Moar on Maryland

March 29, 2011 • 4:59 pm

Over at EvolutionBlog, Jason describes in fair detail the public talk on evolution that I gave at the University of Maryland last night.  (Note the presence of a jacket with no tie: a tribute to Hitch).  It’s a good summary, and saves me the trouble of describing it.  It was a treat to meet Jason, but I still claim that he looks about twenty years old.

It turns out I’m a warmup act for Richard Dawkins, who will be talking at Maryland next week.  But my account of the real highlight of my trip, the petting of baby pigs and lambs, will follow tomorrow.

20 thoughts on “Moar on Maryland”

  3. Yes, we (the UMD Society of Inquiry) were very lucky to get Dawkins to come for free. Very much thanks to our faculty adviser for that!

  4. It was a treat to meet Jason, but I still claim that he looks about twenty years old.

    I never change. But I have noticed at my campus that the students and the new faculty get younger every year.

  7. Much enjoyed Jason’s write-up and hope you’ll be giving a talk in my neck o’ the woods some day!

    1. Ditto…and ditto (eats are good here–and onsen–and Neko Cafes… you know you want to come!)

  8. ‘Referring to the male prostate gland, and the fact that it surrounds the urethra, he said, “No good designer would put an organ prone to swelling around a collapsible tube.”’

    The point is of course that until relatively recently, few men lived long enough to suffer from Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (PBH), or if they did, they’d had their children and completed their evolutionary mission (or indeed their Intelligently Designed mission, if there were such a thing). But for us who do, it’s a bugger of a thing.

    Hence these.

    2. I’m not so sure the prostate is a good example of a ‘design fault’. To me it seems more likely that the prevalence of prostate cancer in humans is more of a case of genetic drift. In other words humans are derived from a limited founder population and like all such populations we will, simply due to chance factors, have some diseases that we have an increased risk compared to other species.
      Prostate cancer is not that common in other animals (I think domesticated dogs – also from a limited gene pool – have an increased risk) yet other mammals, presumably, will have the same sort of plumbing.
      Perhaps if humans were more like elephants and had multiple copies of p53 we wouldn’t have this problem (or when we start to engineer more copies into our descendents.)

      1. I didn’t talk about cancer but about how the swelling prostate squeezes the urethra and makes urination painful and difficult. That’s a design flaw that a good designer would have avoided. You don’t put a collapsible tube through an organ prone to swelling!

      1. He says that humans are irrational; that where belief is threatened then it encourages agressive defensiveness.
        “The origins of our beliefs are more mysterious than the Enlightenment assumption holds. Besides specific studies of education and religiosity, we also have a wealth of evidence showing the impact of unconscious biases on our thinking, which demonstrate the human mind is less rational than many of us would wish. The implication is that explaining religion or atheism is less a matter of explaining what goes wrong in otherwise rational minds and more a matter of explaining how different environments affect universal cognitive mechanisms.”

        Later on…
        “Rather than a “comfort” theory, evidence supports a “threat and action” theory. We have an abundance of evidence from psychology and anthropology that feeling under threat increases commitment to in-group ideologies, whether they are religious ideologies or not.”

        sorry – no time to precis…!

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