Who Were the Sea Peoples?

(Don't worry, this has nothing to do with evolution.) I've heard several times that the Los Alamos scientsists were a bit dark as the Trinity Test approached: To break the tension, Fermi began offering anyone listening a wager on "whether or not the bomb would ignite the atmosphere, and if so, whether it would merely destroy New Mexico or destroy the world." Now can anyone in the class tell us why it is a weakly dominated strategy to bet that the world will be destroyed?

Click on a photo for a larger image:

OK, folks, I promise I'll stop soon, but before the year ends I need just one more evolution fix. I don't have the Dawkins book I've been reading with me now, so I can't quote directly, but in it he recaps the argument he made in The Selfish Gene : humans are "really" just survival machines for genes, which discard us when we have served their "purpose." He even presents a little song he penned celebrating this fact for a conference. Now, I've gotten a few letters on my recent columns to the effect, "Leave the biology to the experts." But my point has been that the biologists have not been leaving the philosophy to the experts, and, indeed, have often not even recognized when they have left the realm of biology and entered that of philosophy. One thing philosophers are trained to do is sort out bad arguments from good ones. So let's see which category Dawkins falls into. The form of the argument is: X and Y are closely related enti...

Like the appearance of certain comets, once in a great while when I'm arguing with someone I realize I am wrong and change my mind. I think Gene has stumbled onto something quite brilliant (and I am not just throwing that term around flippantly) in this LRC article on Intelligent Design. I think Gene is saying the following: The Darwinists claim that the first living cell gave rise to all terrestrial organisms through an undirected process of mutation and adaptation through natural selection. The ID people object to this and claim (a) that certain steps in the process are wildly improbable and hence (b) an intelligent designer must be controlling the whole thing. Now Gene's point is that there is an element of truth (and hence, falsity) in both camps. For what if God set up the initial conditions of the universe such that the "improbable" steps had to occur? In that scenario, the Darwinians who watched a video of the origin of life would come away vindicated, but th...

My friend Sheldon Richman has a new blog -- check it out. In other news from the blogsphere, Will Willkinson has a great quote from Anthony de Jasay on envy.

A fundamentalist reader contends that one has to believe a literal account of Genesis or think Jesus was lying when in Mark, chapter 10, verse 6, he said: “But from the beginning of creation, God made [humans] male and female...” What's remarkable about this is that it is does not jibe with a literal reading of Genesis 1 or 2! In Genesis 1, we learn that on day six: "God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." So that's not the beginning -- that's day six! Of course, maybe Christ didn't literally mean the beginning... Then in Two we read: "Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, and all the host of them. And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made." "And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept; and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof. And th...

Thanks to Dick Clark (who surely must be busy as we near the New Year), I now have a Wikipedia entry .