The Jewmanist

I’ve always felt 50-50 about Christopher Hitchens. While he calls it as he sees it, he’s rarely tactful. I tend to find his writing style full of unnecessary references and ramblings. But his article on Sarah Palin’s war on science is right on the money. He begins by noting her willful ignorance of fruit fly research:

…it didn’t seem possible that things could go any lower or get any dumber. But they did last Friday, when, at a speech in Pittsburgh, Gov. Sarah Palin denounced wasteful expenditure on fruit-fly research, adding for good xenophobic and anti-elitist measure that some of this research took place “in Paris, France” and winding up with a folksy “I kid you not.”

To explain exactly why such research is important, he continues:

It was in 1933 that Thomas Hunt Morgan won a Nobel Prize for showing that genes are passed on by way of chromosomes. The experimental creature that he employed in the making of this great discovery was the Drosophila melanogaster, or fruit fly.

In the essay Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?, Pascal Boyer delves into the evolution of religion.

Is religion a product of our evolution? The very question makes many people, religious or otherwise, cringe, although for different reasons. Some people of faith fear that an understanding of the processes underlying belief could undermine it. Others worry that what is shown to be part of our evolutionary heritage will be interpreted as good, true, necessary or inevitable. Still others, many scientists included, simply dismiss the whole issue, seeing religion as childish, dangerous nonsense.

(Via Prose Before Hos)