No Cage Match for Craig and Dawkins

Sometimes the courage of one's convictions is not enough...

Premier Christian Radio is sponsoring The Reasonable Faith Tour with William Lane Craig.  Craig will speaking and debating at seven venues in the UK this month, the 17th through the 26th of October, 2011.  The organizers made much of inviting Richard Dawkins to debate their man.  Dawkins declined for several reasons, some of them stated, others which may be inferred.  Premier has made much of Dawkins refusal to defend his version of the atheist view, even purchasing some tongue in cheek bus adverts, which will recall some atheist bus ads of years past.

Dawkins supporters have rallied round their idol in support of his nominally principled stand.

Fans of William Lane Craig (WLC) are happy to believe that Dawkin's refusal to debate their idol speaks to the weakness of the atheist position.

Truth be told, it's probably best for Dawkins that they did not meet in rhetorical combat.  Face to face, in a structured debate, locked in to a narrowly defined topic, WLC would mop the floor with Dawkins. Dawkins ought to be brave enough to admit he’s refused to meet WLC in the arena for fear of being beaten on style.  Dawkin’s might have reminded his base that he’s a scientist, not a performer.  Better to admit that WLC is a skilled debater and that the format of the debate would not allow Dawkins to attack WLC’s nasty views on genocide, misogyny, and divine command theory.

All that said, a written debate between these two figureheads, refereed by strict editors, and delivered in book format, would sell like hotcakes to both camps.

Dr. Rachie Reports

Dr. Rachael Dunlop is doing honourable battle with the forces of darkness...

Dr. Dunlop is a well-known voice of reason in the public health debate in Australia, which is experiencing an epidemic of whooping cough courtesy of anti-vax idiocy.   In 9 Vaccination Myths Busted By Science she lays out the latest science in opposition to the unreason espoused by those who wish to reverse two centuries of medical progress.  Herd immunity is the responsibility of every able member of the herd.  The death of the very weak and the very young is the alternative.  No more children need die of communicable diseases, if only the anti-vaxers would catch a case of reality.

This Is Going To Be Fun

Just as soon as it rise to the top of my reading queue...

This evening I had a few spare minutes and a Barnes & Noble gift card burning a hole in my pocket so Robert N. Bellah's Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age followed me home.I know, I know, there are many other books already on my 2011 reading list, so this may become a 2012 read, but maybe not...

XKCD Strikes Again

And again and again and again...

http://xkcd.com/966/

Remember, XKCD is not always safe for work.

Art is Critical to the History of Our Humanity

And that history just got three times longer...

Image credit Science/AAAS

The time at which we humans began to produce art marks an important step in our evolution.  Art represents the use of symbolic communication.  Symbolic communication in turn indicates a significant change in the way we think.  Other markers for this change in our brains include language, music, dance, and religion.  Anatomically modern humans (Homo Sapiens) did not always exhibit these traits, thus we may infer they lacked the underlying neurobiology to support them.  Our current way of interpreting and interacting with the world is something that happened on the fly as our brains changed, perhaps even suddently.

This new issue of Science contains an article describing the discovery at Blombos Cave in South Africa of tools and supplies for making red ochre, one of the oldest pigments used for cave art and body painting.  Human art has been found in caves as much as 30,000 years old, but what makes this discovery important is that archaeologists date the Blombos find to 100,000 years old.  Blombos suggests we have been fully human three times longer than previously thought.

Here's the citation:

Henshilwood, C.S., F. d’Errico, K.L. van Niekerk, Y. Coquinot, Z. Jacobs, S.-E. Lauritzen, M. Menu and R. García-Moreno. 2011. A 100,000-year-old ochre-processing workshop at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science 334:219-222.

On a very cool related note: In the Rouffignac cave system in France archeologists have found evidence that some 13,000 year old finger flutes - parallel lines drawn on soft cave walls with ones fingers - were drawn by children of both genders, some as young as toddlers.  What's more the lines were too straight for kids to have done themselves suggesting adults guided their efforts.  Some markings were too high for children to have reached; they would have been lifted to let them make their mark.  Cave art is thought to have held tremendous religious significance so the idea that children were taught to cave paint by caring adults has something interesting to say about paleolithic society.