I also realize that as it was the first #westskep for you, you’re not in a position to judge the usual form. I agree though, the mic problems did make the situation worse.

Yes, there probably are quite a lot of people at #westskep that are very familiar with the arguments around freedom of information and open government, so possibly it would have been less coherent for someone new to the topic.

I don’t think the word ‘praiseworthy’ is what you meant, but I’ll take compliments where I can get them.

I have a great deal of time for Heather’s work. I think the arguments she puts forward about how to assess trustworthy information are sound. However, I found it pretty hard to glean this from the barely audible, and rather incoherent and rambling delivery at the event. Was I the only attendee disappointed with this aspect of the ‘talk’? I’ve learnt more about her arguments from a couple of blog write-ups (including this one) than through having been there.

It felt like a lot of people at #westskep were already aware of enough background information to be able to suspend their skeptical faculties and just enjoy being with a crowd of like-minded people.

Praiseworthy write-ups make it hard to judge whether this is standard fare for one of these events. I think it’s great that Heather is engaging in this sort of forum, but one does expect an author to (give the impression that they) have done some preparation to succinctly convey their work in a medium other than the written word.

This fascinating article from the Internet Archives illustrates how hard Microsoft tried to convince a businessman that Linux is more expensive than Windows. It’s actually kind of creepy….

If you don’t take religion, or specifically, the religious texts literally, you probably can. Many have. It’s not meant to be taken so literally, surely not, that way be madness! Many Americans seem to have this problem, whilst I feel that in the UK this isn’t the case, even amongst the clergy.

The third argument is more direct: transitions are often found in the fossil record. Preserved transitions are not common—and should not be, according to our understanding of evolution (see next section) but they are not entirely wanting, as creationists often claim. The lower jaw of reptiles contains several bones, that of mammals only one. The non-mammalian jawbones are reduced, step by step, in mammalian ancestors until they become tiny nubbins located at the back of the jaw. The “hammer” and “anvil” bones of the mammalian ear are descendants of these nubbins. How could such a transition be accomplished? the creationists ask. Surely a bone is either entirely in the jaw or in the ear. Yet paleontologists have discovered two transitional lineages of therapsids (the so-called mammal-like reptiles) with a double jaw joint—one composed of the old quadrate and articular bones (soon to become the hammer and anvil), the other of the squamosal and dentary bones (as in modern mammals). For that matter, what better transitional form could we expect to find than the oldest human, Australopithecus afarensis, with its apelike palate, its human upright stance, and a cranial capacity larger than any ape’s of the same body size but a full 1,000 cubic centimeters below ours? If God made each of the half-dozen human species discovered in ancient rocks, why did he create in an unbroken temporal sequence of progressively more modern features—increasing cranial capacity, reduced face and teeth, larger body size? Did he create to mimic evolution and test our faith thereby?

Faced with these facts of evolution and the philosophical bankruptcy of their own position, creationists rely upon distortion and innuendo to buttress their rhetorical claim. If I sound sharp or bitter, indeed I am—for I have become a major target of these practices.

I count myself among the evolutionists who argue for a jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change. In 1972 my colleague Niles Eldredge and I developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium. We argued that two outstanding facts of the fossil record—geologically “sudden” origin of new species and failure to change thereafter (stasis)—reflect the predictions of evolutionary theory, not the imperfections of the fossil record. In most theories, small isolated populations are the source of new species, and the process of speciation takes thousands or tens of thousands of years. This amount of time, so long when measured against our lives, is a geological microsecond. It represents much less than 1 per cent of the average life-span for a fossil invertebrate species—more than ten million years. Large, widespread, and well established species, on the other hand, are not expected to change very much. We believe that the inertia of large populations explains the stasis of most fossil species over millions of years.

We proposed the theory of punctuated equilibrium largely to provide a different explanation for pervasive trends in the fossil record. Trends, we argued, cannot be attributed to gradual transformation within lineages, but must arise from the different success of certain kinds of species. A trend, we argued, is more like climbing a flight of stairs (punctuated and stasis) than rolling up an inclined plane.

Since we proposed punctuated equilibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and again by creationists—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know—as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.