1. Participating In Religion May Make Adolescents From Certain Races More Depressed

Comment #243076 by Neil Schipper on September 5, 2008 at 4:45 am

Did they account for socioeconomic class? Were the families they came from "new" to their religion, like less than 2 or 3 generations? Were the specific forms of religions closer to the fire and brimstone variety, or to the "let's get together and talk about being good" variety?

A hundred years ago astronomers were trying to make sense of the galaxies with data and data interpretation frameworks that weren't nearly up to the task. I would submit that today's sociologists are operating in a similarly primitive state.

2. The Great Evangelical Decline

Comment #189063 by Neil Schipper on June 5, 2008 at 10:36 am

Christine, interesting article. I must say I found the conclusions hard to jibe with the stats we often hear about the rates of literal biblical belief in the U.S. compared with other western countries, and specifically with the anxiety and intimidation many science teachers face.

3. Put a Little Science in Your Life

Comment #187466 by Neil Schipper on June 2, 2008 at 7:23 am

Interesting comments (and dare I say, for a change?). I feel a lot of the pain people are expressing here. We are in the dark ages when it comes to science education. Putting aside the glories of modern cosmology and evolutionary biology, I shudder to think what percent of high school grads (or classroom teachers) can just describe -- not with equations or analysis, but just in a hand-waving way -- which observations led to Copernicus getting beyond Ptolemy.

The hiring of science teachers should be more like the way bands choose new players and & sports teams choose players: what you show you can do should matter, not degrees.

4. Philippe Starck: Why design?

Comment #182536 by Neil Schipper on May 20, 2008 at 11:37 am

I encountered a piece of equipment with a flaw. For your amusement: http://www.gekkou.co.uk/tektronix/

5. Open Letter to a victim of Ben Stein's lying propaganda

Comment #164823 by Neil Schipper on April 20, 2008 at 6:14 pm

Mitchell:

No one lets the Nazi thing go.

What makes it stand out is the rational and bureaucratic nature of the genocide, along with the fact that it came from what was considered among the most civilized population of the world, the Austro-Germans, a population associated with astonishing advances in math, the bio and physical sciences, literature, philosophy, music and art. The Holocaust revealed things about man that he wasn't quite ready to know.

No one brings up the fact that the pilgrams that formed the US and Canada massicured 80% of the 100 million or more natives in the americas.

This is false. Some 80% or 90% of the deaths were by diseases contracted inadvertently (aside from one or two instances where blankets carrying disease were purposefully given to Indians, causing several hundred or thousand deaths). Aboriginal contact with the Europeans was surely a disaster for the aboriginals, but it was not due primarily to genocidal intentions -- appetite for land, wealth, control, safety -- yes, all these things, but not genocide.

Check out the book "In the Hands of the Great Spirit: The 20,000 Year History of American Indians" by Jake Page. It is sympathetic but historically grounded.

6. Biologists Take Evolution Beyond Darwin Way Beyond

Comment #156096 by Neil Schipper on April 6, 2008 at 5:25 pm

Comment 28: I think there are difficulties with talking about traits that are "only advantageous at the group level". In your specific example, heightened communication provides all kinds of advantages at the non-group level, impacting things like the ability to frighten off predators and in-group competitors, the ability to attract mates, and the rearing of offspring. Going to an even more elementary level, the early "hardware" that much later supported speech may have initially evolved because of advantages related to food supply and climate (chewing, breathing) and again mate attraction. I don't think anyone says it's not worthwhile to look at groups, but I think that the group perspective can easily lead to traits being given explanations that are wrong. The goal of the folks studying evolutionary biology is to tease out the complete history -- the time of appearance, the cause of the appearance and the cause of selection -- of every gene of every living thing. Think biochemistry, and imagine that every gene's emergence were explicable in terms of when it appeared (which prior gene underwent a mutation) and precisely how it increased fitness in its environment. It's one heck of a project!

7. A God blog

Comment #137264 by Neil Schipper on March 2, 2008 at 3:18 pm

GBile @ #12,

She's saying that people migrating away from the belief that "there is a god, and I must follow his law and worship him" are not necessarily going to become nice and rational, but that their behaviour will often be influenced by the desire for fast yummy food and having nice, cool stuff. In other words, she's not optimistic that less religion will be associated with a huge reduction in greed, gullibility, and herd-like behaviour.

8. Top 10 Reasons to Believe Logic Over Religion

Comment #114552 by Neil Schipper on January 22, 2008 at 11:58 am

Articles such as this with a smarmy know-it-all slacker vibe shouldn't really be highlighted here on rd.net. I do recognize the humour, and I can see some youth appeal, but the voice is not what I would call wise and knowledgeable. This site should have standards different from a twenty-something's blog.

9. George Scales, War Hero and Generous Friend of RDFRS

Comment #111456 by Neil Schipper on January 14, 2008 at 4:47 pm

Mr. Scales,

When I consider the debt owed by my generation to folks like you, I turn to jelly. Thanks for being.

Prof. Dawkins said you are a "one-off". Well, human cloning appears to be on the horizon, and if figuring out what goes into making people like you is not a goal of these technologies, I can't imagine what would be.

Winnipeg, Canada