@Charles - You are right that nothing about the concept of evolution is undermined by this new discovery. What IS undermined is the belief many people held last week about the timetable of multicellular life. If you were one of those people, having had your belief undermined, do you find yourself feeling more agnostic toward the new view? Or do you, at each new discovery, find yourself eventually embracing the new view with as much conviction (or even more, after all, our knowledge is growing) as the undermined one? I understand that critical agnosticism is built into the rap we know about a scientific understanding of the world, and we all know how to talk about the tentativeness of scientific truth claims, but my experience is that in spite of this lip-service few people actually allow this tentativeness to solidify into a tempered, critical agnosticism. Instead the contemporary ontology is wielded as an index for the other fellow's intelligence. In other words, agnosticism is reduced to the senile claim that "I admit I might be wrong, but in the meantime take THAT you unconvinced mooncalf!"

On the other hand, if you yourself are a scientist at the frontiers of the relevant research, then none of my questions apply. You are in an entirely different social-epistemological space. My experience with scientists are that none of them are half as cocksure of anything as their self-appointed lay defenders are of everything.

I ask you this because I agree with your post. You seem thoughtful and articulate. I'm not targeting you. In fact I'd like to hear from JohnAD and BJN as well.

All the best.

Yay Fluffy!

It isn't so much about people rationalizing their own hypocrisy. It's about people rationalizing their own moral sleuth-hounding in identifying him as a hypocrite. Obviously the guy isn't a hypocrite unless you read his "argument" with strategic uncharitableness . It's not that hard to do. This story is about the "gotcha!" impulse.

That being said, dude writes with a broad brush.

Billy, is your post supposed to be ironic?

This is pretty accurate except for the move from Nostalgic to Conservative. That step seems forced in order to make the circle complete. Well, maybe not (I say as I type in my Converse Chucks.)

Super fun. Thanks for this.

Excellent!

These counterfactual histories are burdened by chronic inevitabalism. It's always a case of "all else being the same, what if.." and then some nonsense follows. History unfolds the way it does because of contingencies like a particularly dense fog on a Tuesday morning in Boston and a misdirected sneeze in a crowded church. Not by virtue of the things we notice when we retrospectively bracket "events" and identify causes and effects from privileged hindsight. When unpacked, an event like "the South won the war" is a very complex cluster of micro-events, each of which set off butterfly-effect consequences in every imaginable direction. A well-played counterfactual history would meander into unrecognizable territory almost immediately.

These false positives for "fake detection" are creepy.

It's a Fred Flinstone midi editor. The guy is obviously having fun and doesn't take this to be composition tool.

According to CSICOP, the UDC accounts for nearly all reported cases of spontaneous human combustion. For those of you not up-to-speed, the UDC is the Ubiquitous Dropped Cigarette.

Very neat!

Wes, ha!

Very neat.

Not fake.