As the mercury rose past 90 on this sunny Sunday, I biked over to see the Pagan Picnic in Tower Grove Park. I attend this event regularly, and it gets a bit bigger each year. There are many booths selling fair foods and drinks, and psychic readings, acupuncture, massage, crystals…
Chimpanzees aren't the only spectacularly intelligent animal species. Sometimes human beings act intelligently! Yes, humans are animals, as difficult as this is to believe for many people. In this TED video, Joshua Klein reminds us about the intelligence of yet another species: crows. Using their intelligence, crows continue to flourish…
You read that right! No reader of Dangerous Intersection, radical materialist or hard-bitten skeptic believes in science. To say otherwise is to give a false impression of what science actually is. Science is not something in which a person believes or does not believe. Science is not a belief system; it has no holy screeds or sacred tenets. It is merely a tool, a method of gleaning knowledge, and the language used in reference to it should reflect this.
What on earth am I ranting about? Well, it goes back a few years to the Discovery Institute, and spans all the way to the present with Ben Stein’s film Expelled. The intelligent design/evolution debate has become quite the pop topic, and hence, the endless battle of science vs. religion has come into everyday discussion as well. Everyday people in normal daily settings run through these issues, turning any public place into a potential battleground.
I’ve heard a lot of the less experienced science advocates say things about science that frankly aren’t accurate. While these people mean very well, they fail to frame their debates properly, and the content of the discussion suffers for it. Since science vs. religion has become as much a layman’s debate as an expert’s one, I think the time has come for those of us on the science side of things to agree on the language we should use.
I have no expertise in science, religion or philosophy, I have no refined understanding of the …
For three decades I've puzzled about the idea held by Christian Fundamentalists that the Bible must be proven absolutely and literally true in every way, or else Christianity is false. The latter clause being accepted as silly, therefore most science of the 19th and 20th century is patently on the…
Many people still bristle at the idea that chimpanzees can have "cultures." The evidence is accumulating, however, as documented in "Almost Human," an article found in the April, 2008 edition of National Geographic. The article was written by Mary Roach, with incredible photos by Franz Lanting. In 2007, an Iowa…