Ayala does the NOMA dance.

Outside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.

Notice how quickly he moves from an emphatic absolute in the first sentence – no business whatsoever – to a qualified one in the second – nothing decisive to say. As Susan Haack says, there’s the bit where he says it and the bit where he takes it back. Science may have nothing decisive to say about values, but that’s not the same thing as having nothing to say … Read the rest

[T]he girls, ages 13 and 14, had been fleeing for two days along rutted roads and over mountain passes to escape their illegal, forced marriages to much older men, and now they had made it to relatively liberal Herat Province.

But a cop spotted them, and far from protecting them, he sent them back home. “There they were publicly and viciously flogged for daring to run away from their husbands.” Or rather their “husbands” who were more like rapist slaveowners than anything we in the less thuggish part of the world would consider “husbands.”

Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that