No, not the rapper. Happy Darwin Day, creationists everywhere!

(Yeah, looks like I forgot again; lucky the science blog crowd are there to remind us mortals about the important annual festivals, eh?)

Where have all the readers gone? It’s a common refrain these days (especially among library staff, but that’s another post entirely), and no less so in our beloved genre. In the absence of hard facts and figures (if anyone can point me towards some, I’d be very grateful), it’s hard to make truly accurate statements about the situation, but the consensus seems to be that the genre, while arguably soaring in terms of quality of output, is losing sales year by year. Continue reading “Sf’s decline and the retreat from Enlightenment”

Looks like there’s an accidental religious theme to my posts this week, but I couldn’t let this one slip by without some commentary. If the destruction of an early-stage embryo is the destruction of a soul, as espoused by Dubya and friends, how many souls does a chimeric human have? Continue reading “Chimerism, or an embarrassment of souls”

I’ll admit to feeling a little smug when reading the rash of recent creationism/ID scare stories from the US recently. “Well, us Brits might not be all we’re cracked up to be,” I thought, “but at least we don’t have those problems over here.” Turns out I may have been making false assumptions. Continue reading “Creationism in the UK education system”