Reading List

After seeing the shockingly bad reading list for the Ball State course purporting to be about the "boundaries of science" but being totally just ID/creationism, I started thinking of which books I would recommend as the counterbalance to his creationist/ID list for undergrads.  This is what I've come up with.  Any suggestions?

Coyne.  Why Evolution is True

Darwin.  On the Origin of Species

Dawkins.  The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Dawkins.  The Selfish Gene

Festinger & Carlsmith.  "Cognitive Dissonance" (article)

Hawking.  A Brief History of Time

Krauss.  A Universe from Nothing

Mills.  Atheist Universe: The Thinking Person's Answer to Christian Fundamentalism

Sagan.  A Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Shermer.  How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God

Shermer.  Why Darwin Matters: The Case Against Intelligent Design

Sokal.  Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture

Stenger.  God: The Failed Hypothesis: How Science Shows that God Does Not Exist

Tyson.  Origins:  Fourteen Billion Years of Cosmic Evolution

Richard Dawkins (Politely) Gives an Hour of Time He'll Never Get Back to a Y.E.C.

I don't know how he does it, or why he's called "strident" or "militant." He's waaaaay more polite than I would be toward this idiot (note that in the comments there's a debate over whether you can call the interviewer an idiot).

April 27 Links

ACLU tells Kansas school system to stop having mandatory assemblies for creationist crap.  I hope they win.

Salon asks if atheists secretly believe in God.  uhh NO!

Conspiracy Theory flowchart

Autism associations in Turkey bristle against an official's statement that atheism and autism are linked.  Yet there's some truth to it.  This study links autism and atheism.  Another links autism with a fear of God in Calvinistic denominations.

PZ Myers weighs in on the Ball State prof who teaches creationism as astronomy.

edited to add:  The press are being lazy or dishonest about the accountability of the West fertilizer plant and the collusion of Texas legislators in not protecting the public.   Oh, and the legislators who want the feds to cough up disaster relief money for this man-made disaster voted against relief for Hurricane Sandy.  Nice folk.

Video of the week: Neil DeGrasse Tyson on The Perimeter of Ignorance

Creationism taught as "Science" at Ball State

Jerry Coyne, who wrote the book, Why Evolution is True, uncovered this "Science" course that's really a course in "intelligent design" and creationism.  He posted about it on his blog, and he confirmed it with the head of the Physics & Astronomy department.

Ball State offers a Ph.D. in Science Education!  How can they let a creationism course be listed as a science course???

The course is cross-listed as a science and culture course within the Honors College, but also as Astronomy 151.  The professor who teaches it also teaches Astronomy 100, possibly the only astronomy those students will ever get, and maybe the only science they'll ever get, and students from that class complain about his frequent diversions into Christianity.

Rather than rehash his post, I just urge you to go to the post for the details.  He even has the syllabus posted, with a reprehensible reading list.

I hope they fire the teacher and whoever has been allowing this prosletyzing under the banner of "science" to continue.

Book Review: Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

I was initially going to review Ariely's latest book, The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How we Lie to Everyone, Especially Ourselves, but this book inspired me to read his more popular book, Predictably Irrational.

We atheists fancy ourselves to be rational, and proudly so.  Dusty Smith's outro slogan is "Logic!"  The forum formerly attached to the Secular Web spun off and chose freeratio.org as its URL.  An online group calls themselves the Rational Response Squad.

But according to Ariely, we are hard-wired to behave in predictably irrational ways due to cognitive biases.  He turned a devastating burn injury into a burning question of how people make decisions.  Whether to remove bandages quickly or slowly was on his mind during the 23 hours between his daily changes of bandages.  What else did he have to think about?  Later, he studied how people make economic decisions, because economics is is about trading pain (loss of money) for benefits.

He put into words some of my objuections to the Ayn Rand libertarianism that is based on the assumption that people will choose to do what's best for themselves.  You can't plan for rational behavior in humans because humans do not behave rationally.

His book is sometimes a little dry, with summaries of various studies he has conducted, but each study reveals more and more about human tendencies.  The one that inspired me to blog about the book is his study of dishnesty and whether being reminded to be honest by seeing the Ten Commandments would reduce the amount of dishonesty in his subjects.  Despite what we atheists believe, it does indeed remind people to be honest.  Since he was interested in general tendencies, not religious tendencies, it isn't clear whether any kind of reminder will keep people honest, but it's possible.  People will cheat less if they believe they might get caught, so strong believers in a watchful Sky Daddy may feel that Big Brother effect.  But... his studies reveal that people's honesty is dependent on their self-perception more than what others will think.  When there's no chance of getting caught there will be cheating but not to a serious degree.  He also studied whether pledging an honor code would have equal results to the Ten Commandments, and it did.  I went to a college with a strict honor code and people still cheated, but I don't know how many of them would have cheated more, or whether more of us would have cheated.

I will read his further research because he is aware of the potential flaws in studying college students rather than prisoners, trailer trash, or us atheists... all of whom would be major cheaters according to stereotype!  I must admit that having grown up in poverty has made me a bit different from the majority in some of his studies.  I will do things (not necessarily cheating things) that middle class people wouldn't.  I see things slightly differently.


I read this book awhile ago so I can't review its contents in detail, but I want to recommend it to anyone who fancies themselves to be a rational person.  He will be attending The Amazing Meeting this year.  I can't imagine a better speaker for a group of skeptics.  (Also, he has a good sense of humor)
Here he is at Google headquarters explaining irrationality:

April 20 Links

Just a few links this week:

Atheist pianist in Turkey found guilty of blasphemy. 

I'm not sure I understand the metaphor exactly, but this People Who Can Eat a Bag of Dicks about the Boston bombing post saved the rest of us the trouble of monitoring the moronic segment of the population's twittering on twitter.  Media Matters also followed the lunatic fringe but they aren't as fun.

Alex Jones and his enablers.  What a bunch of nuts.

The Taliban kills 17 and wounds 60 then apologizes for hurting the wrong person.  Hello, if you want to kill just one person, don't use a fricking BOMB.  Apparrently the Taliban are not just wrong-headed they're empty headed!

Homeless Jesuss sculpture rejected by two churches. 

The Guardian reviews the History Channel's The Bible.  Headline: "History Channel's The Bible series is worse than reality TV"

Malala on the cover of Time in the Most 100 Influential issue

Poster of Internet Memes.  How many do you recognize?

I met some friendly atheists today!

The local university atheist student club had an "Ask an Atheist" table today and I stopped by to say hello.  We had a nice conversation.... and then I saw one of my fundy coworkers heading toward the table.... then veering away when he saw me.  I'm dying to know if he was going to ask a question!  He's a smart guy (for a Christian).  I hope he wasn't going to ask why they're so angry, or bring up Pascal's wager.

Baby with shit-eating grin added to post for no particular reason