BBC’s apologising for a story told on ‘Thought for the Day’ that turned out to lack evidence. That turned out to be a case of the speaker’s perhaps … Read the rest

The promised more on Janet Browne’s Darwin biography. A couple of sentences down on the same page (page 141, to be exact):

And when Sedgwick arrived he tried to entertain him in an appropriately geological fashion by telling him of the gravel pits near Shrewsbury. But Darwin’s story of the labourer who found a tropical shell in the gravel brought only a peal of laughter and the remark that this could not be true. If the shell were genuinely embedded there, said Sedgwick, it would overthrow everything that was known about the superficial deposits of the Midland counties…Recounting the story later, Darwin remembered being astonished that Sedgwick was not more delighted by his strange fact. ‘Nothing before had ever made

Time to say a few words in praise of lateral reading. I’m a great fan of lateral reading – not just via links but also in books. You know how that goes – you read an essay which sends you to a book which sends you to two more books and you find connections you didn’t know about. This is why (at last it can be revealed) I know absolutely nothing about anything in any depth: because I read laterally rather than vertically. I’ve never read an entire book from beginning to end in my life, but I’ve read two pages of a million or so. But never mind – I comfort myself with Johnson’s retort when Elphinston said ‘What, … Read the rest