This morning I spent 45 minutes, via Skype, with Professor John Willis’s Genetics and Evolution course (Bio 102L) at Duke University.  It’s an introductory course for all biology majors, and they’re reading, among other things, Why Evolution is True.  John, a University of Chicago Ph.D. who took my graduate classes, asked me to speak to the students via the internet.  I took a few minutes at the beginning to explain why I wrote the book and who my audience was, and then fielded questions from the students.

You may be surprised at how many of them wanted to talk about religion and evolution. In my experience this is absolutely typical.  It’s a pressing subject, one that, despite my membership in the Strident Gnu Atheists Club, I try to handle with respect, but without diluting my opinions.

If you want to see, the link is here.  Start in at 14:25 (the stuff before it is the class preparing their questions). My part ends at 58:30, and the class continues its discussion for a while thereafter.

The audio is a bit wonky at the start, but improves dramatically after the call is re-started at around 19 minutes in.

No matter how dreadful you think Sarah Palin is, she’s far worse.  Take half an hour and read “Sarah Palin: The sound and the fury,” Michael Joseph Gross’s entertaining exposé of Palin in the new Vanity Fair.  As she gains fame among the morons and miscreants who make up her constituency, her life becomes more constricted and pathetic.  Lots of juicy stuff, and this:

Why are you pretending to be something you’re not? That is the question so many Alaskans have asked this year as they’ve watched Sarah Palin travel the nation. According to almost everyone who has ever known her, including those who have seen the darkest of her dark side, Sarah Palin has a great gift for making people feel good about themselves. Her knack for remembering names and faces and the details of her interactions with people—and for seeming to be present to the person in front of her—constitute an extraordinary power of engagement. Now she is using that power in a fundamentally different way. In part she is using it in the service of her own ambitions. But she is also planting the idea with audiences that they might not be good enough, by telling them she thinks they’re plenty good, no matter what anybody else may say. (“They talk down to us… They think that if we were just smart enough … ”) To some, the message sounds like an affirmation. But is it really? Or does it seed self-doubt and rancor among her partisans, and encourage them to see everyone else as malign?

UPDATE:  Gross explains a bit more about his piece:

The worst stuff isn’t even in there,” Michael Joseph Gross said on “Morning Joe” Thursday. “I couldn’t believe these stories either when I first heard them, and I started this story with a prejudice in her favor. I have a lot in common with this woman. I’m a small-town person, I’m a Christian, I think that a lot of her criticisms of the media actually have something to them. And I think she got a bum ride, but everybody close to her tells the same story” . . . “I started this with every good intention toward her,” he said. “I was just shocked and appalled at every step at what I found. And I wrote this story sort of against my will. It wasn’t what I wanted to write, it wasn’t what I wanted to find. It was what was forced on me by the facts.”

Crispian Jago has created a wonderful map of modern science, looking for all the world like the Manhattan subway lines. (Click here to see the full, enlarged version.) Each line corresponds to a branch of modern science, with the stops being notable figures: natural history, chemistry, evolutionary biology (I’m the penultimate stop!), genetics, and the like. The junctions are those who have contributed to two or more fields: the Gould Avenue stop, for example, sits at the intersection of the Evolution and Paleontology lines.

Pity it’s too big to fit on a teeshirt!

Apparently Hitchens’s first post on his cancer is going to be continued as a regular thing at Vanity Fair. He’s a journalist, and, depressing as it is to see him so ill, this is what he does.  Part 2, “Unanswerable prayers” (a play on Truman Capote, of course) addresses, among other things, the prayers offered on his behalf by believers, and the good wishes of his secular friends.

Of the astonishing and flattering number of people who wrote to me when I fell so ill, very few failed to say one of two things. Either they assured me that they wouldn’t offend me by offering prayers or they tenderly insisted that they would pray anyway . . . Both [Pastors Douglas Wilson and Larry Taunton] wrote to say that their assemblies were praying for me. And it was to them that it first occurred to me to write back, asking: Praying for what? . . .

An enormous number of secular and atheist friends have told me encouraging and flattering things like: “If anyone can beat this, you can”; “Cancer has no chance against someone like you”; “We know you can vanquish this.” On bad days, and even on better ones, such exhortations can have a vaguely depressing effect. If I check out, I’ll be letting all these comrades down. A different secular problem also occurs to me: what if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.

This is a courageous man, with honesty coursing thick in his blood. I know that if I had such a diagnosis, I’d want to abandon work immediately and either wallow in self pity or try to see as much of the world as possible in my remaining days.