The Caveman’s Corner

The employment of anthropologists in time of war is a subject that has become deeply controversial since World War II, in lock step with the application of greater ethical scrutiny to all sciences. The essential conflict is between an anthropologist’s duty to her country and her government, her duty to her discipline and humanity as a whole, and her duty to the subject peoples she studies and who have subjected themselves to study by researchers before her.

Bomb it back to the stone age from the… iron age?

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CO2 emissions…

Smell the CO2.

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http://www.expelledexposed.com/

This is a site created by the National Center for Science Education to debunk and disembowel the various fantasies at the heart of Ben Stein’s new docuganda piece Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. And it does it quite nicely I must say. I rather recommend.

We have a rant today.

I’ve been doing the research for my next “meet an ancestor” today, and I keep coming across one word, “Cebidae.” Apparently, the ecology of our ancestor’s genus was similar to that of the Cebidae. Well, that’s quite interesting, or at least it would be if I knew at all what the authors meant by Cebidae.

The debate we’re getting into here is over the macrotaxonomy of the New World Monkeys. Some authorities like to split it up into lots of little families, as many as seven, while some prefer to refer it in its entirety to one family, incidentally the Cebidae.

Thus, Walker’s Primates of the World, Stein and Rowe’s Physical Anthropology 8th ed., and the Pictorial Guide to the Living Primates give the Cebidae as 11 genera ranging from squirrel monkeys to spider monkeys; everything but marmosets and tarmarins. The Encyclopedia of Human Evolution prefers to exclude only the spider monkeys from the Cebidae and include the marmosets. Animal Diversity Web lumps in all the New World Monkeys. And finally, Wikipedia authoritatively states that the Cebidae is “one of the four families of New World monkeys now recognised,” and is a combination of marmosets, squirrel monkeys, and capuchins (the actual genus Cebus).

Cebus, about the only member of the Cebidae everyone agrees on

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It’s Darwin Day tomorrow! Go forth and share with your friends, loved ones, aquantances, hated ones, and so forth all the Glorious wonders of science, reason, and heathen Darwin-worship. And be sure to burn the proper offerings of sacrificial finches and barnacles.

I recently read the statement, “I don’t know about anyone else, but I find the entire idea of an ‘instinctive morality’ highly disturbing. If we are to shrink and over-simplify our entire moral code down to the existence of a single instinct, we do great harm to its purpose and application,” and I found it disturbing, especially considering the intelligence of the fellow who wrote it.[1]

Not because I disagree. Indeed, the notion that moral codes are nothing more than lists of “goodness genes” is quite disturbing and inaccurate to basic observation. A simple instinct should not vary in the manner that human morality does in its basic constitution from culture to culture. Knocking down this strawman, however, should certainly not mean that morality is necessarily supernatural in origin.

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This is an essay I schlepped together for a different purpose (which I never used it for) about a month ago. The writing’s not so great, but I think I make some ok points, and as that’s about the best you’re going to see from this blog, I think it a fitting inaugural.

It’s more-or-less a rebuttal to the essay “Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism” by Cdesign proponentist Phillip Johnson.

In 2005, the Kansas State Board of Education changed, in Kansas public schools at least, the definition of the English word “science” from “[…] the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us” to a longer definition which removed the concept of “natural explanations.”It wasn’t a matter for the state’s spelling classes, nor did it greatly impact English teacher’s vocabulary assignments. The shift was in concert with the board’s now infamous decision to introduce Intelligent Design into its science classrooms alongside traditional evolution. How are the two related and what could “seeking natural explanations” possibly mean to anyone?

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