Spotting Design

Alun Life, Politics 4 Comments , , , , , ,

Experimental Archaeology
Exper­i­mental Archae­ology. Photo (cc) Wessex Archae­ology.

I wish I was as good an archae­olo­gist as Michael Egnor claims to be. Egnor has recently writ­ten on the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism from a cre­ation­ist point of view. To be hon­est I dis­agree with some of it, the words mainly, but the spaces and punc­tu­ation on the other hand seem sound. Chris­topher O’Brien has given the words far more atten­tion than they deserve, so if you want a cri­tique of the pro­pos­i­tions ((It took me half an hour to choose that word. Facts as the blog entry makes clear wouldn’t have been the right choice)) then it’s a great read. What I find dif­fi­cult is the repeated claim by cre­ation­ists that you can simply see design.

It’s a com­mon claim. When fun­da­ment­al­ists Cameron and Com­fort are notexhort­ing people to stick banana-shaped objects into their mouths they make claims like: “If you stuck a group of sci­ent­ists in a room with a paint­ing then, with noth­ing from the out­side world, they would con­clude there was a painter.” Now I don’t think they would. I can­not simply see design in com­plex objects, so are the cre­ation­ists wrong or am I thick?
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Celebrating one year of blogging

Alun Digital Academia, The Past No Comments , ,

Chris­topher O’Brien is cel­eb­rat­ing one year of blog­ging at North­state Sci­ence. I have to admit I’ve only been read­ing it reg­u­larly for the past few months, but its a fas­cin­at­ing site. I like his recent posts on Apo­lo­get­ics Archae­ology (Part One) (Part Two), but theres more there, like this part of a dis­cus­sion on how her­it­age pre­ser­va­tion works in the USA. Or how about this on Bone Frag­ments and Archae­ology? If you’re bored of archae­ology then there are entries on those pyr­am­ids instead.

But if you read just one entry then make it this one on Zooar­chae­ology and Fam­ily Liv­ing.