Monthly Archives: January 2017
Highland Education Committee Church Appointee blames gays for bullying
The Strathspey Herald reports that:
‘A clergyman has used his position on a Highland Council education committee to criticize the alleged promotion of homosexuality in schools. Read the rest of this entry
Some of my geology photos
If there’s interest, I’ll post more. Click and select “View full size” (below image, R) for full resolution. I lack formal training in geology, and would greatly appreciate comments on my proposed interpretations, but find structures such as these, on every scale, at once fascinating and beautiful.
The Betic-Rif arc of Spain and North Africa is in the news, here are some things I saw in the area:
Left: schist exposure near Benalmadena, Western Malaga province. These Permian rocks have been metamorphosed at a depth of some 40 km. Recent exposure caused by westward extension of Benamadena promenade Read the rest of this entry
Not waving but drowning
Not all the news is bad; but strange times, when we have to welcome leadership from China.
Wandering Gaia is Gaia Vince, author of the award-winning Adventures in the Anthropocene, part of the emerging literature that welcomes the challenge of positively managing the planet.
See also Scientists’ March on Washington and Geneticist launches bid for US Senate
If, like me, you wake everyday with a stone of foreboding in your belly, check the news to discover the world is a little worse, and stumble through your day under the heaviest pall of despair, then you’re not having the best 2017 either – I’m sorry.
Is this a new Dark Ages, this deliberate political, cultural, societal regression?
I’m sure there have been a thousand analyses of how we got into this darkly farcical horror show – and I mean the Trump presidency and Brexit disasters specifically, rather than the continuing awfulness happening to people Yemen, Syria, Nigeria, etc etc – but to be honest, one of my few comforts at the moment is my social bubble made up of kind, intelligent people who are also appalled by this new “post-fact”, mean era.
So what hope, can I give? And, yes, there is always hope!
Even though these recent…
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A Creationist Speaker Comes to Town
Long but detailed; updated resources include rebuttals to creationist claims, including dinosaur soft tissue, and teaching exercise on Lucy. I have mined this for links. There is also a discussion of bible-basd arguments, for those (like the author) to whom such things are important.
By the early 1800s European geologists (many of them devout Christians) realized that the rock layers they observed had to be far older than the 6000 years allowed by a literal interpretation of Bible chronology. For instance, as discussed here , angular unconformities like that shown below could not been formed in the course of the one-year-long Flood of Noah.
Angular Unconformity at Siccar Point, Scotland. Siccar Point, Scotland (Photo: Wikipedia “Hutton’s Unconformity”)
Numerous other evidences for an old earth have been observed by scientists over the past two hundred years. These include fossil soils, and massive deposits of salt and of limestone in the midst of sedimentary rock layers, and tens of thousands of annual layers in lake bottom deposits (“varves”) and in glaciers (see Some Simple Evidences for an Old Earth). We can trace, in reasonable detail, the movements of the sections of earth’s crust over the…
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An Inauguration Day compilation
From Against the Logicians: This has never happened before
From The Upside-down World: You Gotta Fight to Win
From Pandaemonium: LET AMERICA BE AMERICA AGAIN (Langston Hughes and others)
From Patheos: 20 Ways to take action
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing (misattributed to Edmund Burke)
From Robert Reich: “Trump is the ultimate price our political establishment pays for doing almost nothing to improve the plight of the bottom 60 percent of Americans for over thirty years” (more here); the relevance to the UK under successive governments, many of them Labour, is obvious.
And, inevitably, Goya: The sleep of reason produces monsters
Young Earth Creationists arguing in circles
Relative dating from sedimentology dates back some 200 years, as beautifully explained here by my friend, field geologist and Anglican priest, Michael Roberts, with illustrations from what he has seen himself, while we have now had absolute radiometric dates for over a century. Index fossils are used only to establish that rocks are the same age, and the way creationists manage to forget this fact is indeed miraculous.
This piece gains added interest because of its first-hand accounts, both of geological exploration, and of attempts to persuade creationists to accept the results.
This incredibly duplicitous meme appeared on my twitter feed today. Fri 13th Jan 2017
Evolution is wrong as it is a circular argument from the age of fossils worked out from evolution
Yes, it is the old chestnut of Young Earthers that the age of rocks is based on a circular argument from evolution. It took me back to 1971 when I made the felicitous mistake of going to L’Abri to sit at the feet of the evangelical guru Francis Schaeffer. I arrived ther all bright-eyed and bushy tailed thinking of all the wondrous things I would learn in the next four weeks. I learnt much but not what I had expected.
On my first morning i was sent to Shaeffer’s son-in-law Udo Middlemann to discuss what I would study. I explained that I was going into the Anglican ministry and had just returned from 3 years working as an…
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A campaign to thank international NHS staff, in memory of my daughter-in-law Nikki two years on
While NHS Scotland is devolved, immigration policy is reserved to Westminster.
In memory of his wife Nikki, who died two years ago come March of complicated leukaemia, despite expert care from a multinational team and international cooperation to find a suitable bone marrow donor, my son Geoff is launching this campaign, to enhance awareness of the massive contribution made by immigrants to health services throughout the UK, and without which the NHS would collapse. He writes: Read the rest of this entry
I just informed on myself to The Professor Watchlist. My US teaching colleagues, consider doing likewise
I just took action with the American Association of University Professors and if you are a Professor at a US University I think you should too. Read the rest of this entry
Primate's Progress 