So Christopher Hitchens is FINALLY coming back to LA. VIP tickets are already sold out, but it looks like there are plenty of open seating still available.
From Sam Harris…
Upcoming Debate
Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens will debate Rabbi David Wolpe and Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson on February 15th in Los Angeles.
The topic: "Is there an afterlife?"
Tickets Available here.
Snagged from @philosophybites
The 2010 Society for Applied Philosophy Annual Lecture “Militant Modern Atheism” was delivered by Professor Philip Kitcher (John Dewey Professor of Philosophy and James R. Barker Professor of Contemporary Civilization, Columbia University) on Friday 19 March 2010. In this podcast Professor Kitcher discusses his ideas with the Rt Revd Lord Richard Harries, former Bishop of Oxford, and Professor David Archard, Chair of the Society for Applied Philosophy. Listen to the SAP podcast of the interview with Professor Kitcher (34 minutes and 34 seconds; 39.73Mb).
Richard Dawkins is tomorrow’s guest on my favorite talk radio show Patt Morrison. You can listen on 89.3 at 2:00 tomorrow or you can listen online here. The show will also be available for download on Friday at the KPCC website.
2:30 – 2:58:30
Richard Dawkins and The Greatest Show on Earth
Genesis 1:21
And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
In an August 2005 Gallup poll, 58% of the public said that creationism was definitely or probably true as an explanation for the origin and development of life – Richard Dawkins is not part of that 58%. The self proclaimed militant atheist and author of, The God Delusion believes that intelligent design is merely creationism re-christened and that logic would assert that any designer capable of designing something really complex must thus, be more complex himself. In his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, Dawkins goes from homo erectus to guppies (not in that order) using science to prove his point: there is no God.
Guests:
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and author of The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution
IN STUDIO
Not as cool as the last one but pretty damn close, I love the one that looks like it’s smoking. The video is from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.
Snagged from Zooillogix
When I turned 16 I started asking my doctor to authorize mammograms for me. He said that I was a little young and I didn’t really need them but he indulged my request anyway. He knew that my grandmother, both aunts and my mother had all had breast cancer and that it was only a matter of time before it was my turn. So far I have had 5 biopsies, the first at age 29 and so far only one requiring radiation treatment for pre-cancer cells. Any of these, if left unchecked, could have become breast cancer and the results would have been much, much worse.
I wonder if Christopher Hitchens ever thought about the fact that he should have been being checked for esophageal cancer all this time given his heavy smoking and drinking and the fact that the same type of cancer contributed to his own fathers death…
Having never spent a day in bed in his life, he went very speedily from diagnosis of an inoperable cancer in his esophagus to a hammer-blow heart attack that gave his hostess, his sister Ena, barely time to rush to his side.
- Excerpt from Hitch-22 The Commander Chapter
I have a friend whose grandfather and father both died of prostate cancer but he won’t get checked for it…I just don’t understand. Is this a male thing?
From the latest edition of Edge
New forms of media have always caused moral panics: the printing press, newspapers, paperbacks and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber.
So too with electronic technologies. PowerPoint, we're told, is reducing discourse to bullet points. Search engines lower our intelligence, encouraging us to skim on the surface of knowledge rather than dive to its depths. Twitter is shrinking our attention spans.
But such panics often fail basic reality checks. When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1990s coincided with the great American crime decline. The decades of television, transistor radios and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continuously.
Read the rest of the article here…
Richard Dawkins interview with Steven Pinker (part 1 of 7)
